Genetic Testing: Promise and Peril
Ottawa, Ontario, May 5, 2003

Are we too gene focused?

Abby Lippman calls it "geneticization": the tendency to see medical and social issues primarily through the lens of genetics. For Lippman, and others, geneticization is the equivalent of the carpenter who only has a hammer, and for whom everything then begins to look like a nail.

"Let's keep our eyes open and not put on genetic blinders," urges Lippman.

Though an ardent supporter of the overall value of genetic research, Dr. Alex MacKenzie agrees that, "the answer isn't always through the gene". For example, the genetic basis of sickle cell anaemia was identified in the 1950s. However, the first treatment for the disease wasn't introduced until the mid-1990s, and had nothing to do with the genetic discovery.

Alan Bernstein says that the current preoccupation with gene-based solutions is in part a counterbalance to earlier misconceptions. Fifty years ago it was widely believed that schizophrenia was primarily caused by the unhealthy influence of so-called "Freudagenic mothers". It's now known that specific genes play a pivotal role in the onset of this mental disease.

"I think what's happened in the last ten years is, given the power of the new genetic technology, that we've become hypnotised by it. We've become obsessed by it. In some cases we're kind of swinging the pendulum back and correcting the view that genetics has no role in even complex diseases such as schizophrenia," says Alan Bernstein.

Decades from now, Timothy Caulfield believes, we may well look back on our current genomics boom and see it as part of a larger puzzle.

Says Caulfield, "I think that what's going to happen - especially from population studies now taking place in which we're trying to tease out gene-environment interactions - is that we're going to realize how complex these interactions really are."