My Beautiful Genome

by Lone Frank

  “Another thing is that people with greater openness are better at coping with psychological suffering, just as they have a higher survival rate when it comes to physical illnesses,” she adds. I will comfort myself with this finding the next time life takes a dark turn. And when I’m hit by cardiovascular disease because of my unusually low score on agreeableness.

  “But there is more. Over the past few years, there has been an increased focus on a personality type defined by the American psychiatrist Elaine Aron: people who are characterized by sensory processing sensitivity, or highly sensitive people. As may be obvious, they engage in more reflection and with more depth, which can be an advantage in some circumstances. It is not proven but it is a theory that is worth investigating.”

  According to Aron, the highly sensitive are found all over the personality universe of the five factor model. Some are very extroverted, while others are deeply neurotic. Yet, all can be characterized by the way they react to the environment around them. They take a longer time to process information but have more sensibility to detail and subtle distinctions. They have a higher sensitivity to sense impressions, such as loud noises and repulsive smells, and a lower tolerance for stress and unpleasant situations. Aron and her fellow researchers believe that these hypersensitive types could make up as much as a fifth of the population.

  Moos Knudsen explains that she and others are starting to investigate the early life experiences of highly sensitive individuals, including their relationships with their parents, to get a better understanding of how the personality type works. “Some findings actually indicate that, with a good and healthy upbringing, these highly sensitive souls do not just avoid problems but generally do better than anyone else,” she says. This pricks my ears.

  “They turn out to be amazing artists or people who really develop themselves in other ways.”

  She looks at me.

  “Do you think you might like to fill out a couple of questionnaires? They concern sensitivity and the parent—child relationship. You could be one of our first research subjects on the project.”

  Sure – let’s finally get it all out on the table.

  It turns out the study involves about fifty questions, to be answered on a scale from 1 to 7, and it doesn’t take me long. As soon I finish, the completed forms are passed to Cecilie Löe Licht, a young PhD who is responsible for the study. She disappears into an adjoining room and promises to analyze my answers at once.

  I fill the waiting by inviting Moos Knudsen to consider what all our poking around with the genetics of personality will lead to over time. Right now, behavioral genetics still only boasts a small set of circus horses that are, time and again, led by the nose around the ring to perform a variety of tricks. Scientists’ knowledge of this handful of genes is based on relatively few studies, and it has a purely statistical foundation. But will she and her colleagues one day reach a point where they will be able to use a genetic profile to advise individuals on how to conduct their lives? Will they be able to say, for example, that a child should avoid one sort of environment and seek out another?

  At first, Moos Knudsen is hesitant. She wriggles in her chair a bit.

  “A few years ago, I was probably more optimistic about that idea. There are presumably many more variants involved than the ones we study today, and the combination of variants is undoubtedly important. To tease this out would require enormous studies.”

  But they are also about to get underway, I fire back. In Europe, for example, the IMAGEN project gathers researchers scattered across the continent who are following two thousand teenagers over four years. The teens are regularly subjected to brain scans, psychological tests, and questionnaires about their lives and their doings. They are also being tested for a large array of genes. The researchers hope to find some patterns that predict the appearance of psychological and behavioral problems and to head those problems off through a treatment based in biology. “We conduct this study in order to better understand the teenage mind,” says the consortium’s majestic mission statement.

  Moos Knudsen folds her hands on the table. “At a minimum, you can put together a genetic profile that will say something about how a person is equipped for various circumstances,” she acknowledges. “In psychiatry, people are working at full throttle on prevention. And if you can find something that acts as a risk indicator for mental conditions as well as for physical disease, it would be good. Really good.”

  She becomes very quiet and still for a moment, then abruptly leans forward over the table and presses both hands to her temples.

  “I’m constantly surprised, but when I’m out in public lecturing on genetics and personality, there are always people who get angry. ‘I don’t want to be my parents,’ they say. As soon as people hear the word ‘heredity’ or ‘genetic,’ it immediately gets transformed into ‘unchangeable’ somewhere in their mind, and that is not the message at all. A personality is a product of genes and environment, and even though we cannot, of course, freely choose who we are, we still have a certain latitude. Throughout our lives.”

  There is a discreet cough from the door, where Cecilie Licht is waving her analysis of my questionnaire. With a muffled voice, she assures me that I can confidently count myself among the highly sensitive.

  IN THE DAYS after my visit to the grey villa nestled among the concrete behemoths of Copenhagen University Hospital, I digest the information I brought home. At first glance, it looks like a catalogue of unfortunate gene variants. If only I weren’t obliged to take them all.

  I can count the variants on my fingers. There is the COMT gene, where I have a double dose of the “worrier” variant, which inclines my brain to handle emotional strain poorly, and my BDNF variants, which turn up my reaction to stress. A bad combination. On top of that, there are two copies of the less efficient MAOA variant, which disposes a person to aggressive and impulsive behavior – or depression, in the case of women. Finally, I am saddled with two copies of the short SERT variant, which is a notorious guarantor of psychological vulnerability and a tendency to depression. Add it all up and it sounds like the recipe for a walking psychological abrasion. Or as my boyfriend puts it: “It’s remarkable that you haven’t ended up in a closed ward or an early retirement.”

