Reading and Thinking

Back to work, for now, and chugging away.  But also, at other times reading.
Two interesting articles about what is happening in our times and what is coming soon, are in fairly popular magazines.  The first is an excellent description of the agony of living with chronic, life-long panic and anxiety.  It is the cover story of this month, January/February, 2014, Atlantic.   It is written by the editor of the magazine, Scott Stossel.  He is unflinchingly honest about how anxiety seeps into almost every action in his life.  He talks about the many ways he has tried to cope with it, and how much he still struggles.

For anyone who has  ever had a panic attack I think this would be very helpful reading, unless of course, thinking about anxiety makes you anxious.

Related to that is an article in last week's (January 6, 2014) New Yorker.  It called The Gene Factory, and it is written by Michael Specter. The article is a description of BGI --Beijing Genome Institute, which is a Chinese company that is sequencing the  genes of all sorts of living organisms, from viruses to people with all different kinds of diseases as well as, and this is the new part, personality traits.

The article talks about how China does not have much in the way of what the West considers strict moral or ethical guidelines.  This company is much freer to attempt to find  a genetic basis for cognitive and personality traits that could lead to more desirable citizens. They are gathering the genes of people who test higher on I.Q. tests, or on other tests for creativity.  They are putting down the first steps for something that has been avoided in this country, the quest for designer babies.

On of the frightening differences is that in China it might be the State that is doing the designing more than the parents.  What traits the government may find desirable may be worrisome for the rest of the world.

Of course, China is the country that sends dozens of the children who are projected to grow tallest of to be trained in basketball from a very young age.  The results have not brought many victories.

So many questions about the causes and treatments of human illness, behaviors, and activities rushed through my mind upon reading both of these articles on successive days.  It is clear to me, especially when I deal with people who have always had trouble with such things as panic attacks, that at least part of why it happens to them is that they have some genetic predisposition to be more sensitive and reactive to certain kinds of stimuli, especially social pressures.

But surely, it is much more than that.  Complex behaviors are always the results of complex interactions between a person's physical make-up, the current physical state, their individual history of experiences, which includes their family, their community and their culture.  It is also affected by so many other factors such as nutrition, temperature, stress, interpersonal relationship, past current and projected, and just random events.

Still, with Big Data, and fast gene sequencing machines, as well as comprehensive computerized medical records, academic records, work history, so many trends and interactions and patterns will be found as more people feed all of this data, for millions of people, into machines that compute and compile millions of digits a second.

How much do we want to know about ourselves, our talents our possibilities, positive and negative?  How much would we change?

Of course, we all want to know about everyone else.

In fifteen years some guy will be casting his eye on my granddaughter.  I'm going to want to know who he is.