Healing Histories – Genetics

Gillian and Professor Roberts tackle the big questions around nature vs nurture in how much our inherited genes determine our present. Mark shares insights from research into bananas and microbes, and much more, to make this a hopeful and fascinating episode including exploring:

• What genes are and how they influence who we are. 
• The discovery of genes and history of genetic study
• Genes being like an on-off switch in simple terms.
• Genes, illness and disease.
• Genes help us survive in our context.
• What Mark wants us all to know about genetics.
• How the tiniest detail can tell us about how the world works.

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Gillian Straine: Welcome to the GoHealth Podcast. I’m Gillian Strain, chief exec of GoHealth, an organisation with a vision to enable churches and individual Christians to be a healing presence in the world. And this summer, we’re exploring the topic of Healing Histories, discovering the profound influence of history on our lives, the connections between our own past and present, and how it all impacts on our flourishing today.

And this even includes checking out the science of genetic inheritance and how that impacts on our present life and who we think we are. Therefore, I am very pleased to welcome our guest on the podcast today, Professor Mark Roberts, who is Professor of BiomedIcal Science at Oxford University. Mark, welcome. Thank you for giving us your time today on the podcast. How are you? 

Mark Roberts: I’m well, thank you, Gillian. Thanks for having me as well. 

Gillian: I’m really excited for our conversation. Okay, so genes, genetics, what are genes and how do they influence who we are? 

Mark: The easiest way of thinking about it, I guess, is this almost like a sort of recipe for making an organism, making a human that we have within us and a gene encodes for, is a particular recipe, a particular thing. Each each one sort of controls a single sort of bit of us.

Gillian:  A recipe. So mmm….that’s a really interesting word to use, because when I, you know, I like baking in my spare time, get the recipe book out, make a cake. And pretty much if I don’t mess it up and put the right ingredients in a generally get the same product. Right. So is it exactly the same for genes or those other things influencing and going on there? 

Mark: To some extent? And you can see this when you when you grow bacteria where they have identical genetic traits, they can be broadly identical. I’ve deliberately used the term broadly there because actually, whilst the recipe book is there, the organism sort of reads those recipes and turns them into protein. But actually what ones it decides to turn on or read at that particular time can change depending on its environment. And so actually, although all of our cells contain this recipe book, that means, you know, a single cell in your body could at least in theory, make another whole you, actually different recipes are read by different cells. And actually again, looking at yourself, you know, the genes that are turned on in your eyes are going to be different to the ones in your skin, that are going to be different to the ones that turned on in your stomach because each part of your body is doing a specific job. So although they’ve got the full instruction manual, they’re only actually reading a portion of it relating to sort of almost their role, once a better way of describing it.

Gillian: Where did the study of genes begin? Where did it all start? 

Mark: One of the sort of early people who sort of credited with working in this field is actually an Augustine monk, Gregor Mendel. And he did some really interesting work on pea plants and looking at inheritance. Now, in some ways, working with plants is kind of cool, right because you can, with a brush, very carefully take the pollen from one plant and put it onto another so you can sort of control which plant mates with which. And then if you don’t grow the future generations, you can then start going, well, actually, okay, this plant was tall and I’ve now mated it with a short plant. What do I get? Do I get a tall plant or do I get a short plant or do I get a mixture and what ratio do I actually get in terms of that mixture? So is it 50/50, is it one quarter, three quarter and so on? And so from that he started to build up this idea of these units of inheritance, for want of a better way of describing it, because he didn’t know about genes, he didn’t know about DNA, all of that came much later. But actually this idea that you can actually inherit a trait,  and obviously then and they mix together. The other thing that his work really showed, which is this idea, what you might call sort of dominant and recessive, in terms of genes. So you’re happy with the idea that you’re going to get your genes are going to come from a mixture of your parents, some from the mum, some from the dad, and they get mixed together to make you. And so that means that you actually don’t have one copy of the recipe book, you actually got two copies of the recipe book. And so you then have this interesting interplay of, well, which one do we actually see, that is actually manifest? So they have this idea of sort of dominant and recessive genes. So if you’ve got two copies, if one of those is dominant, then that’s the trait that you would see. So he was really incremental actually in terms of working out this idea of this pattern of inheritance and that you could actually inherit these traits and that there was this dominant and recessive nature to it. And in some ways it’s still amazingly right that they had no idea about how this was happening. So the DNA and the process that is sort of underlines it, but actually, even without that, they would start sort of piecing out how you might inherit sort of single traits. And it was things like plant height and shape of the flower, colour of the flower and that sort of thing. 

