The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  68For speculation on the Jewishness of Miguel de Cervantes, see, for one example: “Is There a Hidden Jewish Meaning in Don Quixote?,” Michael McGaha, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2004, pp. 173–88.

  69On Jewish genetic markers in Spain and Portugal: “The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula,” Susan M. Adams et al., The American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 83, No. 6, December 2008, pp. 725–36.

  70For the Spanish study of BRCA mutations: “Analysis of BRCA1 and BRCA2 Genes in Spanish Breast/Ovarian Cancer Patients: A High Proportion of Mutations Unique to Spain and Evidence of Founder Effects,” Orland Díez et al., Human Mutation, Vol. 22, 2003, pp. 301–12.

  71Superstition in the late Middle Ages and state responses to it are discussed in: Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2002, and A History of the Inquisition of Spain, Henry Charles Lea, Vol. 4, Book 8, Chapter 9, Macmillan, London, 1907 (available at: http://libro.uca.edu/lea4/8lea9.htm).

  73For what the Jehovah’s Witnesses think about Job, Satan, and the problem of human sickness, see: “Does the Devil Make Us Sick?” at http://www.watchtower.org/e/19990901/article_02.htm, and “When Sickness Is No More!” at http://www.watchtower.org/e/200701/article_03.htm. My edition of the tract Shonnie carried, aka the Golden Book, is: What Does the Bible Really Teach?, Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Brooklyn, NY, 2006.

  76For Saint Teresa’s life, I relied heavily on Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul, Cathleen Medwick, Doubleday, New York, 1999. Also of interest are: The Life of Saint Teresa, “Taken from the French of ‘A Carmelite Nun’ by Alice Lady Lovat with a Preface by Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson,” Herbert & Daniel, London, 1912; and the nun’s own account of her life and spiritual development, The Life of Teresa of Jesus: The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila, translated and edited by E. Allison Peers, Image Books (Doubleday), New York, 2004. The “four degrees of prayer,” which Teresa likened to watering a garden, are elaborated in The Life. And no consideration of Spanish Catholic mysticism is complete without Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel de Unamuno, translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch, Dover edition, New York, 1954.

  79For the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ understanding of the soul, see: “Do You Have an Immortal Soul?” at http://www.watchtower.org/e/20070715/article_01.htm. On the body’s immortality: “You Can Live Forever” at http://www.watchtower.org/e/20061001/article_02.htm.

  CHAPTER 5: THE LOST TRIBE

  PHOTO: Iona and Marianne, San Pablo, Colorado.

  90Along with Nostrand, Tushar, Cather, and Hordes, all op. cit., my sources on the Native American habitation and Spanish settlement of New Mexico are: Historia de la Nueva México, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, translated by Gilberto Espinosa, The Quivira Society, Los Angeles, 1933 (excerpts available at http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/exploration/text1/villagra.pdf); My Penitente Land: Reflections on Spanish New Mexico, Fray Angélico Chavez, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1974; Santa Fe: History of an Ancient City, edited by David Grant Noble, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, 1989; When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846, Ramon Gutiérrez, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1991; “Historical Introduction to North American Missions,” John Corrigan, in French and Spanish Missions in North America, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, University of California, 2004 (http://www.ecai.org/na-missions/docs/historicalintroduction.htm); Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, Hampton Sides, Doubleday, New York, 2006.

  90Regarding the genetic admixture understanding of New Mexico college students: Klimentidis et al., op. cit.

  93Josiah Gregg’s commentary on the Spanish conquest is from his book Commerce of the Prairies, Or, The Journal of a Santa Fe Trader, J. & H. G. Langley, New York, 1845, p. 267. Like several other out-of-print books in the public domain, it was accessed online at http://books.google.com.

  96About the blend of Native American and European blood in San Luis Valley Hispanos, see “Admixture in the Hispanics of the San Luis Valley, Colorado, and Its Implications for Complex Trait Gene Mapping,” C. Bonilla et al., American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 68, 2004, pp. 139–63. For evidence of one-sided mating in the DNA of SLV Hispanos: “Mitochondrial Versus Nuclear Admixture Estimates Demonstrate a Past History of Directional Mating,” D. Andrew Merriwether et al., American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 102, 1997, pp. 153–59.

