Monthly Archives: January 2019

Medical, Research, Science

How Do Our Genes Make Us Human?

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

Intro: One thing common to all life on Earth, from bacteria to blue whales to bonobos, is a genetic code contained within strands of DNA. This leads to the perplexing question of how our DNA creates human beings.

LONG sections of genetic code are identical across the entire span of life. About 50 per cent of our own DNA sequence is the same as bananas’, while we share 98 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees. So, what makes us different?

In April 2003, a major milestone in the study of human genetics was reached with the publication of the complete human genome. An enormous collaborative project worked on by scientists in 20 different countries, it may well come to be regarded in the same light as the great scientific landmarks. Principal among these was the work of the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel – often referred to as the “father of genetics” – which he carried out in the 1850s and ‘60s and which first established the rules of heredity, as well as James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 description of the molecular structure of DNA as the now-famous double helix.

Gene Expression

The published genome contains the sequence of some three billion so-called base pairs, which constitute the genetic code in our DNA. The translation of the code made up by these base pairs is used to build up 20 different essential amino acids which, together with other amino acids we get from our food, combine in numerous different ways to form all the different proteins we require in our bodies. Geneticists used to think that the role of DNA was almost entirely concerned with providing a template for the manufacture of these proteins, but the complete genome showed that the sections of DNA which perform this function, our genes, only account for about two per cent of the total.

The function of the remaining 98 per cent, sometimes known as “junk DNA”, is not entirely known, but it has become increasingly apparent that much of it is not junk at all. It plays a role in, among other things, gene expression. This is the actual process by which the information contained in our genes is used to make up all the different tissues and organs in our body, through the process known as cell differentiation. Here, stem cells divide to produce different types of cells, such as liver cells or nerve cells. Unravelling the way in which one type of cell divides to produce a wide variety of different cells has proved to be extremely difficult and is currently one of the principal areas of genetic research.

The basic functioning of DNA in producing amino acids from the genetic code is relatively straightforward: the double-stranded DNA molecule effectively unzips, splitting apart the base pairs and revealing the code that is then copied by single-stranded RNA and used to assemble amino acids. But the control of this process, in which the required genes are activated and those not needed switched off, appears to be extremely complicated. Each advance in our knowledge of gene expression uncovers a whole new level of complexity that has to be unravelled. Beyond that, there is also the equally tricky problem of determining how, during the process of protein folding, the proteins made from genes assume the three-dimensional shape that determines their functions. The potential applications of our advancing knowledge of gene expression and protein folding are wide, not least in increasing our understanding and ability to treat diseases which have a genetic basis, prominent among which are many forms of cancer.

The Difficulties of Cloning

Another landmark in genetic research was achieved in 1996, when the first mammal (known as Dolly the Sheep) was cloned by geneticists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer. This involves the removal of a nucleus containing genetic material from a cell of the animal to be cloned, and its introduction into an egg from which the original nucleus has been removed. The egg is then implanted into a surrogate mother and, in theory at least, will develop into an embryo with DNA identical to the animal from which the nucleus was taken.

Needless to say, if it were as easy as that, cloning would be a common occurrence today. In reality, it has proved much more difficult, in part because of the complications which arise as a consequence of gene expression. In some successful cloning experiments, for instance, the observable traits, or phenotype as it is known, of the cloned offspring are not always the same as those of the original animal. So, despite being genetically identical, the offspring looks different from the parent. In order to produce exact copies of the original, the process of cloning has to solve the complicated issues involved with gene expression, including the role of junk DNA in regulating genes. We are, it appears, a long way from seeking flocks of cloned sheep.

Alternative Theories

In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that gene expression is not controlled solely by DNA but is also influenced by a number of external factors collectively known as epigenetics. This is a new field of scientific research and the details of how it works are disputed, but, in essence, it implies that the environment in which DNA replication occurs during cell division can influence the activity of genes and, in doing so, can have an effect on the resulting phenotype. This is thought to occur at a molecular level, through environmental factors modifying the actions of those proteins that surround strands of DNA and influencing the switching off or activation of genes. These epigenetic modifications do not change the DNA sequence of base pairs, so are not inherited by future generations, even if those generations may then be subjected to the same environmental conditions as the parent, resulting in similar epigenetic modifications.