Gillian: It’s fascinating that, what you say that this Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel, he didn’t, of course, know about genes and what they look like and chromosomes and all that kind of stuff. But he started there and I can’t imagine he could have imagined what he was starting. I wonder whether he’s just into peas so they could get more peas for the monastery for their supper and all the rest of it. But actually he kick started something really important and really fascinating, particularly in the debates between science and religion, because we’re a bit more complicated than peas, I know enough science to say that. But actually, from the Christian perspective, the ‘who do you think you are?’ question usually involves something like, ‘well, we think we’re made in the image of God and we think we’ve got free will and all the rest of it.’ So he started off what became a few centuries later a massive debate and one that’s it’s really still going on today isn’t it Mark? This who do you think we are question? How does Gregor Mendel’s work relate to the genetics of being a human being? 

Mark: Okay, yeah, I mean, we can sort of really start in that story, and I guess you could pick up a sort of an individual who did something similar in humans and if we actually look at this, we can look at actually what are termed inherited genetic diseases. And actually we can see their importance in society because I don’t know if you remember just after your children were born, they took a small amount of blood to do a heal prick test. 

Gillian: I do remember.

Mark:  What they’re doing there is they’re actually testing for a number of genetic diseases, actually a number of those diseases in metabolism, because if they can detect those early then actually they can treat, allow the child to thrive, whereas if they let the disease manifest, it becomes problematic. But actually the study of those diseases was I guy called Garrod, who worked in London and then became Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford and he worked on the study of a genetic disease called Alkaptonuria. Crazy name, right?

 

Gillian: Yeah.

Mark: But it’s an interesting one because like all good bits of science, right, you want something that’s easy to measure and one of the manifestations of this disease is the production of a chemical which goes into the urine called Alkapton hence the name of the disease alkaptonuria. But that chemical, when the urine hits oxygen, it goes black. So you can see immediately if an individual is affected because they’re going to have black urine. And yet again, a bit like Mendel, he started to realise that there were patterns in terms of the inheritance that, you know, you could start seeing patterns of this within families and traits and actually starting to work out the idea that actually you could inherit a disease, which now seems obvious, right? But actually, again, at the time that was quite groundbreaking. 

Gillian: And what period was this, Mark? This is between Mendel, the monk.

Mark: 18th Century, something like that – I can’t quite remember.

Gillian: Yeah. So before, before they discovered genes. So this idea of when people are curious and they’re looking for patterns, there are beginning to sense there was something going on.

Mark: Yeah and beginning to sense something’s going on. And diseases is quite  interesting and nice way in the sense that it’s a single gene that’s causing it. So you actually know the inheritance is relatively simple and you can start actually, it’s easy to spot that pattern. 

Gillian: Yeah. yeah. 

Mark: Even there are other diseases where actually it’s sort of more multifactorial and so actually there’s more than one gene in play. And that obviously means that the inheritance becomes more complex to try and understand. So actually in some ways, in the same way that pea plants were a nice way in because you could get quite obvious changes in the plant. And again, of course by single genes, it allowed us to actually start to sort of tease apart what’s going on.

Gillian: It always gets more complicated the bigger the organism. And humans, just complicated, I think, right? Help me colour in a bit, because I’ve got genes, I’ve got recipes, I’ve got mum and dad coming together, traits, dominant things, things that are recessive and patterns. Should I be thinking of genes as sort of on off switches or is it a bit more complicated than that?

