![]() ![]() The logical conclusion is that genetics is "such a mush that we can't understand it," says Ewan Birney at the European Bioinformatics Institute. So editing one gene would affect not only height but who knows what else. A gene linked to height might affect the basic mechanism inside many cells. If that's the case, each gene must influence many different traits. "We have estimated that it's probably something like 100,000 variants across the genome, so most of the genome affects height by a small amount."Ī few years ago, he suggested that height and presumably other common traits are "omnigenetic," meaning they involve all of our genes. "It quickly became clear there's huge numbers of variants that affect height," he says. Jonathan Pritchard, a Howard Hughes investigator at Stanford University, has looked into the genetics of height, which is one of the most thoroughly studied traits. Human traits, like height, follow the same story. And most of them have just a tiny influence on the risk of a disease, often just a small fraction of a percent. Instead, scientists found that thousands upon thousands of genes are associated with common diseases and common traits. "You could have done just as well by throwing a dart at the genome and saying, 'OK, we're going to look at this gene and see if it's associated with depression,' " he says. His lab also looked at the early claims for genes linked to depression. "When we look at the 20 most studied genes investigated for schizophrenia, we find basically no evidence that any of those are associated at levels greater than we'd expect due to chance," says Matthew Keller at the University of Colorado. For example, hundreds of studies over the years have reportedly found genes associated with schizophrenia. Hundreds of scientific papers purported to show strong candidates for these critical genes.īritish comedian John Cleese poked fun at this idea in a video skit, where he pointed on a chart to "the gene which we scientists now know makes us eat coconut ice cream after a fish dinner."īut the scientific effort to find genes for common conditions was largely a flop (with a few notable exceptions, such as Alzheimer's and breast cancer). You may recall all those stories about scientists hunting "the gene for" various diseases. ![]() Still, during the heyday of the Human Genome Project at the end of the 20th century, hopes were high that common diseases might be explained through the interaction of just a handful of genes. Shots - Health News Outrage Intensifies Over Claims Of Gene-Edited Babies ![]() But by the 1920s, it was becoming clear that human traits involved many genes acting in concert. It turns out that the genetics underlying desirable traits such as athleticism, intelligence and beauty are so complicated it may not ever be possible to make targeted changes.īack in the day of Gregor Mendel, the monk who modified the traits of the pea plants in his 19th century garden, it seemed that traits were based on simple elements (later dubbed "genes"). The reality is that biologists probably couldn't produce designer babies even if they wanted to. This move follows a widely criticized experiment in China last year that apparently produced children with edited genomes. Leaders of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy sent a letter on April 24 to Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, adding their voices to the call for a moratorium on experiments that could alter the genes passed down to future generations. Scientists continue to speak out against the prospect of producing engineered embryos that could lead to "designer babies." As scientists learn more about the complex way genes combine and work together to create human traits, the idea of "designer babies" becomes less and less likely. ![]()
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