On January 28, 1983: J. David Smith, “Carrie Elizabeth Buck (1906–1983),” Encyclopedia Virginia, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Buck_Carrie_Elizabeth_1906-1983.
Vivian Dobbs—the child who: Ibid.
The Geographers
So Geographers in Afric-maps: Jonathan Swift and Thomas Roscoe, The Works of Jonathan Swift, DD: With Copious Notes and Additions and a Memoir of the Author, vol. 1 (New York: Derby, 1859), 247–48.
More and more, the Human Genome Project: Justin Gillis, “Gene-mapping controversy escalates; Rockville firm says government officials seek to undercut its effort,” Washington Post, March 7, 2000.
Craig Venter, proposed a shortcut: L. Roberts, “Gambling on a Shortcut to Genome Sequencing,” Science 252, no. 5013 (1991): 1618–19.
In 1986, he had heard of: Lisa Yount, A to Z of Biologists (New York: Facts On File, 2003), 312.
“my future in a crate”: J. Craig Venter, A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life (New York: Viking, 2007), 97.
the NIH technology transfer office contacted: R. Cook-Deegan and C. Heaney, “Patents in genomics and human genetics,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 11 (2010): 383–425, doi:10.1146/annurev-genom-082509-141811.
In 1984, Amgen had filed a patent: Edmund L. Andrews, “Patents; Unaddressed Question in Amgen Case,” New York Times, March 9, 1991.
“Patents (or so I had believed) are designed”: Sulston and Ferry, Common Thread, 87.
“It’s a quick and dirty land grab”: Pamela R. Winnick, A Jealous God: Science’s Crusade against Religion (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2005), 225.
“Could you patent an elephant”: Eric Lander, author interview, 2015.
Walter Bodmer, the English geneticist, warned: L. Roberts, “Genome Patent Fight Erupts,” Science 254, no. 5029 (1991): 184–86.
The Institute for Genomic Research: Venter, Life Decoded, 153.
Working with a new ally, Hamilton Smith: Hamilton O. Smith et al., “Frequency and distribution of DNA uptake signal sequences in the Haemophilus influenzae Rd genome,” Science 269, no. 5223 (1995): 538–40.
“The final [paper] took forty drafts”: Venter, Life Decoded, 212.
“thrilled by the first glimpse”: Ibid., 219.
“What if you took a word”: Eric Lander, author interview, October 2015.
“The real challenge of the Human Genome Project”: Ibid.
TIGR had been set up: HGS was launched by William Haseltine, a former Harvard professor, who hoped to use genomics to discover novel drugs.
On May 12, 1998, the Washington Post: Justin Gills and Rick Weiss, “Private firm aims to beat government to gene map,” Washington Post, May 12, 1998, http://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/05/12/private-firm-aims-to-beat-government-to-gene-map/bfd5a322-781e-4b71-b939-5e7e6a8ebbdb/.
In December 1998: “1998: Genome of roundworm C. elegans sequenced,” Genome.gov, http://www.genome.gov/25520394.
A gene called ceh-13, for instance: Borbála Tihanyi et al., “The C. elegans Hox gene ceh-13 regulates cell migration and fusion in a non-colinear way. Implications for the early evolution of Hox clusters,” BMC Developmental Biology 10, no. 78 (2010), doi:10.1186/1471-213X-10-78.
The C. elegans genome—published to universal: Science 282, no. 5396 (1998): 1945–2140.
its one-billionth human base pair: David Dickson and Colin Macilwain, “ ‘It’s a G’: The one-billionth nucleotide,” Nature 402, no. 6760 (1999): 331.
it had sequenced the genome of the fruit fly: Declan Butler, “Venter’s Drosophila ‘success’ set to boost human genome efforts,” Nature 401, no. 6755 (1999): 729–30.
In March 2000, Science published: “The Drosophila genome,” Science 287, no. 5461 (2000): 2105–364.
Of the 289 human genes known to be: David N. Cooper, Human Gene Evolution (Oxford: BIOS Scientific Publishers, 1999), 21.
177 genes: William K. Purves, Life: The Science of Biology (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2001), 262.
“a man like me”: Marsh, William Blake, 56.