Mark: I think in some ways you can think of the idea of a gene being a recipe for a certain thing, be it a recipe for a yellow pea plant or pink pea plant. And so in that sense, a recipe for whatever makes a colour and they are turned, they can be turned on or off. And actually, again, we sort of see that in the sense of, you know, within the cells of our body we’ve got eye cells, we’ve got skin cells, heart cells and so on. Those cells are all different. And so what’s happening in those is they’re turning on some of the recipe but not all. And so you’ve got that sort of nuance in terms of turning things on. Now, we’ve also we talked about these sort of single gene disorders and, you know, they could be caused, I guess, in two ways. One is that there’s a defect actually in that gene. So even if it’s on, it’s not going to work or that you have a defect in the turning on or off mechanism of that particular gene. And so you still don’t get that gene. So it manifests itself in a different way so that then if we move to something that’s more complex, you’ve got an interplay of what’s been turned on or turned off can actually really affect how a cell lives and behaves and how an organism.

Gillian: And environment can play a big part in this as well, can’t it? I’m thinking we’re about to go into summer season. We’re all hearing about wearing your suncream to protect yourself from skin cancer. 

Mark: Yeah, I mean, skin cancer and the sun is an interesting one because the UV light comes in. And the UV light damages our DNA, and that’s normal. Our body is used to it and has mechanisms to try and repair that, but obviously those reckon those mechanisms have a probability of failure. And so the more sun, the more likely at some point you might not be able to repair and you potentially go down the cancerous route. So in that sense, yes, the exposure to the sun is actually turning on the DNA repair mechanisms. I guess a different example for me is, is always to think of how diet and things can affect an impact.

If we take your self and we’re to look at the genes that were turned on inside you. And then if we take somebody potentially from a refugee camp whose diet much more limited and limited in calorific intake and what’s available, and their actual, the genes that are turned on to breakdown the food and to turn that into energy are going to be different because your, with your plentiful access to food, plentiful access to lots of different types of food. And so actually, yours is going to be what genes are turned on, in terms of, and what’s present in your body is going to be different actually because of your different nutritional intake. 

Gillian: And so here, now this is this is this is interesting. So we’re getting we’re going away from this idea that it’s a recipe and who I am is entirely determined. Here’s Gillian at home, nice middle class life, quite close to the supermarket with means to get food from a supermarket. And Gillian, in a desperate situation, doesn’t have clear access to food, is also under threat and living in fear and the gene expression will be different. Am I hearing that right? That’s…

Mark: Yeah. But in many respects it’s your body…for want of a better ways, adapting to the environment that it’s in, right? It’s trying to make the most of what it has and then sort of protect itself. And so the body and that’s one of the nice things in a way, is that, you know, yes, the body’s got a recipe book, but actually your body makes choices as to what it turns on, depending on what it’s having to cope with, once a better way.

Gillian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the phrase in my head, survival of the fittest. A very famous Darwinian phrase, but it’s about survival. We’re helped by our genes to survive, right? 

Mark: Totally. Yeah. And it is, it is about survival. And actually, the idea of survival of the fittest is this idea that if a gene helps you survive, it will be passed down to the next generation because you’ll have survived enough to pass it down.

Gillian: Yes. Yeah. 

Mark: And if you don’t survive, then you don’t essentially pass it down to the next generation because that obviously predicates on when an organism produces offspring. But it is this idea that if you never get to a stage where you produce offspring, but then on a slightly different tack on this, there are interesting interplays sometimes with these things because you can argue, okay, well there may be some traits that might be not so, not so good or a really nice example is say, sickle cell anemia. So it is a genetic disease and it causes blood cells to, red blood cells form these sort of sickle shape cells and that, that’s not good. But actually it’s quite present in the world, particularly in certain places and that’s because when you’ve got two copies of the gene, you’ve get the sickle cell disease, that’s bad. But if you just had one copy of the defective gene and one copy of The Wild Type, you’re perfectly healthy…

Gillian: Wild type just means normal, right? 

Mark: Yeah, wild type just means normal. You’re perfectly healthy as you have a normal copy and one disease copy. But with that genetic state, you actually have a resistance to the malaria parasite. 

Gillian: Oh waow. 

Mark: So you’ve got the situation where actually, you’ve got the selective pressure of the malarial parasite is actually keeping that disease gene in that population because actually there’s an advantage to having it, because when you when you’ve got one disease and one normal, not only do you not have the disease, you’re also protected against malaria. So if genes can sort of be kept in populations in interesting ways. 

