Butterfield’s depiction of the cultural forces in which the Boskets developed surely tells a good bit about the origins of violent crime in the United States. Because this was his announced purpose, it may seem a quibble to put forward the opinion that the Boskets themselves do not. Although this is not said in the book, they typify a dilemma that law enforcement people and social planners will be facing more and more: to determine if a physiological anomaly has contributed to violent acts and if this anomaly can and should be mitigated pharmaceutically, or perhaps even with genetic manipulations.
The book, on the other hand, implicitly proffers the same strategy that has prevailed throughout much of this century: seek out and correct the relevant environmental problems. Not only are they assumed to be the principal causes, they are alterable; the genetic ones are not. Neither part of this pat analysis is still true. It would be foolish indeed for the government that presides over the highest murder rate in the world to ignore the scientific insights that offer hope in reducing the grim statistics.
In a conversation with a historian, I asked why we always looked to history for help with the world’s bafflements and problems. Without hesitation, she replied, “It’s all we’ve got.” In terms of human behavior, I believe this is no longer true. The historical context is invariably relevant, with nations as well as individuals, but we can no longer feel confident that the past tells the whole story. We now have other places to look for answers. With an extraordinary family like the Boskets, their history may not reveal the cause of their violence but may merely be a symptom of the real cause, their singular biochemistry that is passed down generation after generation in their genes.
More recently, a similar tunnel vision marked a book about the sexual abuse of a retarded girl by a group of affluent high school boys in a New Jersey suburb. What aspects of our culture, what dark side of the American dream, the author asks, does this incident reveal?
While no one would argue that American cultural values might play a role in this incident, to seek the answer only in such environmental factors is ignoring what must be, at least, a major part of the precipitating equation. It might be more astute to reverse the question and ask what positive cultural values, the kind that restrain and forbid such behavior, failed to function in preventing impulses that may well exist in every adolescent male on the planet? With our new knowledge about biochemical elements, it is time to pull the camera back, when giving book-length consideration to alarming and puzzling incidents, and view them in the entire context of human makeup. The social values of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and flaws in the “American dream” are no longer sufficient.
SHORTLY AFTER THE PUBLICATION of All God’s Children, a research paper about mice was published in Nature that may well have said more about the Boskets than the southern tradition of violence and the brutalities of the nation’s prison system. Geneticists discovered that by shutting off a gene responsible for producing nitric oxide, which acts in mice and humans as a neurotransmitter, the mice became murderous. Rigid rules of mouse behavior were viciously broken by the chemically deprived mice. Fights ended with a kill rather than the typical submission of the loser. Female mice not in the mood for love can ordinarily repel with little effort an amorous male; they were now raped mercilessly by the nitric oxide deprived.
This chemical link to behavior took on even greater interest four months later, when the New York Times reported a major discovery: that human hemoglobin, in addition to transporting oxygen to all parts of the body, also transports, of all things, nitric oxide. This was a particularly surprising finding, since hemoglobin had been meticulously studied since the 1930s and was thought to be fully understood. But for all those years no one knew that nitric oxide had been invisibly piggybacking on it.
Early in 1996, scientists working through Duke University discovered that the gas, as a bloodstream stowaway, intrudes on every aspect of human health, including blood pressure, memory, even erections. The Times made no mention of the earlier discovery of the link between nitric-oxide deprivation and violent behavior. Even so, the two discoveries—its ubiquitous presence in the human body and its connection to violence and other behaviors—strongly indicated that it might replace serotonin as the neurotransmitter of the year. It should certainly be the target of vigorous new research.
When nitric oxide’s violence connection was announced in the New York Times at the end of 1995, the usual naysayers were granted their usual space to warn against extrapolating from mice to humans—although the neurobiology of mice and humans has repeatedly been shown to be highly similar. Adding to the gratuitousness of the warnings was that none of the geneticists involved in the study claimed anything more than that the findings suggested possible implications for human behavior. At a time when rape and murder were common occurrences in the United States and domestic violence loomed as routine, I would have thought the discovery that a neurotransmitter has a direct bearing on violence—in mice, baboons, or fruit flies—would have been greeted with the keenest interest, not with the automatic alarms of those who dread biochemical explanations of behavior and fight off any information that narrows the gap between humans and other creatures.
The months following the Maryland conference were a particularly rich period for crime-related research findings. In February 1996 yet another study was released that had important ramifications for the unfolding understanding of the chemical mechanisms underlying behavior. A research project at the University of Pittsburgh proved conclusively what many had suspected for years: A connection existed between high blood levels of lead and hyperactive, antisocial, even criminal, behavior. The main ways lead gets into humans are from flaking pre-1980 paint and antiquated plumbing, both commonplaces of the inner cities. Thus, the link between lead and crime had powerful societal implications. A study group of children, traced from ages seven to eleven, demonstrated that those with high lead levels were far more likely to become troublemakers and criminals.
