With the leisure of a Sunday, I
dabbled, reading in this and that.
An old New York Review of Books (13 Aug 2009) yielded an article
by the ever-interesting Freeman Dyson, which contained this odd glimpse into his
family life:
Last year I received as a Christmas present, a “Portable Genome Chest”, a compact
disc containing a substantial amount of information about my genome.
Initially that reminded me merely of my
puppy-eager ophthalmologist, whom I visit once a year, that he may check for
diabetogenic retinopathy (so far:
clean slate), and who beamingly gifted me with a CD containing a
detailed rotatable enlargeable image of an enormous and bloody-looking eyeball,
allegedly my own. He burbled
on about the wonders I could do with this, once I learn the software; and I had not the heart to inform him
that I was about as likely ever to look at the thing, as fondly to go over (on wintry evenings)
old videos of my colonoscopy.
But he went on:
My children and
grandchildren, and our spouses, got their compact discs too. By comparing our genomes, we can
measure quantitatively how much
each grandchild inherited from each grandparent. .. I consider it a cause for celebration that personal genetic information is
now widely distributed at a price
that ordinary citizens can afford.
Well, make of that what you
will. -- I would not have
given it another thought, save that, not an hour later, finishing Arthur
Koestler’s intensely interesting novel, I happened upon this passage:
“The next step
will be the compiling of a card-index for the whole nation, in which each
family will be registered with the chief traits of its heredity -- a kind of
Domesday Book of the national protoplasma.”
-- Arthur Koestler, Arrival and
Departure (1943), p. 137
Freeman Dyson is a notably decent
and gracious man; the character
uttering the above in the novel is
a Nazi. Make of it … what
you will.
Sileo.
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