Meagre numbers raise genome questions

Journalists believe they do not work to agendas. They will report on therapeutic cloning one day and on its opponents the next, regardless of their own views. Nevertheless, strong agendas do on occasions dominate news coverage. February’s announcement of the human genome sequence is a case in point. On the Sunday before Celera Genomics published its version in Science, and the public consortium’s version appeared in Nature, Robin McKie came out with a vividly clear message in The Observer. ‘Revealed: the secret of human behaviour,’ was the headline to his page one lead story. ‘Environment, not genes, the key to life.’ The article fleshed out those dramatic epigrams. The piece was based on an interview with Celera’s Craig Venter, at a Biovision conference in Lyon, on the imminent revelations. This was a scoop for McKie, because Venter leaked some of the key findings — in particular the recognition that the human genome contains not 80,000 or more genes as previously thought but only 30,000 or so. “The discovery of our meagre gene numbers,” wrote McKie, “reveals that environmental influences are vastly more powerful in shaping the way humans act.” An accompanying editorial emphasised and extended the conclusion. “There simply aren’t enough genes... to have one each for all the characteristics that have been associated with them, from alcoholism to criminality and intelligence.”