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Arts, Books, Literature

(Books) Recommended Literary Fiction

SUMMARIES

. The Redeemed by Tim Pears (published by Bloomsbury for £16.99, 400pp)

YOU don’t need to have read the preceding novels in Tim Pear’s acclaimed West Country trilogy to relish this final instalment – but if you haven’t, it will almost certainly send you scuttling to seek them out.

It’s 1916 and taciturn, working-class Leo is with the Royal Navy while Lottie, daughter of a wealthy landowner, is secretly pursuing her dreams of becoming a vet.

As the years roll, the gap widens yet further between these former childhood friends: Leo joins a private salvage operation at Scapa Flow, then returns to the West Country in search of some land to call his own. Lottie, after an abusive encounter with her veterinary mentor, goes it alone, running a practice from a cottage on the estate.

Pears’ style is methodical rather than exciting (although there are some cracking set pieces) but the steadfast rhythms of his prose are an integral part of his Hardy-esque design, which is to honour ideas of continuity, the elemental relationship between man and beast and even the very soil itself. It’s so deeply, pleasurably wholesome it should be prescribed on the NHS.

. Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich (published by Serpent’s Tail for £14.99, 256pp)

THIS second novel from the Ukrainian author of The Natashas isn’t so much a Marmite novel as a Schrodinger’s Cat one, meaning you’ll likely admire it and find it tiresome at the same time. Jana and Zorka are childhood friends in communist Prague during the 1980s; years later they meet again, at a house party in Paris.

Interwoven with their separate experiences of the diaspora is the story of Aimee and Dominique, the former a young medical assistant, the latter an older, depressive actor who, when the novel begins, has taken a fatal overdose.

The novel lurches about like a drunk, sometimes out of focus, sometimes startlingly sharp, as it switches between perspectives, time frames and ideas of reality itself to explore sexual politics and personal identity forged against a background of intense political instability.

Moskovich’s often stunningly beautiful, artfully cinematic style is deliberately divisive, as perhaps befits a novel seeking to replicate the emotional experience of otherness and late 20th-century dislocation. You might find yourself a mite more confounded than you will be intrigued.

. For The Good Times by David Keenan (published by Faber for £12.99, 368pp)

THIS will blast away lingering January cobwebs: a nastily funny, ultra-violent account of Belfast in the 1970s by the author of the acclaimed This Is Memorial Device.

The narrator, Samuel, is an IRA footsoldier with a psychopathic dedication to the cause, which makes him right at home in the febrile atmosphere of the Ardoyne at the height of the Troubles, where men mutilating, torturing and blasting each other to smithereens has become a sort of daily Grand Guignol.

Delivered retrospectively from a Maze prison cell, Samuel’s hyper-adrenalised narrative blends hallucinatory visions, paranoid delirium and graphic descriptions with a Martin McDonagh-style feel for farce, as he repeatedly bungles executions while out on the rampage with his best mate Tommy, a Perry Como aficionado with a fine line in cultural malapropisms.

Samuel’s voice is shockingly alive and entertaining and, as the body count rises to preposterous levels, almost entirely desensitised to the bloody mayhem.

But then, and as Keenan makes grimly clear, for the perpetrators, exceptional violence is never a means to an end but the thing itself.

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Arts, Films, United States

Film Review: Vice (15)

REVIEW

VICE, appropriately named, tells the life story of Dick Cheney, who was Vice President of the United States throughout the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush.

The film, which is written by Adam McKay, makes no secret of his own motivational objective. It stems from a Liberal Agenda, which deserves capitalising given his bias which runs from the first minute of this film to the last.