Gillian: So I’m thinking Mark, so I was, I’ve mentioned it a few times on this podcast, I got diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma when I was 21, which is cancer of the lymphatic system. And like anyone who gets diagnosed with, gets a difficult diagnosis, the question why comes up? Why me? All that. And within our Christian spiritual tradition, there’s lots of answers, lots of ways and good things we can do. And we thank God for the medical health care system and scientists like you and all the rest of it. But as a scientist, I actually went in and I did some some investigation when I wanted to answer questions why I’d got Hodgkin’s lymphoma? I went and looked at the science of genetics, because when you get a disease like cancer, there’s often associations with it, negative. What have I done to deserve this, this terrible phrase that you get? Well, you’ve done blooming’ nothing right? It’s just but it’s there in our society. So I went and had a look at the genetics of it, of the whole thing. And what I learned was, you know, cancer is by and large a random, you know, random disease. It’s one cell that just goes off in its own direction. And you know what? I found that really comforting. Comforting because I got a bit of understanding. Secondly, it was quite clear that it was something random. It wasn’t my fault, but also it was driven by this force, you know, cancer is a rapidly reproducing cells driven by the same life force as all of life. So actually it was a really expansive and cool thing to understand as I was trying to understand my illness. 

Mark: Yeah, I mean, cancer is kind of interesting from a genetic point of view because as you say, it’s these cells that are just growing uncontrollably, which because we’re quite highly ordered organisms that that’s problematic But actually because it’s problematic, the body has a number of ways to stop that from happening. And in the sort of cancer field, there’s this idea of hallmarks of cancer and the idea that there are a number of systems in each cell and actually to become cancerous something needs to go wrong in all of them. So that also sort of speaks to the idea of the idea of probability. And why it becomes quite unlikely, I guess, in a way, because you’ve got to break, not one system, but six. You’ve got to basically have these mutations happen and it also, I guess, speaks to the idea of the disease relating to the longer you live, the more likely ,because it’s, as we talked about with the sun and the idea of DNA damage, the more sun that you’re exposed to, the more your body can repair. The DNA breaks but it’s not perfect, there’s a possibility, albeit very small, that that it gets it wrong. And so that small possibility over a long time builds up this idea.

 

Gillian: Yeah, it’s fascinating the amount of ways the body and our genes are constantly trying to protect us from this that’s happening. But I have to say sometimes probability doesn’t comfort everyone, does it? I think those are facts and figures and I never find that particularly comforting. Oh you’ve got a 20% chance or you know, it’s always numbers. Some people do. 

Mark: Yeah. And I guess this is the sad thing. And also that, you know, when we’ve got these six things, there are ways if you had a defect in one of those that that can move down a family line. And so you end up, people having…being more likely because of their genes to get cancer.

Gillian: Let’s move away a bit from probability and statistics as well, as fascinating as that is, because I’m still I’m still caught, I still,  I’m still caught in the dichotomy between genes as recipes. There’s environmental influences that can determine how our genes are expressed, but how much more wiggle room if we’re in that area of ‘who do you think you are? Genes obviously have a huge influence. What about things like our emotional life or our personality? How much of that is genetic? How much is not genetic? Where’s the, I’m sure there’s a better term than wiggle room. What’s the wiggle room for the freedom, Mark? 

Mark: I mean, that’s a really challenging question. 

Gillian: Yeah, I know, I know. I would love to know your opinion.

Mark: No, no. And it is a sort of, you know, this question of how much is governed, I guess, by our genes is nature versus nurture, as I guess what you’re trying to put in. And I think it’s a mixture of the two and you see that I guess if we…a simple genetic experiment I guess is the identical twin, right? We’ve got people who are essentially identical genetically, but actually they’re not the same person. And so you can start to, you can see, you can really see to some extent that there is an impact on nurture, the things external, I guess, that move people in slightly different directions, even though actually genetically they could be, they can be the same. So I definitely wouldn’t say it’s everything but I also wouldn’t say it was, it was nothing as well. It’s sort of part of the mix of what makes you you.

 

Gillian: Do you think there’s a gene that determines how spiritual we are? 

Mark: Probably not. If ever, it would likely, in my mind be multiple genes that interplay together that might, might do that. I don’t know. 