  For the admixture fractions of other Hispanic groups, see: “Genome-Wide Patterns of Population Structure and Admixture among Hispanic/Latino Populations,” Katarzyna Bryc et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107, No. 2, May 2010, pp. 8954–61. Bryc et al. also deal with sex-biased mating, citing the predominantly European Y chromosomes of Hispanic men. Harry Ostrer was senior author on this paper.

  98For the design of the typical New Mexico plaza, see: Mondragon-Valdez, op. cit., p. 10.

  99On the stealing of people versus the stealing of animals: Sides, op. cit, p. 128.

  99Sources on the casta system of colonial Mexico and New Mexico, in addition to Gutiérrez, op. cit., are: “Españoles, Castas, y Labradores: Santa Fe Society in the Eighteenth Century,” Adrian Bustamante, in Noble, 1989, op. cit., pp. 65–77; Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, Ilona Katzew, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004; “Casta Paintings: The Construction and Depiction of Race in Colonial Mexico,” Christa Johanna Olson, posted online at: http://hemi.ps.tsoa.nyu.edu/archive/studentwork/colony/olson/Casta1.htm.

  For a scientific account of assortative mating, see “Ancestry-Related Assortative Mating in Latino Populations,” Neil Risch et al., Genome Biology, 2009, posted online at http://genomebiology.com/2009/10/11/R132.

  100For the 2004 SLV admixture study, see Bonilla et al., op. cit. The incident of a man comparing his Indian slave to a Jew is taken from Gutiérrez, op. cit., p. 195.

  101For the historical work of Fray Angélico Chavez, see Chavez, op. cit.

  102That 90 percent of marriages were intravillage is from Gutiérrez, op. cit., p. 282ff.

  103Here are leading references for four genetic disorders that have been recognized in Hispanos: “Oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy [OPMD] in Hispanic New Mexicans,” M. W. Becher et al., Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 286, No. 19, 2001, pp. 2437–40; “Familial Cavernous Angiomas of the Brain in an Hispanic Family,” I. Mason et al., Neurology, Vol. 38, No. 2, 1988, pp. 324–26; “Genetic Risk for Recombinant 8 Syndrome [San Luis Valley syndrome] and the Transmission Rate of Balanced Inversion 8 in the Hispanic Population of the Southwestern United States,” A. C. Smith et al., American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 41, No. 6, 1987, pp. 1083–1103. The congenital dwarfism syndrome is reported in “5 Birth-Defect Cases Tell a Centuries-Old Tale,” Mindy Sink, The New York Times, April 22, 2003. It has not yet been classified, according to one of the investigators, Dr. Carol Clericuzio of the University of New Mexico.

  103For an overview of breast-cancer incidence in Hispanics, including the contribution of European ancestry to women’s risk, see: “Genetic Ancestry and Risk of Breast Cancer among U.S. Latinas,” Laura Fejerman et al., Cancer Research, Vol. 68, No. 23, December 2008, pp. 9723–28.

  103On the genetics of Zuni cystic fibrosis: “Determination of Cystic Fibrosis Carrier Frequency for Zuni Native Americans of New Mexico,” D. Kessler et al., Clinical Genetics, Vol. 49, No. 2, 1996, pp. 95–97. On the genetics of Zuni kidney disease: “Heritability of Measures of Kidney Disease among Zuni Indians: The Zuni Kidney Project,” Jean W. MacCluer et al., American Journal of Kidney Diseases, Vol. 56, No. 2, 2010, pp. 289–302.

  106Regarding the herbal remedies of the traditional médica, see Tushar, op. c
it., p. 84.

  109Dorothy Martinez Medina died in July 2010, following surgery for advanced stomach cancer. The operation, at University of Colorado Hospital in Denver, was performed without a blood transfusion, per the proscription of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the procedure was said to have been successful. But two weeks later, Dorothy succumbed to pneumonia and heart failure. She had asked not to be kept on life support, another stipulation of the Witnesses.

  During the months before her cancer was discovered, Dorothy treated her stomach pain—thought to be ulcers—with traditional remedies rather than the antibiotics that were (mistakenly) prescribed. Was her stomach cancer related to her BRCA1 mutation? The medical literature suggests that BRCA carriers are at greater risk for cancer in general.

  Dorothy’s sister Bernarda, a breast-cancer survivor, died in July 2011 at the age of ninety-five.

  CHAPTER 6: FROM THE MORADA TO THE KINGDOM HALL

  PHOTOs: Morada, San Francisco, Colorado; San Luis Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, San Pedro, Colorado.

