We are still in our infancy in understanding genomics, epigenetic inheritance systems (EIS) and proteomics, especially in relation to psychological symptomatology, e.g., how do we understand the relation between gene expression and phentotypic expression of delusions or hallucinations.  Genes do not code for anxiety, hallucinations or delusions.  The following references I thought might be of interest to some ISPS members.

Brian Koehler

Leon Eisenberg (2004), Harvard social psychiatrist, in his article “Social psychiatry and the human genome: contextualizing heritability” (British Journal of Psychiatry, 184: 101-103), pointed out that genes alone are not the secret code or blueprint for life.  He noted:

“The [dogma] of one gene/one protein, a useful fable for its time has been exploded; alternative splicing permits multiple proteins from a single gene.  Thirty thousand plus genes code for 100,000 plus proteins; epigenetic post-translational modifications create the potential for a million different proteins that must interact to produce a viable human being.  The assembly of these components reflects not merely the code but biological and social pulls and pushes at work during its fabrication.  Men and women, in all our diversity, emerge from these intricate and unpredictable interactions.  Nature and nurture stand in reciprocity, not opposition.  Offspring inherit, along with their parents’ genes, their parents, their peers and the places [sociocultural contexts] they inhabit.”

Eisenberg concluded that “genes set the boundaries of the possible; environments parse out the actual.”

In last night's colloquium, Jean-Max Gaudilliere remarked on the role of chance in our lives.  Randomness and chance may play a strong role in the development of many psychiatric and medical disorders.  Richard Lewontin (2000), Professor at Harvard University- taken from his volume The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (published by Harvard University Press)- concluded:

“The organism is determined neither by its genes nor by its environment nor even by the interaction between them, but bears a significant mark of random processes.  The organism does not compute itself from the information in its genes nor even from the information in the genes and the sequence of environments.  The metaphor of computation is just a trendy form of Descartes’s metaphor of the machine.  Like any metaphor, it catches some aspect of the truth but leads us astray if we take it too seriously” (p. 38).

Sapolsky (2005), a professor at Stanford University, in considering the lessons from many research studies, concluded:

“Obviously, beware of simple explanations; it is rare that nature is parsimonious...Sometimes genetics is about inevitability-if you have the gene for Huntington’s disease...there’s a 100 percent chance you’re going to have this awful neurological disease by middle age.  But in far more realms than people usually expect, genes are about vulnerabilities and potentials, rather than about destiny.  And out of that comes a social imperative-genes do indeed seem to play a role in some of our less desirable behaviors.  But what knowledge about those genes keeps teaching us is that we have that much more of a responsibility to create environments that interact benignly with those genes” (p.56).

Brian Koehler PhD
New York University