“The lesson is that the complexity”: Quote from the director of the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, Gerry Rubin, in Robert Sanders, “UC Berkeley collaboration with Celera Genomics concludes with publication of nearly complete sequence of the genome of the fruit fly,” press release, UC Berkeley, March 24, 2000, http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2000/03/03-24-2000.html.
“between a human and a nematode worm”: The Age of the Genome, BBC Radio 4, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ss2rk.
“Fix this!”: James Shreeve, The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 350.
That initial meeting in Ari Patrinos’s basement: For details of this story see ibid. Also see Venter, Life Decoded, 97.
At 10:19 a.m. on the morning of June 26: “June 2000 White House Event,” Genome.gov, https://www.genome.gov/10001356.
Clinton spoke first, comparing the map: “President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair deliver remarks on human genome milestone,” CNN.com Transcripts, June 26, 2000.
“My greatest success”: Shreeve, Genome War, 360.
Lander recruited yet another team of scientists: McElheny, Drawing the Map of Life, 163.
“In the history of scientific writing since the 1600s”: Eric Lander, author interview, October 2015.
“genome tossed salad”: Shreeve, Genome War, 364.
The Book of Man (in Twenty-Three Volumes)
It encodes about 20,687 genes in total: Details of the Human Genome Project come from “Human genome far more active than thought,” Wellcome Trust, Sanger Institute, September 5, 2012, http://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/press/2012/120905.html; Venter, Life Decoded; and Committee on Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome, Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988), http://www.nap.edu/read/1097/chapter/1.
PART FIVE: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
How nice it would be: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
“So, We’s the Same”
“So, We’s the Same”: Kathryn Stockett, The Help (New York: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 2009), 235.
We got to have a re-vote: “Who is blacker Charles Barkley or Snoop Dogg,” YouTube, January 19, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHfX-11ZHXM.
What have I in common with Jews?: Franz Kafka, The Basic Kafka (New York: Pocket Books, 1979), 259.
This mirror writing can result: Everett Hughes, “The making of a physician: General statement of ideas and problems,” Human Organization 14, no. 4 (1955): 21–25.
“as absurd as defining the organs”: Allen Verhey, Nature and Altering It (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 19.
“Encoded in the DNA sequence are fundamental”: Committee on Mapping and Sequencing, Mapping and Sequencing, 11.
“Had Mr. Darwin or his followers furnished”: Louis Agassiz, “On the origins of species,” American Journal of Science and Arts 30 (1860): 142–54.
In 1848, stone diggers in a limestone quarry: Douglas Palmer, Paul Pettitt, and Paul G. Bahn, Unearthing the Past: The Great Archaeological Discoveries That Have Changed History (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2005), 20.
“an early time in the evolution of man”: Popular Science Monthly 100 (1922).
Allan Wilson began to use genetic tools: Rebecca L. Cann, Mork Stoneking, and Allan C. Wilson, “Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution,” Nature 325 (1987): 31–36.
The genes lodged within mitochondria: See Chuan Ku et al., “Endosymbiotic origin and differential loss of eukaryotic genes,” Nature 524 (2015): 427–32.
First, when Wilson measured the overall diversity: Thomas D. Kocher et al., “Dynamics of mitochondrial DNA evolution in animals: Amplification and sequencing with conserved primers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 86, no. 16 (1989): 6196–200.
By 1991, Wilson could use his method: David M. Irwin, Thomas
D. Kocher, and Allan C. Wilson, “Evolution of the cytochrome-b gene of mammals,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 32, no. 2 (1991): 128–44; Linda Vigilant et al., “African populations and the evolution of human mitochondrial DNA,” Science 253, no. 5027 (1991): 1503–7; and Anna Di Rienzo and Allan C. Wilson, “Branching pattern in the evolutionary tree for human mitochondrial DNA,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 88, no. 5 (1991): 1597–601.
In November 2008, a seminal study: Jun Z. Li et al., “Worldwide human relationships inferred from genome-wide patterns of variation,” Science 319, no. 5866 (2008): 1100–104.
“You get less and less variation”: John Roach, “Massive genetic study supports ‘out of Africa’ theory,” National Geographic News, February 21, 2008.
