Skinner – moving beyond genetic determinism

There’s a paradigm in science called genetic determinism and the concept is that the DNA sequence is basically the determinate for everything. It’s like – I’ve heard of ‘your genes determine who you are’. And so this idea is that genetic sequence allows certain genes to get expressed on and off, certain genes get expressed on and off. This changes how the cell functions, tissues function and eventually the biology of the organism. If there’s a mutation in the DNA then essentially you’ll have an abnormal gene expression, abnormal physiology and abnormal biology and this is where we thought most disease came from.  

Today what we’re moving towards is a slightly different concept in that’s where; how epigenetics will actually come into play to regulate how that DNA functions. So it’s not so much the sequence, it’s really the epigenetics will allow us much more elegant control for what genes get turned on and off and then that will actually cause disease, health or whatever. This genetic determinism focus that’s been there for 100 years; it was actually started with Mendel, sort of rediscovery of Mendel in the early 1900’s. And so we’ve been studying it for a long time. It’s been really critical to get us to where we are now, and genetics is absolutely important. But the epigenetics turns out to be a newer paradigm where it comes and works with the genetics in terms of how things work, much more different sort of going forward.