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Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

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America's Olympic-Size Gene Pool

By Jonathan Weiner
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2000, at 5:00 PM ET

Natalie,

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Francis Galton did have a few good moments, though. He once argued that the most promising gene pool on the planet was the American melting pot. He didn't call it a gene pool--the word gene wasn't invented yet. He talked about "bits of inheritance." But Galton said America was naturally selecting for all kinds of enterprising people because they were the ones who immigrated; and once they arrived in America they were mixing their bits of inheritance in interesting ways. Wouldn't he be impressed by our monocultural crops of candidates.

As for gene therapy, I'm not a "gene groupie" either, and I don't want to add to either the hype or the scandals surrounding the field at the moment. I'm taking the long view. How many decades will it take before biomedicine can cure diseases by fixing misspellings in the DNA? It won't take as long as it took biologists to get from Mendel's peas to the double helix of DNA--that was almost a century. But it may take more time than seemed likely ten years ago.

Anyone in our generation who's hoping to be transformed into Methuselah will need the patience of Job. Of course, Job wasn't very patient, as I remember.

Gene therapy is likely to improve slowly, bit by bit.

Jonathan