The story is about junk DNA. It got a lot of coverage, so if you google “junk dna” you’ll find a lot. Pick your poison.
In any case, the story is about the “junk dna” and they have discovered that it switches bits of DNA on and off. We know that our DNA contains instructions about what our bodies should do under a variety of conditions. This junk dna sits there monitoring environmental conditions, and when the conditions are “right,” it switches on the relevant DNA. My favorite example is about strong muscles. If we don’t exercise, our muscles grow weak. But if we go to the gym and lift weights, the junk dna detects the stress, and switches on the DNA that enables our muscles to build new material.
They say we need to actually tear muscle fibre in order to stimulate new growth. So what is happening is this junk dna is monitoring muscles for torn fiber. If there is too much of it, it switches on the muscle growing function.
My favorite condition (said ironically) is bipolar disorder. They say that bipolar is in the dna, but that it requires certain stressors in the environment before the dna switches on the set of behaviors that we call bipolar disorder. It causes a change in brain chemistry that leads to things like a reduced need for sleep, and a quickened thinking ability and a willingness to take risks.
Now you can imagine an environment where those traits would be valuable. If we are in danger and we need some smart solutions quickly, those traits would be useful. If only we could turn them on or keep them off at will, we could target them more effectively. Of course, using those traits has consequences. You end up depressed and suicidal. Basically, you have maybe three to six months to get something done, and then you have to wait out a year or more of depression that you may or may not survive. It’s a huge cost for a nebulous benefit.
Well, all disease responses are like that. They monitor the environment for certain cues, which probably are like counters of a sort: how often do we get muscle stress, or how many white blood cells are running around, or how many immune triggerings do we see at the skin (mosquito bites), and when they pass a threshold, they trigger a response.
Would knowing precisely what stretches of DNA watch for which environmental stimuli and cause which precise responses help us eliminate disease?
No. Pure and simple, the premise of this question is a red herring. It can’t happen. It is a misunderstanding of the science and the mechanisms of the body.
First of all, mosquitoes probably aren’t going away. So you could switch off our defense response, but that wouldn’t help. Similarly, the need to build muscles won’t go away.
But let’s look at bipolar. Let’s look at cystic fibrosis. Let’s look at sickle cell anemia. These are bad things, right?
Not so fast, buster! These are all adaptations to certain conditions in the environment. If we were to eliminate the adaptation, we wouldn’t be able to respond to certain changes in the environment, and potentially, we’d all die out. Or there could be large die-offs because we removed adaptations we thought we didn’t need.
Potentially we could learn to turn these adaptations on in a smarter way. Or perhaps we could learn to enhance them so they would be more effectively. Maybe we could learn to turn on brilliance in all people at will. We could modify our bodies with the bipolar gene, thus enabling faster, more creative thinking, and we could turn it on at certain points in time, or at all times, if people weren’t afraid of burning out.
My feeling is that there is an awful long way to go before we begin to fully understand what all the dna does. There is an even longer way to go before we learn how to manipulate it for our own good, and an even further way to go before we can manipulate it precisely enough to make it do what we want.
With mental illness, there is one mutation that appears on an allele for thirteen different disorders. There are, in addition, uncounted other mutations associated with each disorder. It’s interesting that they share one mutation in common, because that opens the possibility that they are all related genetically. It might mean that mental illness is a broad category and the expression of the illness might happen based on other mutations and environmental triggers.
But it could be so complex, and the same thing could happen under so many different conditions—genes and environment—that we may never be able to sort it out. In fact, it probably changes all the time, from one generation to the next. It may not be predictable. Which means, it won’t allow us to defend ourselves against diseases as effectively as we imagine we might, and we might never get rid of sickness.
I’m not sure it is desirable to rid ourselves of sickness. New sicknesses are being developed all the time, anyway. In fact, I don’t think humankind will rid itself of sickness. Certainly not in my life time. We may be able to use our DNA in a more targeted way, but maybe for a small number of conditions, we will be able to effectively target them. But we will never be able to target all diseases and sicknesses in a specific enough way to be able to say we truly know what we are doing.
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