UI prof has unique perspective on genome
URBANA – University of Illinois Professor Richard Powers was doing research for his 10th novel when GQ magazine made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Its editors asked him to have his own genome sequenced and analyzed and to write an article about it.
He really didn't want to know his medical future but accepted the assignment; the novel he was working on was about genomics, among other themes.
"It really was serendipity," he said. "I probably wouldn't have done it but I was deep into this novel."
In "Generosity, an Enhancement," published earlier this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a reclusive Chicago art-college teacher of creative nonfiction becomes deeply concerned about a student, Thassa Amzwar, an Algerian refugee, because she seems inordinately happy – even though her father was assassinated as part of the civil unrest in her homeland and her mother later died.
Does Thassa have a genetic predisposition to happiness, or the so-called happiness gene?
A series of events ensue, among them a gene study of Thassa in Boston, that are noisily mediated by the media. Soon all of society wants a piece of the young woman, in one way or another.
As for Powers, 52, he became the ninth person on Earth to have his genetic code sequenced by the Boston-based Knome, the first company to offer complete genome sequencing and analysis services for private individuals.
The cost then was $350,000 per person, but GQ and Knome worked out a deal, with the magazine paying only a fraction of the usual fee. Knome has tagged its service, "Know Thyself."
Powers discovered, among other things, that he has genetic variations that increase his risks for cardiovascular problems, Alzheimer's and obesity. However, the rail-thin writer, whose family nickname for him has been "Stick Man," believes genes don't determine our lives, or medical futures.
"It's not a simple one for one," he said. "The public has this idea it's all determined but it isn't. Some individual gene variants have very specific medical consequences but the effects of most others depend on where, when, how often and how quickly they are turned on and off in the body, and all of that is very much affected by environment."
Powers said "Generosity, an Enhancement," is, in a way, a portrait not so much of the science of genomics but rather of the way the public misunderstands and misinterprets that science.
"It's about a society that thinks it's moving from chance to choice faster than it really is," he said. "Once upon a time the secret of happiness was taking the hand dealt to you and playing the best possible game that you could. Now we might be too inclined to ask for a new deal."
Powers also sees "Generosity" as more of a social satire than a science book. Indeed, it offers up-to-the-moment lucid descriptions about the blogging age and what Powers calls the "runaway collective mind."
"It's not about what the scientists are saying any more. It's about what the bloggers are saying," he said.
And, part of the fun of the novel – considered by Powers as his most accessible – is that readers don't know whether the author invented the narrator (Russell Stone) or the narrator invented the author. This metafictional device has a narrator separate from Stone, who watches him to try to see where his story goes.
"At the end of the book you learn the book is a revision or enhancement of this story behind the story," said Powers, who won a National Book Award for his previous novel, "The Echo Maker."
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