The oldest human populations: Lev A. Zhivotovsky, Noah A. Rosenberg, and Marcus W. Feldman, “Features of evolution and expansion of modern humans, inferred from genomewide microsatellite markers,” American Journal of Human Genetics 72, no. 5 (2003): 1171–86.
The “youngest” humans: Noah Rosenberg et al., “Genetic structure of human populations,” Science 298, no. 5602 (2002): 2381–85. A map of human migrations can be found in L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman, “The application of molecular genetic approaches to the study of human evolution,” Nature Genetics 33 (2003): 266–75.
It is called the Out of Africa theory: For the origin of humans in Southern Africa, see Brenna M. Henn et al., “Hunter-gatherer genomic diversity suggests a southern African origin for modern humans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 13 (2011): 5154–62. Also see Brenna M. Henn, L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and Marcus W. Feldman, “The great human expansion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 44 (2012): 17758–64.
“Sexual intercourse began”: Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis,” High Windows.
“In terms of modern humans”: Christopher Stringer, “Rethinking ‘out of Africa,’ ” editorial, Edge, November 12, 2011, http://edge.org/conversation/rethinking-out-of-africa.
Others have proposed: H. C. Harpending et al., “Genetic traces of ancient demography,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95 (1998): 1961–67; R. Gonser et al., “Microsatellite mutations and inferences about human demography,” Genetics 154 (2000): 1793–1807; A. M. Bowcock et al., “High resolution of human evolutionary trees with polymorphic microsatellites,” Nature 368 (1994): 455–57; and C. Dib et al., “A comprehensive genetic map of the human genome based on 5,264 microsatellites,” Nature 380 (1996): 152–54.
The most recent estimates suggest that: Anthony P. Polednak, Racial and Ethnic Differences in Disease (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 32–33.
As Marcus Feldman and Richard Lewontin put it: M. W. Feldman and R. C. Lewontin, “Race, ancestry, and medicine,” in Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, ed. B. A. Koenig, S. S. Lee, and S. S. Richardson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008). Also see Li et al., “Worldwide human relationships inferred from genome-wide patterns of variation,” 1100–104.
In his monumental study on human genetics: L. Cavalli-Sforza, Paola Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 19.
“So, we’s the same”: Stockett, Help.
In 1994, the very year: Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, The History and Geography.
a very different kind of book about: Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
“a flame-throwing treatise on class”: “The ‘Bell Curve’ agenda,” New York Times, October 24, 1994.
his 1985 book, Crime and Human Nature: Wilson and Herrnstein. Crime and Human Nature.
In 1904, Charles Spearman, a British statistician: Charles Spearman, “ ‘General Intelligence,’ objectively determined and measured,” American Journal of Psychology 15, no. 2 (1904): 201–92.
Recognizing that this measurement varied with age: The concept of IQ was initially developed by William Stern, the German psychologist.
Developmental psychologists such as Louis Thurstone: Louis Leon Thurstone, “The absolute zero in intelligence measurement,” Psychological Review 35, no. 3 (1928): 175; and L. Thurstone, “Some primary abilities in visual thinking,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1950): 517–21. Also see Howard Gardner and Thomas Hatch, “Educational implications of the theory of multiple intelligences,” Educational Researcher 18, no. 8 (1989): 4–10.
Drawing heavily from an earlier article: Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 284.
In the 1950s, a series of reports: George A. Jervis, “The mental deficiencies,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1953): 25–33. Also see Otis Dudley Duncan, “Is the intelligence of the general population declining?” American Sociological Review 17, no. 4 (1952): 401–7.
They limited the tests to only those administered after 1960: The particular variables assessed by Murray and Herrnstein deserve mention. They wondered whether a deep disenchantment with tests and scores might pervade African-Americans, making them reluctant to engage with IQ tests. But subtle experiments to measure and excise any such “test disengagement” could not erase the 15-point difference. They considered the possibility that the tests were culturally biased (perhaps the most notorious example, borrowed from an SAT examination, asks students to consider the analogy “oarsmen:regatta.” It hardly takes an expert on language and culture to know that most inner-city children, black or white, might have little knowledge of what a regatta is, let alone what an oarsman does in one). Yet even after removing such culture-specific and class-specific items from the tests, Murray and Herrnstein wrote, a difference of 15-odd points remained.
