"There are so many genes and so many mutations," he said.
Biological views about chemical imbalances, faulty genes and so on are not only unproven but have been shown to increase fear and stigma.
There are many similar examples involving groups of people, molecules of a gas, genes, and so on.
D'Souza's misgivings finally surface in the book's last few chapters, in which he frets about the implications of what he sees as the techno-economy's next step, into the "posthuman" world of smart robots and custom genes and so on.
The work will enable scientists to start work on drugs that mimic the effects of the healthy genes and so help to prevent Alzheimer's developing in patients who carry mutated variants.
The idea that it's rarely correct to attribute a function solely to one gene seems at odds with the headlines about discoveries of cancer genes, pacemaker genes, depression genes and so forth.
Take a classic episode of "The Simpsons," in which Homer and Marge's intelligent, cheerful daughter Lisa goes into a funk when she realizes she has Homer's genes and so is destined to grow up to be just as big an idiot as he is.
What it could mean: the reason this breakthrough is so exciting medically is that, if successful, each person can make his own "spare parts" that would contain all the same genes and so would not be rejected as "foreign" by the body.
Motifs such as silencers, enhancers and locus control regions (LCRs) act over long distances to regulate adjacent genes, and so called insulators prevent the misregulation of adjacent genes by restricting the effects of regulatory elements to specific regions [54], [55].
These enzymes restrain the transcription of tumor suppressor genes and so offer bright targets for cancer therapy [ 11, 12].
The mainly upregulated cluster contains both anti- and pro-apoptotic genes, and so does the mainly downregulated cluster.
