I, me, and my genome
Seema Singh -
Monday, January 12, 2009 11:31 AM
After the Nobel prizewinner James Watson and controversial geneticist-entrepreneur Craig Venter, it's the iconic cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, now at Harvard and earlier at MIT, who is getting his genome sequenced in full public glare.
As one of the 10 volunteers of the Personal Genome Project, he is putting his genome data on the Internet, along with his medical history.
In this absorbing NYT article, Pinker dispels some dystopian fears about genomics and explains what personalized medicine holds for us. Of course, this long narrative is for the scientifically-inclined, psychologically curious, and genetically skeptical but the take-home messages work well for just about anyone.
As genetic tests have begun hitting the shelves, Pinker thinks consumers "will probably learn of genes linked to personality before they see any that are reliably connected to intelligence."
So, why is Pinker doing this? Perhaps, among other things, for the sake of evolutionary psychology!
On his first book tour, 15 years ago, he was asked which event in life made him do what he was doing -- a cognitive scientist studying language. He was "dumbstruck". "The only thing that came to mind was that the human mind is uniquely interesting and that as soon as I learned you could study it for a living, I knew that that was what I wanted to do, " he recalls.
(Well, seven years ago, sitting in Pinker's introductory psychology class at MIT, my friends and I used to wonder what a successful career he could've had in Hollywood.)
The world's leading cognitive scientist, who is going public with his genetic predispositions, Pinker is cautiously optimistic about what genes can tell: "The self is a byzantine bureaucracy, and no gene can push the buttons of behavior by itself."
So, what can we look forward to?
"If you are bitten by scientific or personal curiosity and can think in probabilities, by all means enjoy the fruits of personal genomics. But if you want to know whether you are at risk for high cholesterol, have your cholesterol measured; if you want to know whether you are good at math, take a math test. And if you really want to know yourself (and this will be the test of how much you do), consider the suggestion of François La Rochefoucauld: ‘Our enemies' opinion of us comes closer to the truth than our own.' "