Imagine in 5 or 10 years, when you take your daughter to school and overhear two kids talking, ‘Forget it, Amy, you were born a fatty and future heart disease patient. I read your genome record.’ Would you be obfuscated?
This is a very likely scenario based on the recent news hit the portals. Amy Harmon of New York Times and Thomas Goetz of Wired Magazine enthused in their reports on the offering by the start-up company, 23AndMe.com, that can give anyone his/her genomic report within 2 to 3 weeks at the price of 1000 dollars. With the email they would send you, you can look up Genome Journal on their website, and get an idea why you hate drinking milk, or how likely you would develop Alzheimer’s or diabetes type I. Sure the result is still preliminary, the strategic DNA decoding covers only 550 thousand single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, over the humongous 6 trillion bases. The analysis is more focused on so-called monogenic connection, i.e., one particular SNPs indicates a specific physical feature or predisposition (easy to research at this stage), but it is everyone’s belief that more breakthroughs will be added up soon, prediction will be more pin-pointing, until one day you are startling at the information laid out on you that you are doomed to be like this and doomed to be demise of that. Will we be blessed when this happens?
I’m not comfortable about this. First to any snoopy individual, is it advantageous that parents know their son would have high brain cancer possibility? It is more of an atrocity. Some may argue that it might be fantastic to know first-hand their daughter is a chess wunderkind, so no need to send the girl to piano lesson or ballet or soccer club. But let’s face it, there might be only one Wolfgang Mozart in every 300 years, one Einstein in every 200 years. Genius is genius because they are so rare, one million parents going for the test may end up 999 thousand disappointing ones with so much side information to worry to raise their kids. What about the next life stage, going to school, applying for the first job, having a date, everyone is carrying his/her genetic report in the chest pocket and worrying about being targeted? This is a crappy situation.
In a larger picture, genealogy is such a powerful technique but bearing two sides. Some regulations have to come up first to prevent it from being abused. Insurance company, human resources department in a company, evil politicians and so on all love to take some wicked advantages. I even read articles a few years ago that an English junk scientist predicts there might be ‘rich’ gene in far future generations. I see huge possibilities of the outrageous biased societies and polarized world. Compared with the implication that versatile gene decoding availabilities, current sporadic racial discrimination is just petty. This reminds us of the onset of nuclear technology. It is really a political and ethical issue; the implication is far more than a simple disease estimator.
Another abusing concern is more technological. How good does the ‘born’ factor determine one’s fate? I still don’t know if the ‘training’ and ‘exercise’ could alter one’s gene, but the fact that gene analysis is not definitive may not be emphasized in a real practice. The quality of gene-to-feature study has to be carefully managed and reviewed. For example, how much sense does it make if one study claims Person 1 has 12% higher intelligence than Person 2. I don’t know how significant this probability estimation is, even I am well aware of the interpretation of wave functions in most quantum mechanics systems. Also there are multigenic connections and there are many other SNPs not being thoroughly investigated. We just can’t simply expect simple claims that state to know many of our ‘born’ characteristics.
The technology advance is often catching me off guard. I think I have to embrace it, like it or not. Gene code is like a heavenly book written by god. It is really interesting humans now are cracking it.
No animals have more subtle and layered emotions than human beings. We can be annoyed, disturbed, upset, freaked out, frustrated, devastated, or distraught. Our affection towards someone or something is no less multiple faceted, bonds ourselves with family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. It is forever the theme for any sort of entertainment. But when it comes down to some business-like endeavor, an individual’s emotion is least favored factor for achievement. The best performance comes out of the condition that everyone is functioning like a module in a huge machine. In another word, the best player/employee is working like a robot, show me the instructions, then the results will come.
First I got this notion was when I was preparing for GRE exam. In a training class, the teacher joked us about the mentality for the preparation, ‘You guys should study the material day in and day out, emotionlessly like a robot. Don’t let anything else distract you, forget about girls, forget about the holidays. Your whole world now is this portion of reading passages, these pages of logic questions and this amount of vocabulary.’ He waved papers on his hand, ‘After you finish your assignment today, you can go eat and sleep. And I guarantee you will have a good score.’ Later on in numerous situations, heard of or experienced by myself, I felt emotion was something incompatible with competition and cooperation. Pro athletes know exactly how important it is to keep a cool head under opponents’ defiance and audience’s hustler. Zinedine Zidane, the retired French soccer icon, gave the whole world a counter example why tempered emotion didn’t help win when he head butted Italian defender Marco Materazzi in World Cup game, 2006. On the other hand, hardly does every single conflict between boss and secondary, every argument between colleagues, not involve sentimental detachment. ‘I hate my boss, he is nothing but a judgmental moron.’ ‘JB is an asshole, there is no way I can work with him.’ When one’s emotion takes over his work, it is a sign of lack of professionalism.
Psychologically, everyone takes things personal. We are humans, just can’t take our personal emotion away. Being in a group, when the chemistry goes sour, an easy solution is to reshuffle. A small ego-friendly system can be easily built all over again. As for an individual, there is something worth looking deeper. Emotion is human’s weak side, irrational, which is deviate from well deduced strategy. Harry Markowitz, Nobel prize-winning economist who pioneered the modern investment portfolio theory, makes all-human mistakes when he manages his own retirement plan. His theory suggests investor to “calculate the historical co-variances of the asset classes and draw an efficient frontier”, i.e., distribute the investment into classes of stocks and bonds for minimizing the risk out of the portfolio. Interestingly instead, Mr. Markowitz visualized his grief that ‘if the stock market went way up and I wasn’t in it---or if it went way down and I was completely in it…” So he split his contribution 50/50 between stocks and bonds. The result is unfortunately proving the righteousness of his famous theory.
Plan, strategy and decision can be scientifically analyzed. There might be even mathematical derivation behind to support all the statement. While emotion drags human’s mind away from it. It is environmental noise. Either called mentally tough, or strategically cool, it is best to shelf one’s emotion for the best performance.
Didn't realize until a while ago that John Mayer was a white guy. The melody of his song 'waiting on the world to change' haunted me. Whatever he's trying to say in the song, I just felt I didn't have the luxury to 'wait on the world to change' for my personal life, this is my intentional misread. I need to change myself before the world is changing and overwhelming me. Everything starts from bits and pieces, so is one's attitude. Here is my list of exercise to reshape myself, mentally and physically. It is trivial, but if I do it on daily basis, I strongly believe it'll do good to me.
1. Memorize a number. (phone number, some stats, some odd results, etc. Today's take, the latest mass destruction on date earth: circa 65 millions years ago.)
2. Run along the staircase. (if no company is needed.)
3. Walk fast. (no stroll.)
4. 3 new words.
5. 20% instrumental music.
6. run as often as I can.
7. get up early (the hardest part. I'll push the time gradually.)
RSS Feed