The Myth of Normal 54

The neuroscientist Candace Lewis, whose own research is in epigenetics, the growing field that investigates the impact of life experience on the activity of our genes, sees things the same way. “More and more the science is demonstrating this holistic model of who we are,” she told me. “It’s more than just what’s enclosed in my skin—it’s everything I’m surrounded by. Not to see that is to remove healing from medicine.” As Dr. Lewis has peered at molecules and strands of DNA, she, too, has found herself lifting her gaze to the whole person and from the individual to broader social issues. “As a specialist in the complexity of brain and behavior, I know it’s not just brain and behavior,” said the former Fulbright scholar. “One of the biggest takehome messages from my work is how malleable we are as an organism, how responsive to environmental cues throughout the lifespan.” The dominant assumption in our culture is that genetic inheritance determines the better part of our destiny, who we are, what we suffer from, and what we are capable of. In 2000, at a White House briefing, Bill Clinton proclaimed the findings of the Human Genome Project “the most wondrous map ever produced by humankind,” adding that “today we are learning the language in which God created life.” The new science, the soon-to-be expresident predicted, “will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human disease,” leading to cures for conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and cancer “by attacking their genetic roots.”[*] Two decades later, we know that little of the sort has happened.[1] And for good reason: genes are not, in fact, life’s language, any more than a scrambled alphabet or a randomly arranged dictionary is a Shakespeare play, or a musical scale is equivalent to a John Coltrane solo. For letters or words to become language, they must be arranged, enunciated, inflected, punctuated with pauses, EMPHASIZED or softened. Like all building blocks, genes help make up the language of existence, but it is through the workings of epigenetics that they are activated, accented, or quieted. The mechanisms of epigenetics include, among myriad others, adding certain molecules to DNA sequences so as to change gene function, modifying the numbers of receptors