Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Professor Stephen Jones

Thank you. I am not sure that I can live up to that introduction. 

I am extremely proud to be given this honorary degree by the University of Essex - a place I've known since it was founded.  One of my fellow students, when I myself was a student at Edinburgh, is now on the academic staff here; and he put me very firmly in my place this morning. He pointed out something I hadn't known, that, in the new Laura Ashley catalogue my own recent book – this is the commercial break here – In the Blood appears, on a bedside table, on top of a rather fine swatch of expensive material.

Somehow that encapsulates for me what genetics has done; it has reached the bedside tables of the middle classes.  Everybody knows, or thinks they know, the rules of genetics and many people believe great things will come from it. They are both alarmed and excited by what might happen. Well my view, I fear, is rather more sober than that of the interior designers; because genetics is a science.  It is only a science; certainly no less but definitely not more.  My concern with much of the public perception of that endeavour is that people expect more of it than it can possibly deliver. Almost always, the questions they asks of my science are not scientific questions at all.

The book on the bedside table a hundred years ago would not have been the Laura Ashley catalogue, the bible of the bourgeoisie, but the Bible itself. That too - or at least the Old Testament - is a genetics textbook, the first one of all. It is mainly about inheritance and it deals with the kinds of issues with which geneticists are constantly being faced today; queries about sex, about age, about death, about who belongs to a group and who doesn't, who's guilty and who should be forgiven, who's saved and who is damned.  However, the questions asked of science are not scientific questions at all; they don't deserve and they cannot receive scientific answers. To that extent, genetics is simply besides the point.

I spend most of my time trying to put genetics down.  I got into trouble the other day by saying the four letters of the genetic code were in fact not A G C and T but H Y P and E. However, it's worth remembering what genetics can say; and it is quite a lot.  As I say to all my first year students to cheer them up on their first day at University, "Look to the person to the left of you and to the person to the right of you and if you do that two out of every three of you will die for reasons connected with the genes you carry".  Now they all look very depressed by that, but then I point out, equally accurately, that if the left half of the hall were to look at the right half of the hall and imagine themselves back in the days of the nineteenth century, in fact one half would be absent because half of the people in this room would have died, probably in childhood, from some infectious disease or from starvation.

In the modern world, our enemies no longer come from outside, they are no longer microbes, or starvation, or war, in general they come from within.  We suffer from the enemy within which is our own DNA, which is remarkable stuff.  If anybody, consumed by the tedium of my lecture, were to rush across campus into the main road and to be knocked down flat by a speeding bus, the DNA in your own body would stretch to the moon and back eight thousand times and that's a lot of DNA.  However, the number of genes is surprisingly small. It takes about seventy thousand genes to make a human being, which is roughly the same number as it takes to make a C class Mercedes with air conditioning.  So we are a top of the range car, but not much more.

Genetics does tell us remarkable things about ourselves and it will, without doubt, play an important part in understanding disease, longevity, individual risks and the like. On those things it can deliver.  However, we cannot deliver on the expectations of genetics -  genes as fate. One sees all the time claims that people have done terrible acts which they blamed upon the way they were born. Sometimes indeed they have got away with it, particularly in the States, by using genetic arguments to say that they are not responsible for their activities.

In fact, nobody really believes that genetics is a universal alibi, that it explains what we are. The people who believe that everything is in the genes tend to be people, I find, that send their children to private schools. They do not practice what they preach. What is more, few people think through what they mean when they say "it's all in the genes". Take crime and bad behaviour.  Of course, they are in the genes; but that means very little. Geneticists have known that for years.  In fact, the gene for crime, at least for violent crime, was actually discovered about ten years ago.  Its DNA sequence was established and we have it, as do many other laboratories, in our freezers in a small vial of cloudy liquid.  The gene is present in half the population; it is the very important piece of DNA that turns us from being the default state of being female to the unfortunate state of being male. All it does is to make the embryo grow a tiny bit faster and it pushes it down the track of maleness.  Now nearly every violent criminal is male, every male has this gene, therefore, we have the gene for crime.

It is very hard to fault the logic of that argument, stupid though it is, but it illustrates the difficulty of taking a sociological construct such as crime and using scientific language to try and understand it.  So my view on genetics is that it is a fascinating subject, but when it comes to the human questions, it can answer all the questions except the interesting ones.  It is only a science, part of biology, and not a means of salvation.

At the end of this ceremony I've learned one thing from my visit to Essex; that biology is very much alive and well here.  I have not been here for ten years and I am most impressed and delighted to see how active the Biology Department is, both in research and teaching,  I was particularly impressed by some of the almost impenetrable PhD theses titles I saw during this graduation.  When you can't even understand the titles of the theses, you know that it is a high grade university; and one in which my science will, I hope, continue to thrive.

Finally I leave with the thought that as soon as I get back to London, I will rush to Laura Ashley before it closes and try and get a fabric to match this robe.  Thank you.