  You have to constantly remind yourself that genetic studies contain a healthy degree of uncertainty and only provide a statistical digest of reality. It is not a given that such findings apply to me particularly or anyone else who goes off and gets a gene test. Nevertheless, it seems pretty plain that I am a pitiful loser in the genetic lottery, one of those people who, due to the malevolence of fate, got an overdose of sensitivity and risk packed into her biology.

  And yet, not. Or, at least, not necessarily. For as Gitte Moos Knudsen indicated, scientists are developing a new way of interpreting the phenomenon of genetic sensitivity.

  In the earlier days of behavioral genetics, there was a blinkered focus on vulnerability, as researchers put a glaring spotlight on those poor wretches who happen to carry an unfortunate genetic burden and then run into a horrible childhood, and thus are inevitably subject to psychological illness throughout their lives. But as Jay Belsky, a child psychologist at London’s Birkbeck College, points out, this does not capture the full scene.

  Belsky argues we should be thinking in terms not of vulnerability but of susceptibility – or, more precisely, of plasticity. When it comes to genes such as SERT and MAOA, variants that heretofore have been characterized as making a person “vulnerable” or “at risk,” need to be considered as making that person (and his or her nervous system) more sensitive and flexible in responding to relevant information from the surrounding environment. This sensitivity, in turn, makes a person more susceptible not just to negative influences but also, and to the same degree, to positive ones – a genetic tendency that is highly plastic rather than one-dimensional.

  The framework of vulnerability and risk has until now been so absolute that otherwise excellent
researchers have missed plasticity when it is found in their own observations. Belsky and his colleagues combed painstakingly through data from well-known studies, including Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt’s Dunedin research, and uncovered something interesting: while it is true enough that the “vulnerable” variants of SERT and MAOA, when combined with child neglect and even violence, increase the risk that a person will end up with depression and behavioral problems, the reverse is also true; as soon as you’re talking about a normal childhood, the carrier of these variants will have fewer depressions and fewer behavioral problems, compared to those with more robust variants. In other words, the sensitive do better than the robust. They get more out of the absence of stress than the robust. They thrive. In almost poetic terms, the psychologist Bruce Ellis and pediatrician Thomas Boyce have described the theory as the difference between “dandelions” and “orchids.” The former are the robust among us, the salt of the earth, those people that carry the species through even in adverse conditions. The latter are those who wither when the gardening is deficient but who blossom wildly and beautifully with the right care.

  So, the question remains: what provides this much-coveted normal or even above-average childhood? As the researchers at Copenhagen University Hospital noted, a close bond between parent and child may have a decisive effect. When you probe the scientific evidence, you can see some of the first indications that this is the case.

  For instance, in 2009 a joint team from Columbia University in New York and the University of Pittsburgh discovered that the quality of parental care directly curbs the effect of the vulnerable – that is, less efficient – variant of the MAOA gene. The study makes for captivating reading. The researchers asked 159 adult women, all of whom were diagnosed with depression or bipolar disorder, to grade their parents on the quality of their parental care. In addition, the women were asked to provide information about early traumatic experiences, such as divorce, death in the family, physical violence, or sexual abuse. They were also evaluated psychiatrically and scored for aggressive and impulsive tendencies. Finally, they were tested for the make-up of their MAOA gene.

  In the study, the researchers showed that those women equipped with vulnerable MAOA variants were the most sensitive to the stressful experiences of childhood. A childhood marked by trauma could make these women more aggressive and impulsive in adulthood than women in the genetically robust group. But they were also the only ones who showed any response to a high degree of parental care; for some of the women, their tendency to develop aggressive and impulsive behavior seemed to be attenuated by positive parenting. Conversely, the genetically robust women, all of whom had highly efficient MAOA variants, gained no special benefit from what they themselves described as good parental care. For them, stressful events led to a relatively high score on aggressive and impulsive behavior regardless of how their parents treated them.

  As I pore over the literature, I’m inspired to call Cecilie Licht to find out more about the project on the highly sensitive personalities among whom I am now enrolled. The young researcher explains that she wants to study how a suite of gene variants influence our personality dimensions and how they work together with the early parent—child relationship. I am reminded of Robert Plomin and his much-touted model, which claims that our childhood home environment plays a negligible role in shaping our personality. But Licht refers to some promising new ideas, including a theory suggested by Jay Belsky that this only applies to the genetically robust among us; the genetically susceptible can be influenced by the environments our parents create.

  How does a scientist go about measuring parental environment, especially decades later? The relationship between parent and offspring is complex, and it seems impossible to boil it down to a simple, fifty-question form. Yet, Licht and her colleagues in this research focus on two general aspects of personality that, they posit, are crucial: the extent to which a child experiences care or rejection; and whether the child feels autonomous, or restricted and overprotected. As Licht herself formulates it: “You can imagine a scale in which cold control lies at one end, and warm freedom at the other.”

