Does the latest research indicate that DNA is our destiny?”
When we become ill, most of us lay the blame at the feet of our ancestors: my heart problem is like dad’s, who had a dicky ticker; I’m likely to get breast cancer because it’s what my grandmother died of. We look upon ourselves in a sense as victims—victims of our genetic history. Nowadays, virtually all of medicine is built upon the notion that the blueprint of our life and health lies in our DNA, the genetic coding that supposedly holds a fixed menu of our potential for health or illness. Medicine has accepted the neo-Darwinist interpretation of health—that each of our cells, equipped with a full pack of genes, mostly lives out a preprogrammed future. In the simplest terms, this means that genetics is destiny or, as Sylvia Plath put it, “Fixed stars govern a life”. Nevertheless, as our cover story this month shows, growing evidence, popularized by the remarkable work of biologist Dr Bruce Lipton, convincingly demonstrates that our genes, far from being a pre-determined destiny, exist
