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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2024
James Watson, the Nobel laureate, Harvard professor, and head of the Human Genome Project, said to Time Magazine in 1989, “We used to think our fate was in our stars. Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes.”
He was no doubt trying to find a cute way of saying that scholars used to try and predict the future astrologically, but now science is allowing us to do it genetically. But is genetics really like astrology in that way (although presumably more accurate)? Is the future really predictable from genetics? Of course, there are many genetic diseases known in humans – though relatively few of them are fully penetrant, meaning that if the gene is there, so is the disease. But most features of the human genome aren’t like that at all.
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