Well I've floated about on the site for a while, and written the odd little diary. Nothing hugely interesting, but I thought it might be time for an exposition of genetics. You see I am a psychiatric geneticist, a double taboo of sorts. When I tell people I mainly get three responses:
- Oh! That's interesting...what does that mean?
- [Glazed over eyes and blank stare] What?
- You nazi. You are trying to take over the world with breeding programs etc.
Adding psychiatry into that blend only makes people more uncomfortable.
I have faith in what I do. Or at least the method, and the current climate is not one for research and science. Let me tell you a bit about what we study and try to cure. More below the fold...
Psychiatric genetics is a varied field. We touch on everything from the traditional psychiatric disorders like depression, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder to more modern trait-based concepts like neuroticism (a great indicator for depression), pro-social behavior (a sort of scale for empathy), and religiosity (how fervently you believe your religion).
In reality our field is split into two groups: quantitative genetics (population-based analysis) and molecular genetics (parsing DNA to find variants that predispose to problems).
Quantitative Genetics(QG) set about determining what traits are heritable(have some sort of genetic component). It turns out that almost everything we studied is genetic. From altruism to depression, these things are at least partly determined by genetics. Average estimates for most traits run to about 40-60% of the variation within the population can be explained by genetics. Some are more so (schizophrenia for example shows 80-90% heritability), while others less so (political affiliation shows almost no genetic component.) QG has used family, adoption, and twin studies to get at these estimates. QG is still sussing out the relationships between a lot of these traits. There are major questions such as whether schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder are the same or different. Actually, cleaning up diagnosis of psychiatric disorders more generally, as current defintions run from a clinical rather than scientific perspective is well within QG's purview. Strangely, animal genetics was way ahead of human genetics in accepting that personality could be genetically mediated. You can get a bull catalogue for studding your cows, and in the description will be not only a full list of physical traits but also the personality of the bull.
Molecular Genetics has taken the assertion that most things are genetic and tried to find the bits of DNA that predispose to particular traits. Of course the DNA itself isn't what is causing the problem or changing the trait, but how cells interpret the information in DNA. Some protein may not be made quite correctly that can have a knock-on effect to cause schizophrenia or alzheimer's or any number of problems. Unfortunately, it turns out that most psychiatric traits are 'complex.' Complex means that for the disease to arise there has to be a confluence of various genetic and environmental effects. This makes life particularly tricky, as it is like trying to undo a knot with 100 mini-knots that combine to make 20 super-knots that then combine to make that 1 final huge knot. We geneticists believe in genetics more so than other things partly because we have had success in assessing genetics where assessing environment is more difficult. That and genetics is a guaranteed starting point.
As an illustration of the difficulties of dealing with environment, let's take this situation: I spilled a bit of coffee and didn't wipe it up. Someone noticed this and criticized me, perhaps a bit too fiercely (this is the environmental stimulus, the criticism). I could conceivably respond to this stimulus in a number of ways, with anger, sulking, brooding, defensively (citing shortcomings of the individual), or fill in your own. All of these responses are conceivable, and though the environmental stimulus is the same, there are vast differences in how I reacted to them. This isn't to say that measuring the environment is useless, it certainly isn't and there are clear things that can drop out of the environment (like exposure to lead greatly increases the risk of cancer).
Anyway, this is only a beginning, I'll write more on genetics in particular, if there is some interest. There's tons to talk about here, but genetics may just hold the key to a lot of our health problems. I've not even touched on one of the biggest section of genetics, which is cancer. Our best shot for getting at cancer is to understand the genetics behind it, because cancer really is a genetic disease.
For the politics bit:
Geneticists work in two main places, universities and at pharmacuetical companies. Most geneticists work at the former rather than the latter, but things are getting more difficult. Clinton believed in science, and increased the NIH's budget hugely. He really made science an important, though not often cited part of his presidency. Bush is obviously taking the opposite tack. Fewer grants are getting funded, and good science, things that ought to be studied, is being ignored because of the lack of money. As the funding situation gets worse more geneticists will be driven to work for industry(no funding means you are basically fired), which is not what we want. Industry causes problems for a lot of scientists. By and large we like to share our data, as we know how difficult things are going to be(To be fair, we only started sharing when we found out that we wouldn't be able to do it on our own). Industry cracks down on sharing, and prevents us from being able to solve these problems as easily and readily. There is also the profit incentive. People that I've known who work in industry have held back key findings for 3-4 years, to allow a head start on following work. Not an effective way to solve this immensely difficult problems.
Addtionally, the whole ID, creationism arguments are complete denials of my entire work. I love my job, I really do. It's a great thing to love one's job, I can't recommend it enough. When I am confronted with these constant denials of what I do and the whole nature of my work, I get upset. So, thank you Dkos for helping me deal with my problems with creationists. I always find it so ironic the whole denial of science by the religious right. The more that this agenda is pushed, the further we get from answers to that which trouble us.
Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed the quick overview. I'll go into more detail about what's been found from various bits of genetics in the coming weeks.
Cheers,