Evgeny Ginter: "The genetic passport is a profanity"
Natalia Gurevich, AIF Health, 01.15.2009
Today, anyone can, by paying a certain amount, undergo genetic testing, find out what diseases he has a predisposition to, and get an individual genetic passport.
And along with it – recommendations on how to eat, what medications to take or not to take in order to live happily ever after. It would seem to be a good thing. But not everything is so simple. A number of leading Russian geneticists believe that there may be more harm than good from a genetic passport today.
Among them is the director of the Medical and Genetic Research Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Professor Evgeny Ginter.
– In many European countries, a legislative act has been adopted, according to which all military personnel, as well as law enforcement officers who are at constant risk, must undergo gene testing and obtain DNA passports. Is it justified?– Absolutely.
By the way, if at one time genetic passports had been introduced in our army and law enforcement agencies before the start of the Chechen campaign, we would have been able to avoid a lot of problems associated with the identification of the remains of dead soldiers.
– Do civilian people need to undergo such an examination? For example, in order to learn about the predisposition to hereditary diseases?– A geneticist can assess the risk of developing a disease not specifically for a given person, but the average risk for the entire group of people with certain predisposition genes.
In practice, it looks like this: a person comes to a medical and genetic consultation to find out what is the probability that he will develop a particular disease. And he gets the answer: yes, you will get sick because you have such and such a gene, or, conversely, you will not get sick because you do not have this gene. In either case, it will be completely untrue. In fact, he is just part of a group of people with a certain genotype who may or may not get sick.
I will give one example. There is such a severe rheumatic disease – Bekhterev's disease. It has long been established that almost all patients suffering from this disease have the HLA B-27 antigen. The frequency of Bekhterev's disease is approximately 1 case per 1000 people, and the frequency of the presence of the antigen in the population is 5%. That is, it will be detected in 50 people out of 1000, and Bekhterev's disease will develop only in one. And 49 will not get sick, despite the fact that they are carriers of an antigen predisposing to the development of the disease. This is the case for almost all multifactorial (arising from a combination of hereditary predisposition and the influence of environmental factors) diseases. These include diabetes mellitus, bronchial asthma, coronary heart disease, atherosclerosis, etc.
– So we don't need individual genetic passports, which have been talked about so much lately?– In the form in which they exist today, they are absolutely not needed.
And we don't do that in our center. Now only private commercial structures are doing this all over the world. And to be quite frank, I think there is not a single competent, qualified geneticist in any such structure, and if there is, then he is engaged in profanity.
I will say more, the genetic passport in the form in which it is now issued by commercial structures can cause significant harm. A person is told that he has a predisposition to diabetes mellitus or to coronary heart disease. And what's next? Nothing but banal advice to lead a healthy lifestyle, not to smoke, do physical education, not to eat too fatty food, they will not be able to give him. But these recommendations, known since prehistoric times, are good for anyone, even a hundred percent healthy person. Why intimidate people, drive them into depression?
– Do you reject the very idea of a genetic passport?– No, it's a good idea.
And, most likely, in the future we will come to the point that we will be able to issue truly individual genetic passports to people.
Science does not stand still, technologies aimed at decoding the human genome are constantly being improved. So, the Americans have set themselves the task of creating a real genetic passport, which will cost about $ 1,000 and which will be a decoding of the genome of this particular person.
– And when, in your opinion, will this become possible?– This is not a question of today or even tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow.
Sooner or later we will be able to find out all the genetic patterns, identify all the genes that are responsible for our diseases. But it will not happen as soon as we would like. In the meantime, the tool that is being used now to predict the risk of a particular disease for a particular person is very imperfect. People who do this only make a smart appearance, reducing a serious profession to the level of fortune tellers or astrologers.
By the wayThe human genome was finished decoding in 1993.
It is assumed that each person has from 25 to 30 thousand genes. This is about twice as much as, say, a fruit fly-drosophila. Of these 30 thousand genes, approximately 15 thousand genes have been identified, while the remaining 15 thousand remain unrecognized in the read human genome. The same is the case with genes that cause hereditary diseases.
About five thousand such diseases are known today. Hereditary diseases affect almost all human organs and systems. Another thing is that most of these diseases, fortunately, are extremely rare. Today, progress has been made in the treatment of about 50 different hereditary diseases. One of them is phenylketonuria, a widespread disease for which screening is carried out among newborns in many countries, including Russia.
Genetic testing is often carried out during in vitro fertilization, when at the stage of division of a fertilized egg, without harming the embryo, one of the cells is removed and its analysis is carried out. This is called preimplantation diagnosis. It is also possible to conduct genetic testing during a normal pregnancy starting from the eighth to tenth week (prenatal invasive diagnosis). This method is used if there is a suspicion of a hereditary pathology in the fetus. At the same time, such a study almost does not threaten either the expectant mother or her child.
InterestingIn Europe and in the United States of America, work is in full swing, however, not on humans, but on mice (98% of whose genes coincide with human genes), which aims to consistently study the function of all identified genes.
The work is called "Knockout of all genes". Knockout means turning off a gene, that is, scientists are looking at what happens if you turn off a particular gene.
A little historyThe concept of "genetic passport" is connected with the discovery of the English geneticist Alex Jeffries, who found that some parts of human DNA are absolutely individual.
This phenomenon is called "DNA fingerprinting". As a result, a method of genetic identification by DNA molecules appeared.
Jeffreys soon had the opportunity to test this method in practice. In one of the small towns of England, an underage girl was raped and murdered. After a long search, the police managed to detain the suspect, but he stubbornly denied his involvement in this crime. The Pinkertons decided to turn to Jeffries for help. The analysis carried out by the scientist clearly testified: the detainee is innocent. Then it was decided to undergo a genetic analysis of all the men who lived in the town – fortunately there were not so many of them, about three thousand. The biological material obtained from one of the men absolutely exactly coincided with the biological material of the rapist remaining on the victim's body.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru16.01.2009