The lack of nitric oxide that turns mice into killers results from an anomaly in their own genes; the lead contamination comes from the environment. Both problems—one caused endogenously, the other exogenously—are only two of the most recent indications of links between chemical imbalances and criminal behavior. When the back-porch biddies spoke of criminals’ “bad blood” they appear to have been more accurate than they—or any of us—knew.
These chemical links to violent behavior, however, by no means imply that adverse social conditions aren’t still an important, perhaps the most important, cause of crime. Still, if pharmaceutical or other forms of help can be given to those whose dangerous criminality stems from their internal chemistry, even if these individuals represent only a small percentage of the criminal population, our society would be foolhardy indeed to ignore such research because of paranoid fears, so well articulated by the Maryland protesters, of sweeping governmental plots to sedate black youth. We should harness the new scientific knowledge to reduce violence in this country, and perhaps enlist the genetic watchdogs to make sure the capability is not misused.
EIGHTEEN
CONCLUSIONS
BEHAVIORAL GENETICISTS JOKE that people with one child are environmentalists; those with more than one are geneticists. The story implies a self-evident aspect to the inheritance of personality: that children demonstrate temperament and behavioral differences at too young an age to allow environmental explanations. But if all this has always been obvious to parents, it was not just ignored by science for the past fifty years, it was vigorously denied—and still is in some Foucault-besotted corners of academia.
Kenneth Kendler theorizes why many people, including scientists, resist accepting a genetic influence over their actions—for other than the usual political reasons. “They fear,” he said, “that would mean they are not masters of their own ship.” As I hope has been demonstrated in the preceding pages, no such glum conclusion is necessary. The new information asks only that we recognize that the vessel we pr
esume to control has predispositions—has, in fact, a mind of its own. Fortunately, we do too. The fiction of despotic genes usurping our sovereignty over ourselves has by now, I hope, been laid to rest. As far as behavior is concerned, there is no genetic determination, only genetic influence.
Whatever the reasons for resistance to the genes-behavior connection, the preponderance of scientific evidence is at last coming into synch with the evidence of most people’s experience, so that gut hunches are now reinforced by hard data. Yet, the persistence of the environmental thought patterns is discouraging. While genetic explanations are becoming acceptable for temperaments and talents, the tendency toward rigid environmentalism springs back to life when the dialogue shifts to more complex behavioral manifestations—depression and rebelliousness, for instance, and other traits traditionally thought to be products of dynamic mental process. Even now, when these longtime domains of traditional psychology are discussed, the usual suspects are trotted out—rearing, home setting, education, role models, and the rest—with little more than lip service to possible biological contributions—and this is true among educated people and in some alert, up-to-speed journals. The environment-scanning habit goes very deep.
With the critics’ unceasing cries of alarm about the perils of a genes-based view and the impugning of the motives of those who hold it,1 behavioral geneticists are reduced to denying hidden agendas or to demonstrating—as I have tried to do in this book—that the implications are not as dire as the gene police would have us believe. Often lost in the argument are the many benefits that will come from the new understanding of human personality and behavior.
Perhaps the most auspicious benefit is the possibility of interventions and remedies for unwanted psychological conditions that till now have been considered as intractable or reachable only by extended therapy. The pharmaceutical adjustments to chronic chemical imbalances—Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil—have been amazingly successful. While these drugs can be seen as a massive rebellion against genetic influence, they merely adjust neurological abnormalities in which genes often appear to play a part. With the rapid advances in molecular biological knowledge and such landmark research as the Human Genome Project, the direct interventions that have already been successful with physical problems may soon be possible with behavioral problems as well. Scientists are already predicting that as the genetic basis for various forms of addiction, depression, and sexual aberration are pin-pointed and understood, nucleic adjustments might one day become available to whomever wants them.
Potential misuses are, of course, a danger, as was stressed at the Maryland violence conference. Governments could emerge that forced “cures” on its people; this might begin with such clear-cut problems as criminality, but tyrants might push ahead to such “problems” as an unwillingness to be oppressed. They might well see this attitude as a “condition” that needed remedying (as the Russians saw it as mental illness needing hospitalization). Happily, in this country at least, the government has shown a marked reluctance to employ drug therapies that could reduce the pandemic problem of crime. There is less reason to think a future government would be eager to tinker chemically with individual problems that pose no threat to society at large. Even if such gene-happy governments should emerge, evidence abounds that, in this country at least, many influential observers on both sides of the political fence stand ready to pounce at the first sign of overly eager gene manipulators.
The potential is also arriving to address directly through gene therapy not just some mental illnesses but disadvantageous aptitudes as well. Sandra Scarr is just one of many psychologists who foresee the possibility of raising I.Q. at the biochemical level as the genetic pathways to cognitive development become more thoroughly understood. This, she feels, is particularly auspicious in the case of various forms of mental retardation that have not responded to educational treatment. The potential applications for everyone else are no less exciting. We might envision the perfect Christmas gift of the future: fifteen more I.Q. points.