Gillian: Okay, here let’s start somewhere else. Does, is there any genetic influence on intelligence? 

Mark: Probably. Probably in the sense that, you know, you can clearly see if we look between different human species going back in time and we can obviously see that they had different brain sizes and different, I don’t know, I guess, different ways that those brains were interconnected. And so I guess, yes, from that, from that sense, I think you can probably say that again, it’s not going to be this sort of simple single gene is this… And I wouldn’t also say that I see there are many other parts that play into that in terms of education and when and how people are nurtured that will really influence, influence that.

But I guess it’s interesting, maybe if we think about certain things like say, musical ability where you get these child prodigies and that can be perhaps speaks to the fact that some of these abilities potentially can be linked more to the sort of genetics where you’ve got sort of an innate ability. There seems to be something there that which would suggest there’s some genetic underpinning…

Gillian: To our brain structure I guess, and part of that would be our, I mean, there’s the rational intelligence, but also emotional intelligence and how that’s linked to our intuitive, intuitive systems within the mind. And there is interesting stuff coming up around spiritual intelligence in terms of how it’s linked to the, our intuition sense as well. So this seems like a really fascinating area to look at.

One of the words we often use in the Guild. So our, our our tagline is ‘together we flourish’. And this is rooted in our understanding of what health and healing is all about, but also a serious understanding that, you know, rubbish happens in life. You know, none of us will avoid rubbish diseases and ultimately death. So which often wellbeing programmes don’t mentioned, but we often mentioned here because that’s life, right? And often a lot of our training programs in our community by about helping people to flourish irrespective of age and stage and what they’re going through. Do our genes help us to flourish? 

Mark: Well, certainly. I mean, it comes back to this idea that, they they help you survive on, you know, they try and they try and make a working organism and they’re there to try and do that. So for me, yes, they definitely help you flourish. And and actually, I don’t know, in some ways actually the diversity of genes within a population also help us flourish. And so a slightly random example, let’s think about bananas. Okay. So bananas, the predominant species I think is the Cavendish banana, in the world. And that’s actually got a relatively low genetic diversity and is currently quite a concern because there’s a disease that’s starting to affect them and obviously reduced the banana production and because you’ve got a small variation in genes, actually there aren’t bananas or there’s a limited number of bananas naturally resistant to this particular…and so if you have a small diversity, then actually it’s much more likely as a population for things to go drastically wrong. Whereas one of the things that’s amazing actually, is that this huge diversity allows us as a population to support each other and flourish in different ways.

Gillian: Diversity on so many levels, right Mark? You know what,  we could talk about genetic level, but in all sorts of other ways in society, how fear of diversity can hold people back from flourishing individually and as a community. Waow. I never thought we’d link that conversation with bananas, that’s fantastic. 

Mark: Yes. 

Gillian: Mark, what’s exciting in your field at the moment, give us an update that we can understand.

Mark: My particular interest is about microbes and particular bacteria. And I think what’s what’s really exciting at the moment is in the last few years, we’ve really started to get more more of an understanding of the diversity, to use that word again, of the bacteria,  that live sort of on all of our bodily surfaces, but actually how important they are to actually making you you in the sense that actually the bacteria that live on your surfaces can influence you and you can influence them. And so there’s actually this sort of other community that isn’t human because they’re bacterial cells, but actually does play a really important part in making you as a, as a human, as a human.

Gillian: How do we influence bacteria? How do they influence us? I said, simple, but I’m going to need a bit more…because this sounds good.

Mark: No no no, that’s fine. I mean, really nice example, actually, there’s a bacteria in your mouth that helped produce a compound called nitrous oxide, which acts as a base, and the later it changes your blood pressure. Okay. So there’s a lovely study where people used, we gave them all a mouthwash and I can’t remember how many times a day they had to do it. It was very regular, much more regular than you’d actually use it, using essentially an antiseptical mouthwash, made a notable change in those people’s blood pressure that was statistically significant from those that didn’t do that.

Gillian: Waow. 

Mark: And so it’s that little influence where the bacteria on and in us that can actually sort of really help us break down things that help us make things and that can really sort of influence what happens. And for me this is the really exciting thing of just trying to understand actually how we’re used to thinking about our selves as an organism and in some respects we are. But actually we’re also an ecosystem in our own sense, covered in these bacteria that are interacting with us, but sort of changing a bit how we are. 