  I can’t help but think of Dad. How we banded together over reading and raisins and how we could always talk about everything like adults, even when I was just a kid. Certainly, there was a nice collection of stressful events in my childhood, but there was also an enduring relationship with my father. I could talk about unconditional love and care, but “warm freedom” is actually a very precise way of putting it.

  “How can I lay down the law for you, when you are a far more reasonable person than I am,” he said on one occasion. I was nine then, and there were no prohibitions. No fixed bedtimes, no special times when I had to be home, no forbidden television shows. That sort of thing my father believed his sensible daughter could easily manage. And when my self-management went awry, it was remedied with an ironic finesse.

  Like the time two years later, when I was caught in a minor shoplifting incident with a friend and co-conspirator, and we were held by the shop owner, who wanted our parents called in. Naturally, it was my father we phoned and, of course, he came and retrieved us and talked the furious lady down to earth. When my friend dissolved into tears, convinced that her volatile mother would tear her limb from limb, my father drove her home and talked her mother down to earth, too. In the car along the way, he practised his own form of pedagogy. “Girls, I hope you’ve learned how stupid it is to steal candy bars and funny erasers. If you’d swiped a nice Bang & Olufsen television or a stereo, you could respect that, but this is just embarrassing.”

  My snuffling friend in the back seat just gawked, and once again it was confirmed that my father was the greatest adult in the world. Now, I can only speculate whether he actually saved me from the worst effects of the sensitive genes I inherited from both my parents. Maybe susceptible variants are not the genetic bullets they appear but, in my particular context, a beneficial tool. At one point, Licht says what I am thinking myself: “It’s entirely possible that you did better with your sensitive variants than you would have done with the more robust ones.”

  It is possible, yes, but no one can say so with full confidence. Behavioral genetics can provide some intriguing indicators, but we are still dealing with research that scratches the surface of personality. If we still know so little, what does this information mean for us, here and now?

  “Personal genomics has a long way to go before it will be a significant tool for self-discovery,” says the psychologist Steven Pinker. And, he is right, in the sense that the molecular answers will not surprise us with revelations of traits we didn’t already know about.

  I have lived with myself every single day for over forty years and am not blind to the flaws and tender spots of my character. Stress, for instance. Before I subjected myself to personality testing and genetic analyses, I understood that the way I dealt with stress and strain was not something to be proud of. After more than ten years as a professional journalist, I remain chronically bad at deadlines. While my hardboiled colleagues take them with aplomb, I can freeze when a sudden time pressure arises and, in a few seconds, transform from a seemingly stable adult human being into a hysterical wreck.

  So, what difference would it make to hear about some exotic gene variants that push a bit on the serotonin system? I’m not sure I agree with Pinker on this. Even now – in spite of all the uncertainty and lack of knowledge – it makes a difference to self-discovery; it provides a biological awareness that can very well affect your self-image.

  I dig out an old New York Times clipping I had almost forgotten about but which has acquired new meaning. It is an account of two American sisters, Tichelle and La’Tanya, and how their common starting point led to drastically different destinies. The girls really drew the short straws in the great parent lottery. Their mother was an alcoholic, their father was out of the picture, and their stepfather, who was installed in the household, abused the girls sexually from a very young age
. The girls, in other words, shared a horrendous childhood.

  As a young adult, however, Tichelle seemed to thrive. She completed her education with good marks, and put together a life as a computer operator and as a parent who can be said to be a success, all things considered. Her big sister La’Tanya, on the other hand, struggled. Though she, too, was a mother and had a vocation, as a nursing assistant, from time to time she fell into a deep hole of depression. She experienced anxiety attacks and had difficulty holding onto a job and, more generally, dealing with the challenges of everyday life.

  At one point, the two sisters, at the suggestion of an entrepreneurial reporter, had their genes tested. The hardy Tichelle had two copies of the long SERT variant, while the fragile La’Tanya carried one long and one short version. “I feel a little better that there is a reason, another reason, for my life being hard,” La’Tanya said when she heard the results. “And I understand that what I’m able to do for myself and my kids, even with this, is good. It’s good.”

  No behavioral geneticist would claim that this little variant is itself the decisive cause for the young woman’s situation. But it is probably a piece in the puzzle, and La’Tanya uses this knowledge to forgive herself for the fact that she has to fight hard to, quite simply, feel better. You could say that she leans comfortably on a molecular crutch.

  For me, the question is whether this sort of crutch, in some hands, might not help carry us forward. In other words, whether a person could use genetic insight as a lever with which to change the self. Statistically, we know that personality is quite stable but, as Henrik Skovdahl Hansen indicated, great changes can occur in the individual, if the person is engaged in the process. Then, the statistics may actually mean that either most people do not find it worth the effort to make the attempt, choosing the motto “I’m wonderful the way I am,” or they do not try to change themselves thoroughly enough.