  113On white Americans’ repugnance for Hispanos as a race, see Sides, op. cit., pp. 125–26. The quotation about a mongrel race is from Rocky Mountain Life, or, Startling Scenes and Perilous Adventures in the Far West during an Expedition of Three Years, Rufus B. Sage, Wentworth, Boston, 1857, chapter 2. The depiction of Mexican ladies smoking is from Wah-To-Yah, and the Taos Trail; or Prairie Travel and Scalp Dances, with a look at Los Rancheros from Muleback and the Rocky Mountain Campfire, Lewis H. Garrard, H. W. Derby & Co., Cincinnati, 1850, p. 196. The racial observations of W. H. H. Davis are taken from his El Gringo; or, New Mexico and Her People, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1857, pp. 214ff, 316. Regarding the alleged racial shortcomings of Mexican soldiers: Types of Mankind, or Ethnological Researches, based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History, J. C. Nott, MD, and Geo. R. Gliddon, Lippincott, Grambo & Co., Philadelphia, 1854, pp. 280, 454ff.

  115The quotation by Browne is from his Adventures in the Apache County: A Tour Through Arizona and Sonora, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1869, p. 172.

  As an example of the higher repute that Americans held for the Pueblo Indians, one Thomas James wrote: “I have spoken before, in favorable terms of the Mexican [sic] Indians. They are a nobler race of people than their masters the descendants of the conquerors; more courageous and more generous; more faithful to their word and more ingenious and intellectual than the Spaniards. The men are generally six feet in stature, well formed and of an open, frank, and manly deportment. Their women are very fascinating, and far superior in virtue, as in beauty, to the greater number of the Spanish females.” Source: Three Years Among the Indians and Mexicans, Gen. Thomas James, Printed at the office of the “War Eagle,” Waterloo, IL, 1846. Accessed at: http://www.xmission.com/~drudy/mtman/html/james/jamesint.html.

  116W. H. H. Davis on New Mexicans’ “blind adoration”: op. cit., p. 225. On his hope for their improvement: p. 231.

  116Willa Cather’s comment about the stern religious temperament of the more remote New Mexico villages is from a letter she wrote to The Commonweal, explaining how she came to write her novel. The letter was included in later editions of Death Comes for the Archbishop.

  116In addition to Mondragon-Valdez and Tushar, both op. cit., two good sources for the tangled history of the Sangre de Cristo Grant are: “Memory and Pluralism on a Property Law Frontier,” Gregory Alan Hicks, bepress Legal Series, Working Paper 860, November 14, 2005 (accessible at: http://law.bepress.com/expresso/eps/860), and “Charles Beaubien and Common Use-Rights on the Sangre de Cristo Grant,” Malcolm Ebright, Center for Land Grant Studies, Guadalupita, NM, undated MS.

  117For explications of the penitentes and their moradas, see, in addition to Chavez., op. cit., and Teeuwen, ed., op cit., Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest, Marta Weigle, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1976; and Land of the Penitentes, Land of Tradition, Ruben E. Archuleta, Schuster’s Printing, Pueblo, CO, 2003.

  Details of the restoration of the San Francisco morada were provided by Belinda Zink, project architect for the State Historical Fund, Colorado Historical Society.

  119The report of the parading of flagellants in medieval Valladolid comes from Mulcahy, op. cit., p. 135.

  121About the advent of Protestantism in New Mexico and Culebra: The Protestant Clergy in the Great Plains and Mountain West, 1865–1515, Ferenc Morton Szasz, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1988; Sea la Luz: The Making of Mexican Protestantism in the American Southwest 1829–1900, Juan Francisco Martinez, University of North Texas Press, Denton, TX, 2006; “The History of Costilla County as Revealed by Its Cemeteries,” Hazel Petty, San Luis Valley Genealogical Society, obtained from http://costillacounty.homestead.com.

  122On the development of premillennial Protestantism from the Great Disappointment to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, see: Mankind’s Search for God, Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1990; “The Adventist and Jehovah’s Witness Branch of Protestantism,” Jerry Bergman, America’s Alternative Religions, edited by Timothy Miller, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1995, pp. 33–46; “Millions Now Living Will Never Die,” Iain S. Maclean, Religions of the United States in Practice, edited by Colleen McDannell, Vol. 2, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001, pp. 375–88; When Prophecy Fails, Leon Festinger et al., Martino Fine Books, Eastford, CT, 1956, 2009.