Whether you buy into McKay’s thesis that Cheney is one of the most manipulative and sinister men on the planet is another question entirely. For pure malignancy, Vice makes the present incumbent of the White House look like Forrest Gump. But it must be said he presents it very entertainingly.

Film critics would have noted that McKay deploys a similar set of idiosyncrasies to those he brought to his examination of the 2008 global financial crisis, The Big Short. He delivers jump-cuts, slow-mo, speed-ups, addresses to the camera, faux-closing credits, and whimsical narration from a character whose intimate link with Cheney is held back, only to be revealed in a late here-I-am kind of flourish.

It’s almost as if the director, and his editor, Hank Corwin, cannot shrug off a cinematic form of attention deficit disorder. It would be wholly wrong to categorise them as one-trick ponies; they have dozens of production tricks.

If the viewer can embrace all that, and its Leftie politics, then Vice is a hoot. It is also quite brilliantly acted. Christian Bale is deservedly the clear favourite to win an Academy Award for his remarkable lead performances. He renders himself almost unrecognisable and nails Cheney’s every mannerism and tic.

Gary Oldman won the Academy Award last year for his role as Winston Churchill, but he didn’t transform himself into Churchill like Bale does Cheney (both physically and temperamentally).

As Cheney’s wife, the terrifyingly ambitious Lynne, Amy Adams also richly deserves her Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

In the years since her breakthrough movie in 2002, Catch Me If You Can, Adams has acquired the acting adroitness in playing Lynne Cheney who is a relentless schemer. Indeed, McKay has said that when he spoke to local folk back in Casper, Wyoming, where Lynne and Dick started out, they told him that whoever she married would have ended up as the most powerful man in the land.

How he became such a powerful man, in the process confounding the famous assertion of one of his predecessors, John Nance Garner, that “the vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit”, is the film’s narrative.

 

IT BEGINS in Casper, where young Dick is a drunken driver and general wastrel until his intended, Lynne, gives him a furious pep talk.

They marry and make their way to Washington, where Cheney finds himself in thrall to another upwardly-mobile politician, Donald Rumsfeld (the suddenly ubiquitous Steve Carell). One of the fascinations of this film is the dynamic between Cheney and Rumsfeld. Gradually, the apprentice becomes the master.

After serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations, both men continue to climb the slippery pole, but it is Cheney, the more shrewder and Machiavellian of the pair, who climbs the highest – with Lynne pushing hard from below. There is a rather ludicrous – if not hilarious – scene in which she almost literally slips into the guise of Lady Macbeth.

Cheney’s appetite for power is gluttonous, yet he is clever and astute enough never to look or give the image of being greedy. When a dim-witted George W. Bush (played by Sam Rockwell, also Oscar-nominated) invites him to become his running mate – “a nothing job,” snorts Lynne – he plays hard to get. He insists he’s happy running an oil company.

Eventually, he says he’ll do it on the proviso that he takes some of the more “mundane” jobs such as running the military. Oh, and foreign policy. McKay’s only concession to Cheney’s humanity is his devotion to his wife and daughters; it causes him genuine angst when his two girls fall out over the sexuality of one of them.

Otherwise, his moral scruples are conspicuous only by their absence. He even has the pretence to turn the 9/11 attacks to his own advantage, and his vested oil interests are not incidental in the subsequent decision to invade Iraq.

McKay’ political bias is adept enough to remind his audience over and over that all this comes from a Leftist standpoint, perhaps as a pre-emptive strike to say: “I know it’s biased, but it’s also true.”

I doubt it will come as no surprise to see liberal Hollywood rise to Vice when the Oscar nominees gather in Hollywood, just as it has been no surprise, since its U.S. release in December, to see the film flop pretty much everywhere but on the East and West coasts.

The question of whether a film will appeal to mainstream America has long been defined by a simple question: will it play in Peoria, Illinois? In this case, the answer is an emphatic no.

Verdict: Left-leaning political bias, but well delivered.

★★★★

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