Gillian: Yeah, it’s fascinating isn’t it. We often, you know, we so often we think I’m an island and, you know, it’s just me and my thoughts. But actually even at the microbial level and then again on the genetic level, it’s fascinatingly complicated, all these interacting systems that makes us who we think we are. 

Mark: Yeah, Yeah. No the world is a really complex place. And I mean, even even us as an organism…I think it’s one of the things that drove me down the study I went to. It’s just, I still find life amazing. And the fact that, you know, inside you, there’s genes, those genes are making proteins, those proteins are doing jobs and that’s just all happening. And that makes you, you know, you, you and you function and the fact it just happens. And how that happens is just absolutely fascinating in my mind. 

Gillian: It’s like all these multiple layers of community and we have it anyway and we aware, but right inside of us, all these interacting layers of community we’re not even aware of and how they work together to make us flourish. Waow. I never thought I’d get such a strong endorsement for the GoHealth Community from microbial science, that, that’s what it’s all about.

Mark, you’ve got a fascinating job and sounds like you’re working on the teeny tiniest things and do and then relating up to the big world. What do you wish people understood about genetics, the world you’re in?

Mark:  I think it is, you know, this basic idea of inheritance and the idea I guess of the fact that the DNA that acts as sort of that record, helps make us human and make us who we are. But I guess coming back to the examples are things we’ve talked about, this idea of, you know, how it’s simple cases, a single gene can actually have a very noticeable effect.

In other cases, it’s, it’s more nuanced because you’ve got this these sort of complex interplay. But how we sort of all build up and make organisms. And then I guess how the sort of sexual reproduction process how that causes this nice gene shuffling and that creates that diversity that we’re sort of talking about earlier and actually helps a species survive. Because the more diverse you are, the more likely you are to have useful traits that will end up allowing you to survive whatever whatever the world throws at you. 

Gillian: So I’m hearing sort of community diversity and then you’ve mentioned what the world throws at you, because there’s a lot going on in the world right now. And, and often people we start off chatting around determinism, people just sort of throw their hands up.

There’s nothing I can do, you know. And often people think about genetics that way. It’s all predetermined. But I’ve really heard you strongly describe, teeny tiny detail. You know, these interacting systems where there there is there is wiggle room there. We have freedom in these systems.

I just wonder how, what brings you hope and joy in your job? Where do you find the flourishing personally as you’re studying genetics today? 

Mark: It is sort of as you alluded to earlier, it’s the little things in life, very literally, that I find exciting.

[LAUGHTER]

For me, I just find it amazing trying to understand the complexity of even the smallest forms of life and how in the same way that we adapt and change to our environment. So so do these bacteria and actually trying to understand that and actually get this idea of how the world works, is I guess what sort of fascinates me, and it’s that I would say it’s sort of like what sort of inspiring and then how that sort of, Yeah, less to me, how it sort of sits in the wider system. I am actually, I am very sort of focused on this sort of small thing and how it works because to me actually, you know, you get a nice understanding of these things you can then sort of build a greater, you build into this, this wider understanding of how life works and how life adapts and changes to the world.

Gillian: Mark, thank you so much for helping us go from genetic analysis into a vision of a world where adaptation and diversity and community sort of sings and is part of what’s going on for us. Thank you for giving us your time. 

We’re going to be picking up the conversation over in the Go health community, where we’re being encouraged in this season to listen to the podcast, listen in on what Mark’s been saying, and then go on a journaling journey with a spiritual specialist, our own Wendy Lloyd.

So log into the resources to find what you need to reflect on Mark’s podcast and a few ideas about how you can journey through your own history for healing and flourishing. 

We’ve also got an offer going on right now so you can get a journal for free if you join the Community. So thank you to our producer, Rosie Dawson, and to Wendy Lloyd from the GoHealth team for all of your work on this series and the podcast.

And if you’re listening and feel inspired do hit share and let others know about the work of the GoHealth Community where together we seek to flourish and to be healing presences in the world today. Once again, thank you so much, Mark, for joining us. 

Mark: Thank you.