Institute For The Future

How Our Bodies are Becoming Social

As part of the Chronicle of Higher Education's series on ideas and issues that will define the coming decade, Alondra Nelson writes about an idea we've been kicking around for a while: That over the next decade, she argues, our DNA will do as much to define our social interactions as it will do to define our health experiences.

 

As Nelson puts it:

 

If the therapeutic utility of the genome is somewhat intangible, the social life of DNA is unmistakable.

 

A defining aspect of the coming decade, the social life of DNA, signals the growing presence of genetic science in both predictable and unforeseen sites. Genetic analysis may indeed lead to personalized medicine. Yet it will also mediate identification, community formation, and citizenship. Justice and restitution will continue to be sought via the rungs of the double helix, as the Innocence Project and recent slavery-reparations suits make clear.

 

 

And we've seen evidence of this all over the place. Courts really are beginning to use DNA in sentencing decisions. Direct-to-consumer genetics companies really are encouraging expecting moms to create new communities based on their own, and their childrens', DNA. For that matter, there's an HR problem I've noted more recently--in effect, there are far too few professionals trained in genetics to actually provide the sort of counseling people will actually need.

 

Where else will we be able to turn, but to each other, to understand this byzantine but critical information about oureselves?

 

But there's a second reason why our bodies are becoming social, and it's just now emerging: We're beginning to understand, in a much more thoughtful way, how our cultures shape our genes.

 

Take this excellent example from David Dobbs' new Wired blog about a surprising finding that "A well-established gene variant that is supposed to predict depression seems to predict just the opposite in East Asia."

 

Dobbs argues that, in effect, a gene that seems like a predisposition to depression is really a predisposition to being sensitive to the social world. In the United States, and other individualistic cultures, a need to be social is more likely to lead to feelings of isolation, whereas in more collectivist cultures, the same gene will predispose a person to feeling more connected. Or, put differently, the genetic mutation seems to predispose people to gain more from social support, or to lose more in the absence of social support.

 

And, to be clear, this isn't an isolated study. A month or so ago, Ed Yong highlighted a study showing that a genetic variation that effects oxytocin receptors impacts has distinct impacts on Americans and Koreans. The researchers:

 

looked at a specific version of the OXTR gene, whose carriers are allegedly more social and sensitive. But this link between gene and behaviour depends on culture; it exists among American people, who tend to look for support in troubled times, but not in Korean cultures, where such support is less socially acceptable. Culture sets the stage on which the OXTR gene expresses itself.

 

 

It's more evidence for an argument David Dobbs made in the Atlantic about a year ago, which is that we're increasingly understanding our genes in terms of sensitivity rather than risks. On his blog, Dobbs argues that this concept leads to the conclusion that we are moving from "looking not at gene-x-environment interactions...[to] genes x (immediate) environment x culture — GxExC."

 

Now, this sounds great, in theory. But while genome-wide studies are already pretty complicated, throwing culture into the equation will create a much thornier set of problems. The two examples I cited above--that Americans are individualistic, but also are more likely than others to seek out emotional support in times of distress--aren't inherently contradictory, but they certainly don't feel like coherent parts of a well-developed narrative. And these are just the high-level ideas--attempting to actually operationalize some aspect of culture, to stick a value on how collective we are, for example, is something of a fool's errand.

 

While I don't know if we need to take the idea of studying the interactions between genes and cultures to the point of actually creating metrics to include in studies, I do think understanding the force of social and cultural institutions on our bodies is going to become a far more important, if extraordinarily messy task, in the coming decade.