7th Grade Science – Article Abstract 5 – 25 Points

INSTRUCTIONS: Read this article and outline its important points by answering the questions at the bottom.

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The Human Phenome Project - By Olivia Judson, The New York Times, June 8, 2010

In 1884, a man called Francis Galton opened the doors of his “Anthropometric Laboratory.” This was “for the use of those who desire to be accurately measured in many ways, either to obtain timely warning of remediable faults in development, or to learn their powers.” The many ways included height, hand strength, acuity of sight and hearing, lung capacity and the power of a blow with the fist.

Galton was one of Charles Darwin’s cousins. This was no particular distinction: Darwin had many cousins. Indeed, he married one, and was married by one — the vicar who presided at the wedding was a cousin too. But Galton was distinguished in other ways: he was one of the great scientists and polymaths of the 19th century.

Among his achievements: he was the first to make rigorous weather maps, and he discovered the anticyclone. He developed methods to describe and classify fingerprints, and showed that they were a reliable way of telling one person from another. He made major contributions to statistics, discovering the concept of correlation and calculating the first correlation coefficients. (We talk of correlations when disparate phenomena occur together, either because one causes the other — as in smoking and lung cancer — or because both are the result of some other factor. For example, people with red hair tend to have pale skin; both are due to a particular gene involved in pigmentation. Correlation coefficients are a measure of the strength of the association.)

Famously, he made a beauty map of the British Isles — whenever he passed a woman on the street, he graded her beauty and secretly pricked a piece of paper to record it. (According to Galton, the most beautiful women could be found in London, and the ugliest in Aberdeen, a town in northern Scotland.) He published a comment in Nature arguing that you can estimate the level of boredom in an audience based on how often people fidget. And he investigated the power of prayer by looking at the lifespan of monarchs (who are prayed for by their subjects) and clergy (who presumably spend a lot of time praying).

He concluded it wasn’t effective, but admitted it could be consoling.

But above all, he was interested in heredity — or what we would now call genetics. He conducted a study of the inheritance of intelligence, for which he analyzed the pedigrees of eminent Englishmen. (He remarked that if he had had more time, he “should have especially liked to investigate the biographies of Italians and Jews, both of whom appear to be rich in families of high intellectual breeds. Germany and America are also full of interest. It is a little less so with respect to France, where the Revolution and the guillotine made sad havoc among the progeny of her abler races.”)

He was interested in the biology of racial differences. He was the first to describe humans as being the products of the twin forces of “nature and nurture.” And he coined the term “eugenics,” and argued that humans could be improved through selective breeding. The ghastly legacy of these ideas is well known, and continues to reverberate today.

It is easy to imagine that, if Galton were magicked into the present, he would have been fascinated by the human genome project, and anxious to get himself sequenced. And yet, in some ways, his anthropomorphic laboratory, crude though it was, makes as good a symbol for 21st century biology as a gene sequencer does.

Genes are the easy part. Soon, we will all be able to get our genomes fully sequenced: we will be able to look at our genotypes. We may not know what all the genes do — it will still be some time before we have mastered that. But we will know what they are.

The far harder task is to understand how genes interact with the environment to make an actual organism with particular characteristics — that is, the phenotype. The phenotype is what Galton was measuring in his laboratory. And while the human genome project was a challenge for the last century, the human phenome project will be the challenge for this one.

The problem is that where genes are tidy bits of DNA, the environment is huge, amorphous and hard to quantify. It includes what your mother ate for breakfast when she was pregnant with you, the colds you’ve had, and how much you were hugged when you were a baby. Vaccinations, exposure to dirt, whether you sleep in a dark room — these are all part of your environment too. Complicating matters further, in different environments, different sets of genes get switched on and off. Recent experiments looking at fat, sedentary laboratory rats showed that they use a completely different portion of their genome from their thinner, more active counterparts.

Measuring all this sounds impossible. Yet at least two phenomics initiatives are already underway. One is the U.K.’s Biobank project, the other is the Personal Genome Project, led by the latter-day polymath George Church. The aim of both projects is to collect large quantities of information — genetic, phenotypic and environmental — from large numbers of people, in an attempt to understand how genes and environment interact to produce each of us. Biobank, indeed, measures some of the same traits that Galton measured, including lung capacity and the strength of the hand grip. What a shame that Galton did not collect, from each of his several thousand subjects, a lock of hair from which we could now extract DNA.

(Biobank and the Personal Genome Project differ in several important respects. For example, Biobank will link to health records, but aims to keep personal information confidential. The Personal Genome Project aims to recruit individuals willing to make many details of their lives public.)

Yet for all the vastness of their ambition, these new projects have a narrow focus. Their primary, and worthy, aim is to gain a deeper understanding of how our environments interact with genes to causes diseases. But, as Galton well knew, there is more to the human phenotype than that.

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ANSWER THE QUESTIONS BELOW ON A SEPARATE SHEET OF PAPER

1. List the title of the article, the author, where it was published, and the date it was published.

2. What are some of the things that Francis Galton’s “Anthropometric Laboratory” recorded about human bodies?

3. What is one of the things that Francis Galton discovered or achieved?

4. What are “correlations”?

5. What is “eugenics”?

6. What will the “Human Phenome Project” measure about humans?

7. What role does the environment play in your phenotype?

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