Another benefit to broad acceptance of the genes-behavior dynamic could be greater acceptance of human differences. As more and more people come to accept a biochemical basis for behavioral traits, the result could be an increased tolerance of the foibles of those around us. Although, as Ruth Hubbard and a number of opponents of behavioral genetics correctly point out, establishing a genetic basis for a condition is no guarantee of warm acceptance—as racial minorities and people with physical disabilities know well.
Still, it is not unreasonable to hope that those who sit in judgment of their fellow humans, which means all of us, will eventually make a distinction between a trait that stems from genes rather than one that is a choice. I have seen this work in my own case. I had always had a strong dislike of extremely effeminate men, especially the drag queens currently in fashion. But when I read Chandler Burr’s Atlantic Monthly article “The Biology of Homosexuality” and learned of the hormonal mishaps in the womb that appear to cause femininity in men and masculinity in women, my hostility evaporated. I no longer saw outrageous queens as mincing embarrassments to all gays but rather as a biochemically betrayed group who make the best of the genetic hand they were dealt by being amusing (and looking fabulous).
Genetic awareness, while not ensuring toleration, at least will force the judgmental to find other pretexts for condemnation. In the case of homosexuality, even the most resolute homophobe should recognize that a genetic-biological cause is a sizable distance from morality-freighted environmental explanations, such as children yielding to infantile lusts that more strong-willed types were able to withstand. Perhaps in the coming genetic-awareness utopia, the gay-hater will acknowledge a nucleic basis, not just to gayness, but to his own revulsion at gayness. Such a perception, in turn, might lessen talk about the laws of God and of Nature.
ALWAYS LURKING NEARBY when one discusses applications of genetic knowledge is, of course, the much feared eugenic approach to inherited afflictions. While still a scare term, eugenics is already being practiced in America on a do-it-yourself basis by, among others, the Ashkenazi Jews, who, before marrying, often screen their partner’s DNA for the life-destroying Tay-Sachs disease that plagues their group. If one of the couple has the dreaded gene, they frequently decide against marriage or against having children. But the ethics and morality of lethal diseases are easy. As scientific capability expands to include undesirable personality traits, the ethical dilemmas burgeon.
Within a few years, science will be able to predict in fetuses a high likelihood of such unwanted behavioral traits as depression, addiction, crippling timidity, violence. Although no one envisions forecasts of 100 percent certainty, merely a high probability, a recent poll dramatized the worrying repercussions of even this partial predictability. A group of young couples were asked if, knowing that their fetus has a fifty-fifty chance of becoming an obese adult, they would abort. Over three-quarters said they would. If such thinking is typical, Kate Smith, Gertrude Stein, or Luciano Pavarotti’s chances for survival would have been, well, slim; they might have been sacrifices on the altar of genetic perfection.
This raises a hopeful point about the whole idea of at-home eugenics. Science is now drawing closer to a cure to the genetic anomaly that causes one form of obesity, obviating the abortion temptation. There is no reason for even the most finicky parents to abort a Rosanne or a John Goodman if we have the ability to make them thin later. In the coming years, similar correctives for genetic flaws will surely arrive for many behavior and trait problems. But until such remedies provide easy solutions to grim problems, the predictive potential of genetic screenings of fetuses presents enormous moral dilemmas and are laid out in detail in biogeneticist Philip Kitcher’s book The Lives to Come.
But until the gene-adjusting cures are here, aborting fetuses marked for calamity remains a feasible option. Even for deadly diseases like Tay-Sachs, however, this would be eugenics pure and simple—but they are not the state-imposed eugenics so rig
htly feared by many. On the other hand, few of those for whom the word eugenics means Hitler and state-sanctioned genocide would condemn parents who decide against dedicating their futures to an imbecilic or schizophrenic offspring.
Even before coming close to the inhumanity of the Nazis or the superficiality of the fat-fearing parents, the moral dilemmas are overwhelming. And these will burgeon as science moves beyond the mere ability to predict the high likelihood of a trait to the ability to adjust, even eliminate, it. Would Oscar Wilde have been a great wit without his homosexuality, or Peter the Great the modernizer of Russia without his violent streak?
Brooding about this ability to eliminate flaws, genetic psychiatrists specializing in depression tell a dark joke about Handel’s having written The Messiah in a two-week frenzy of manic elation. Had lithium been around at the time, they say, his symptoms might have been cured. As we approach the capability to edit genes in the womb, the result might be to strip the world of future Handels, Dostoyevskys, and van Goghs in a drive to prevent the birth of flawed humans. Another point in the debates to come would be that having a van Gogh on the planet was great for the rest of us but wasn’t so great for van Gogh. Whose agony is it, anyway?
Books have and will be written about the moral and ethical conundrums that will ensue from the unraveling of human biochemical mysteries. As with any new discoveries, however, it should be kept in mind that knowledge, no matter how frightening, in itself, is neutral. Decisions about the use of knowledge immediately involves values, but society at large, not science alone, will have to grapple with those decisions. Still, with the dawning genetic and molecular biological knowledge, for all the perils and hard choices, few would deny its enormous potential for reducing human misery.
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