04-01 Families

It is bloody amazing how conscious you become of genetics in a typical family without anyone having any basic training in biology. Ok, we have genes, we have DNA, we have cells, and lots move. And you quickly learn that traits of members of your family are determined by their genes and that genes are passed on from one generation to the other.
It was grade six, and our art teacher suspected I was colour-blind and gave me a test like the one above. If you are normal you see a “74” but I see a “21”.
I remember mother saying, “Oh dear”. Apparently, her father was tested in WW1 and was determined to be colour-blind. And my four brothers were all red-green deficient. We were told that the sons of our daughters would also be colour-blind.
My father had a clothing business, and this made colour-blindness a family disaster. It became necessary for my father to write the colour of each bolt of cloth on the ticket. Tweeds were the worst with all the colours mixed together. And I could never figure out what the colour “heather” really looked like.
Another cute story. As a seven-year old boy my mother bought a wire-haired terrier from a pet store and it just loved chasing cars. I did not have the strength to hold it back when it was on a leash.
Taking the advice of someone who frequented “dog shows”, mother went to a breeder who explained how they had bred that trait out of their animals. The dog was given away and I cried my eyes out. He was hit and killed by a car only a week later.
My aunt had a Chihuahua which she called a “lap-dog”. But the little mutt snarled if you tried to lift her off Aunt’s lap. I loved her humour when she said, “That just brings out the wolf in her personality.”
You learn to take genetics seriously when you realize Great Danes and Chihuahuas come from wolves. It makes the genetic differences in people seem like nothing.
Early in life I realized my father at 6’ 5” was different from his brother who was 6’ 1”. My father lived to age 71 and his brother to age 94. Father’s mother was a big woman and gave birth to a 15-pound child. Her father had weak veins as a man of 6’ 7”. And he passed on this weakness to a lot of his descendants who died young. My uncle was so different because he came from his father’s side of the family.
It is encouraging to study research, to the extent you can understand it, to discover how important the way you take care of yourself counts in terms of how long you live. So many of my friends are outliving their parents because of both modern medicine and a healthier lifestyle. Apparently, it is roughly 20% genetics and 80% environment.
Grandkids tell me that it is no longer cool to smoke. Things like smoking can cause mutations in your cells which is cancer. So many of the old movie stars that got paid for smoking on the screen died of this dreaded disease.
The biggest family experience with genetics was when we adopted our two children. In 1961, the Children’s Aid counsellor told us that human development is mostly a question of the environment in which children are raised. Nurture over nature, was her position. Oh, we were told that the voice-box is inherited.
Over the next twenty years, we realized she was wrong. Our children had all kinds of qualities and abilities that were not identifiable anywhere in our families.
But what was so interesting was coming to the same opinion as later research that both nature and nurture were equally important in development. And that the environment in which a child is raised will act as a kind of multiplier of their genetic qualities.
Our daughter who loved music got lessons and we always went to her concerts. This reinforcement of a child’s natural traits is just something loving families do everywhere without taking a course in biology.
That’s the way I see it anyways