Institute For The Future

Three Lessons from Genetics for Thinking about the Future

 

There have been a lot of great articles looking back at the history of genetic sequencing to mark the ten-year anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome. The path of genetics research has been decidedly, unexpectedly slow--a frustratingly process that also offers some great lessons for thinking about the future.

 

Back when the genome was first completed, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair described it as "“breakthrough that takes humankind across a frontier and into a new era” while the CEO of a pharmaceutical maker said that by now, we would look back on 1999 "and think of medicine as being in the dark ages."

 

So here we are ten years later: sequencing genes has gotten ridiculously cheap, but there's little real understanding of what all that data mean, or how to use it. Family history still remains a better gauge of heart disease than genetics, for example. Not surprisingly, it's hard to find breathless coverage of the potential of genetics--at best, you can find guarded optimism that we'll be able to wring something useful out of our genes.

 

The first lesson, I think, is that the last ten years of genetics is a reminder of the need to think about multiple possibilities at once. Dozens of startup biotech companies--all aimed at leveraging genetic data to transform pharmaceuticals--were funded and died over the course of the past decade, because they were operating on the seemingly safe assumption that one of the most astounding achievements in basic science research would naturally lead to some great business opportunities. The reality is that precious few have materialized in the past decade.

 

In other words, change--growth--isn't linear. A field like genetics may seem promising--but counting on that promise, in any field, is tenuous.

 

But while tangible, practical advances from genetics have yet to materialize, the next decade--given the disappointment of the first decade of the whole genome--holds a surprising amount of promise. I've highlighted one example of that potential--linking social and environmental datasets to our genes. Essentially, research over the past decade has shown that our biological selves are influenced, to a surprising extent, by the context that surrounds us. The challenge, unfortunately, is that this influence can take place over huge chunks of time--tens of thousands of years, potentially--and, of course, we don't really have the ability to think over such long stretches of time.

 

And this, I think, is the second lesson from genetics: There's a lot of potential value in looking at relationships between fields. Genetics would seem, at first glance, to be a purely biological pursuit. But what we're finding is that a good chunk of what we can learn from genetics isn't by studying individual genes, or even one individual. The potential knowledge, and applications, of genetics are in finding links between seemingly distinct fields of knowledge, and my sense is that sensing those potential connections will be critical in the coming decade.

 

Of course, it's one thing to say there are connections between genes and social and environmental factors, and it's another thing to understand them. A recently declassified report from the U.S. Department of Defense, for example, pointed out that given the unclear but significant effects of the environment on our genes, we should expect "inaccurate assessments of risks" which will take "decade of careful research" to turn into more reliable understandings. In other words, we won't be able to comprehensively measure the interactions between genes and other factors for quite some time--so we should just resign ourselves to the idea that we'll be getting things wrong for a while, if we're lucky. If we're unlucky, we should plan on being wrong for quite a bit longer.

 

And this is the third lesson of genetics for thinking about the future: Humility. It's not hard to find different efforts to predict the future, particularly things like who will get sick, what strain of flu will strike, and other sorts of health issues. What our genes show us is that even something as seemingly fundamental as DNA isn't particularly predictive. At best, DNA gives us a tool for anticipating what is likely. And while that might sound disappointing, I think it's also the best we an hope for.