Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Betting on Risky Genes
A provocative feature in this month's Atlantic on a new way to think about genetic variations: Not as switches that confer or protect against disease risks, but as something closer to behavioral investment strategies that might offer more risk and more reward through greater sensitivity to the environment, or instead might offer more conservative strategies. You may have heard of neuroplasticity; the feature, written by David Dobbs, aims to highlight genetic plasticity and contrasts it with more standard views of genetics, behavior and the environment.
Relatively early in his piece, he notes that:
Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience. (emphasis mine)
In other words, genetic variations increase or decrease environmental sensitivity, with increased risk being a sort of byproduct. As Dobbs writes:
Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival.
Dobbs' piece offers an intriguing way to think about genetic risks--particularly in terms of understanding why risks for diseases and challenging psychological conditions would persist in the face of natural selection--though his analysis starts to break down at the point of trying to figure out how to act on genetic plasticity, at least in the present.
For example, Dobbs cites some findings from some early childhood researchers who took genetic readings of different infants and then conducted home visits to encourage reading to the children and the like. On follow-up psychological tests, the researchers found that toddlers who had higher risks of ADHD showed much greater improvement in emotional and well-being scores than did toddlers whose genes protected against ADHD. In other words, the risky genes came with greater rewards, when exposed to positive environmental factors.
Still, I don't see much of a way to act on this sort of information. Nothing here makes reading to your kids, or creating healthy environments, a bad choice.
At the same time, I do think there's something to Dobbs' point--thinking of genes not solely as predisposing us to the bad, but as having different interactions with our environments. And over time, I expect a major avenue for genetic research to involve understanding the different ways our environments--and not just parental behaviors like nurturing, but chemicals and foods and other specific inputs--affect our future health states.