Where Have all the Answers Gone? - 7 July 2000

A friend who knows me well said the other day: "Well, I suppose there's no doubt what you'll be talking about this week."

Well, after about 30 years he doesn't know me well enough, for until the day itself there's always a doubt in my mind.

But this particular week there was no doubt. I was not going to talk about the genome, the just-discovered code for designing and running a human being.

It is a breathtaking thought which immediately had pundits and health nuts and amateur prophets figuring that pretty soon, in a year or two, or maybe 10, we might know exactly what gene causes every known disease and so presto! we'll know how to cure them all.

I replied to my friend: "Not a hope of talking about that."

I'd been reading one of the New York Times's five full-time medical correspondents for years, the admirable Miss Gina Kollata - their genetic expert. And I'm as much in the dark about her speciality as I ever was, so no thank you.

I think I'd rather talk about the 27 marvellous tall ships on 4 July or the startling sight, the other morning, of a plane in the sky streaming a banner which said: "July 7 - the new Harry Potter novel."

After which - an event almost as astonishing to me as discovering how to put together a human being - it was calculated that about one million children would be begging their parents to wake them at the crack of dawn on the 7th so they could first in line at the bookshop for the next appearance of the most popular child in the history of human fiction.

However, my friend persisted to the extent of saying: "Why not, anyway, give it a shot?"

Alright then: a shot in the dark doesn't take long to fire. And with increasing cheerfulness I thought, after all, the vocabulary of the genome's programming contains only four letters: A, G, C, T - which, as you all know, are named after the chemical units of deoxyribonucleic acid, which most of us slangily call DNA.

Well just as we can't keep on saying deoxyribonucleic acid, we can't spend all our time spelling out the three-letter words that A, G, C, T represent, can we?

Don't forget, though, that those 64 words come in strings of 300 and represent about, oh, 50,000 instructions, otherwise known as genes.

And who receives these instructions? The cells of your body, of course, of which the brain has about a thousand different sorts.

Now that's really the gist of the matter but some people are never satisfied till they've gone beyond the gist to the nub.

That's where I was ready to throw up my hands till I luckily came on two reporters who summed the whole thing up for us.

One is a super smart reporter - Nicholas Wade - and he illustrates for us just how one gene can determine your state of health and/or your behaviour. Listen to this.

There is a microscopic worm used in laboratory experiments - and I hope animal lovers won't mind my mentioning this - it's called a C elegans. It exists in all the soils of the world.

Some colonies of the worm eat, like monks or convicts, in groups. Others eat alone.

Now here's the exciting news, which follows on the word that soon we'll know why, say, a bad cold is caused by one particular slip in our 100 billion nerve cells that are wired, don't forget, with 100 trillion interconnections.

Well back to the roundworm. Mr Wade tells us - or rather some biologist slaving away at the University of California at San Francisco - that both the group feeders and the lonely feeders are controlled by the same gene.

The social boys have the letters TTT whereas the ones who eat alone have GTT. So one single letter out of 50,000 can decide whether you're going to be the Wimbledon champion or a certified public accountant who doesn't actually like the game.

Is everything clear now? If not help is at hand.

When the genome bit came on the evening news for the first time, it was, after all, only one item in a roundup of world news and the Cuban embargo, Governor Bush and the death penalty and the Midwestern howl over the price of gasolene - petrol - still had to be dealt with.

So the anchorman turned to his science reporter and said, like a survivor from the Titanic clutching at a deck chair: "Save me doctor, in 30 seconds can you sum it all up?"

"Well," said the doctor, "well, yes, let me put it this way - my Uncle Morris eats two cheeseburgers every day and has no symptoms of anything wrong. I look at a hamburger - a cheeseburger - and my cholesterol goes through the ceiling."

"Thank you doctor and that's our report on the genome."

So let us descend from the virtual world of perfection to the real, imperfect world we're living in.

There was just published a national survey of the American college population - I should say of the male college population - and it reports the decline or lapsing of an old and great American tradition, which is the desire of young college men in any of their four years at college to get a summer job.

I might have said in my time here half my friends were working their way through college - as janitors in the dormitories, washing dishes, waiting in the dining rooms - very often doing some dull form of clerking at night.

But working your way through college is another thing most conspicuous in a depression and I don't doubt we'll see it again come the next recession.

Even in prosperity though I'd assumed that most college boys, young men, automatically at the end of the spring term looked around for a job.

One of the favourites for healthy, athletically-inclined men was being a lifeguard at the beach - and the definition of a beach on this continent includes within its enormous coastline mountain lakes, swimming holes, outdoor swimming pools, rivers, creeks.

A lifeguard at every public beach in the land was as certain a fixture as a deckchair. The recent survey added to its report that only 34% of college students are looking for jobs while employers beg and pray - actually send out an SOS for lifeguards.

This is as unlikely a story as reporting in England that the local schools, say, can't find 11 boys who want to play cricket.

The survey asked the 60-odd per cent who didn't intend to get a summer job what would they be doing instead. The communal answer? "Hanging out" - Hanging out? Yes at discos, night-clubs, oh, just with the gang.

The report noted that they have this choice mainly because most of their parents are flush with money. They, the young, are the beneficiaries of the longest sustained prosperity in American history.

So where are the employers of all sorts, from hospitals to logging camps, where are they seeking and getting the extra labour they need?

From the incoming population of European refugees and from their children - Finns, Czechs, Kosovans.

I heard a forester say: "The Bulgarians and the Macedonians are fine workmen."

I'd never even thought that in the wake of the dreadful late troubles there were Bulgarian and Macedonian immigrants.

But I can testify at first hand to a fine workman from Kosovo who came here from his country's misery to the land where the streets are paved with gold and immediately went to work to repair a cracked ceiling underneath a leaky roof through which the rains had descended.

The ceiling fell in on him. He was philosophical - he had known worse things.

Along with this shocker survey about summer jobs for youth and their preference - or the preference of 60% - just to "hang out" comes another statistical college survey. A very simple one.

Taking the form of 32 questions about the simplest skeletal facts of American history set down by the choice method - four answers to each question, choose the right one.

Things like: During which war was Abraham Lincoln commander-in-chief: the Revolutionary War, World War II, the Civil War?

Who said speak softly and carry a big stick: Bill Clinton, George III, Teddy Roosevelt?

They were mostly on the order of which king came after George V? And what was the name of the king who burnt the cakes? If the questionnaire had been taking place in England.

Well the result from college seniors, this one, that's to say students in their last - their fourth year of college - 52% right.

On the question of: In the Second War, was Stalin the ally or the enemy of Churchill? half were not sure.

What does all this, any of these continual statistical surveys reveal? The dumbness of American students?

No, it shows the American passion for finding out the truth instead of assuming that you know it.

Apply tests of similar difficulty or ease to your own student population. The results, I'll bet, will astound you.

Down the centuries wise men have always lamented that we think we know what public opinion is but can only guess.

Thus Montaigne called it "unmeasurable." Lord Bryce, the best historian in the American government system, wrote a hundred years ago: "The obvious weakness of government by public opinion is the difficulty of ascertaining it."

Well in 1932 a 30-year-old man born in a small town in the corn country of Iowa said to himself: "If government is supposed to be based on the will of the people somebody ought to find out what that will is."

And he did it, the first man in the world, and by so doing changed, forever, our views of government governing itself, punctured more of our social and collective preconceptions, not with satire - which is after all another form of personal opinion - but with the discovery of a scientific method.

Obviously a man whose story needs a talk to itself. And, pending a catastrophe before next time, and provided the sky doesn't fall in, we'll tell his story.

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