In the 1990s, the psychologist Eric Turkheimer: Eric Turkheimer, “Consensus and controversy about IQ,” Contemporary Psychology 35, no. 5 (1990): 428–30. Also see Eric Turkheimer et al., “Socioeconomic status modifies heritability of IQ in young children,” Psychological Science 14, no. 6 (2003): 623–28.
In a blistering article written: Stephen Jay Gould, “Curve ball,” New Yorker, November 28, 1994, 139–40.
The Harvard historian Orlando Patterson: Orlando Patterson, “For Whom the Bell Curves,” in The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America, ed. Steven Fraser (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
black children do worse at tests: William Wright, Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality (London: Routledge, 2013), 195.
a fact buried so inconspicuously: Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 300–305.
Sandra Scarr and Richard Weinberg in 1976: Sandra Scarr and Richard A. Weinberg, “Intellectual similarities within families of both adopted and biological children,” Intelligence 1, no. 2 (1977): 170–91.
“When nobody read”: Alison Gopnik, “To drug or not to drug,” Slate, February 22, 2010, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/02/to_drug_or_not_to_drug.2.html.
The First Derivative of Identity
For several decades, anthropology has participated: Paul Brodwin, “Genetics, identity, and the anthropology of essentialism,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 323–30.
“Sex is not inherited”: Frederick Augustus Rhodes, The Next Generation (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1915), 74.
“The egg, as far as sex is concerned”: Editorials, Journal of the American Medical Association 41 (1903): 1579.
She termed it the sex chromosome: Nettie Maria Stevens, Studies in Spermatogenesis: A Comparative Study of the Heterochromosomes in Certain Species of Coleoptera, Hemiptera and Lepidoptera, with Especial Reference to Sex Determination (Baltimore: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1906).
“punk meets new romantic”: Kathleen M. Weston, Blue Skies and Bench Space: Adventures in Cancer Research (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2012), “Chapter 8: Walk This Way.”
In 1955, Gerald Swyer, an English endocrinologist: G. I. M. Swyer, “Male pseudohermaphrodit
ism: A hitherto undescribed form,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 4941 (1955): 709.
Page called the gene ZFY: Ansbert Schneider-Gädicke et al., “ZFX has a gene structure similar to ZFY, the putative human sex determinant, and escapes X inactivation,” Cell 57, no. 7 (1989): 1247–58.
intronless gene called SRY: Philippe Berta et al., “Genetic evidence equating SRY and the testis-determining factor,” Nature 348, no. 6300 (1990): 448–50.
the mice developed as anatomically male: Ibid.; John Gubbay et al., “A gene mapping to the sex-determining region of the mouse Y chromosome is a member of a novel family of embryonically expressed genes,” Nature 346 (1990): 245–50; Ralf J. Jäger et al., “A human XY female with a frame shift mutation in the candidate testis-determining gene SRY gene,” Nature 348 (1990): 452–54; Peter Koopman et al., “Expression of a candidate sex-determining gene during mouse testis differentiation,” Nature 348 (1990): 450–52; Peter Koopman et al., “Male development of chromosomally female mice transgenic for SRY gene,” Nature 351 (1991): 117–21; and Andrew H. Sinclair et al., “A gene from the human sex-determining region encodes a protein with homology to a conserved DNA-binding motif,” Nature 346 (1990): 240–44.
“I didn’t fit in well”: “IAmA young woman with Swyer syndrome (also called XY gonadal dysgenesis),” Reddit, 2011, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e792p/iama_young_woman_with_swyer_syndrome_also_called/.
On the morning of May 5, 2004: Details of the story of David Reimer are from John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
Based on Money’s advice, “Brenda”: John Money, A First Person History of Pediatric Psychoendocrinology (Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media, 2002), “Chapter 6: David and Goliath.”
“Gender identity is sufficiently incompletely”: Gerald N. Callahan, Between XX and XY (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009), 129.
“my leather-and-lace look”: J. Michael Bostwick and Kari A. Martin, “A man’s brain in an ambiguous body: A case of mistaken gender identity,” American Journal of Psychiatry 164, no. 10 (2007): 1499–505.
The Gene Page 66