  Jehovah’s Witness publications, including The Watchtower magazine and The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, can be obtained through any Kingdom Hall or by accessing “Watchtower: Official Web Site of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” http://www.watchtower.org.

  CHAPTER 7: THE DNA AGE

  PHOTO: Santo, San Luis, Colorado.

  138My treatment of Tay-Sachs and the effort to combat the disease in the Jewish community drew upon: “Screening and Prevention in Tay-Sachs Disease: Origins, Update, and Impact,” Michael M. Kaback, Advances in Genetics, Vol. 44, 2001, pp. 253–65; “Tay-Sachs Screening in the Jewish Ashkenazi Population: DNA Testing Is the Preferred Procedure,” Gideon Bach et al., American Journal of Medical Genetics, Vol. 99, 2001, pp. 70–75; “A Genetic Profile of Contemporary Jewish Populations,” Harry Ostrer, Nature Reviews/Genetics, Vol. 2, November 2001, pp. 895–96; Jewish Genetic Disorders: A Layman’s Guide, Ernest L. Abel, McFarland & Co., Jefferson, NC, 2001, pp. 126–37; “Using Genetic Tests, Ashkenazi Jews Vanquish a Disease,” Gina Kolata, The New York Times, February 18, 2003; “Ten Years of Progress,” Miriam Colton, Jewish Daily Forward, August 20, 2004; “Tay-Sachs Disease,” J. A. F. Filho and Barbara Shapiro, Archives of Neurology, Vol. 61, 2004, pp. 1466–68. See also the entry on Tay-Sachs in Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, the database maintained by the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/omim/272800). In addition, I interviewed Drs. Michael Kaback, Robert Desnick, and Harry Ostrer about their parts in the TSD screening programs.

  140In addition to my interview with him, my account of Rabbi Ekstein and Dor Yeshorim benefited from: “The Dor Yeshorim Story: Community-Based Carrier Screening for Tay-Sachs Disease,” Josef Ekstein and Howard Katzenstein, Advances in Genetics, Vol. 44, 2001, pp. 298–310; “The Rabbi’s Dilemma,” Alison George, New Scientist, February 14, 2004, pp. 45–47; “Responsibility of Genetic Testing” (letter), Josef Ekstein, Genetics in Medicine, Vol. 6, No. 5, 2004; “Most Studied Yet Least Understood: Perceptions Related to Genetic Risk and Reproductive Genetic Screening in Orthodox Jews,” Ilana S. Mittman, PhD dissertation (Philosophy), Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 2005; “Trailblazer in Genetics for the Jewish World and Beyond,” Yehoshua Leiman, Personal Glimpses, supplement to Hamodia, Pesach 5766 (April 2006), pp. 24–27.

  142That up to half of Ashkenazi Jews carry at lea
st one harmful mutation is from Dr. Carole Oddoux, a colleague of Harry Ostrer’s at NYU School of Medicine. Oddoux offered the estimate at a genetics conference in Israel in 2011.

  As for the race to discover the mutation for familial dysautonomia (FD): In 2001, two reports were published in the same issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics (vol. 68). Making essentially identical claims, the two papers were: “Familial Dysautonomia Is Caused by Mutations of the IKAP Gene,” by Sylvia Anderson et al., and “Tissue-Specific Expression of a Splicing Mutation in the IKBKAP Gene Causes Familial Dysautonomia,” by Susan A. Slaugenhaupt et al. Ekstein and Fordham University researchers authored the former paper, while Ostrer, though not an author, was associated with the Massachusetts General Hospital team that produced the latter paper. A patent battle between the two groups, with control of the FD genetic test at stake, was decided in a 2011 court decision in favor of the Massachusetts General team. (The litigation did not involve Ostrer.)

  145The prominence of Jewish subjects in the genetic literature was examined in “Prevalence of Jews as Subjects in Genetic Research: Figures, Explanation, and Potential Implications,” Daphna Carmeli, American Journal of Medical Genetics, Vol. 130A, No. 1, 2004, pp. 76–83.

  146A good book on the sequencing of the human genome, including explanations of the technology, is: The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World, James Shreeve, Knopf, New York, 2004. See also my own magazine writing on genetics and on the outsized medical hopes for genomics, e.g., “Reading the Language of Our Ancestors,” Discover, February 2002, pp. 70–77; “Bad Genes, Good Drugs,” Discover, April 2002, pp. 52–60; and other articles, accessible at http://jeffwheelwright.com.