Here Is a Human Being Read Online Free Page B

more above the population average, or my lifetime risk was greater than 25 percent. I was beginning to feel nervous despite myself. My palms were sweaty.
    Alzheimer’s was first. This was APOE, the gene Watson and Pinker didn’t want to know. If I had one or two copies of APOE4, I’d be at higher risk. At the time, Navigenics did not test directly for the APOE gene, but rather a marker near it. This was partly for technical reasons and partly because the APOE gene was patented (we’ll revisit this notion). But the marker near it was a nearly perfect proxy for APOE. So did I have one copy of APOE4? Two? I clicked … zero. Navigenics said the average lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s for males was 9 percent, which sounded about right; my risk, given my APOE status, was 5 percent. I felt a palpable sense of relief and a little guilty for allowing myself to feel that. But the fact that I had zero copies of APOE4 meant each of my parents could have no more than one copy. I wanted to call them and tell them, even though that would have been a deterministic thing to do.
    Celiac disease: average risk was 0.06 percent; mine was 0.02 percent. Woo-hoo. Bring on the gluten.
    Colon cancer: average risk was 6 percent; mine was 5 percent.
    Crohn’s disease: average risk 0.58 percent; mine was 0.37 percent. This was based on my genotype at nine different genes.
    Type 2 diabetes: average risk was 25 percent; mine was 32 percent. Whoops—time to lose weight, exercise, and maybe get a glucose-tolerance test. As if I didn’t know.
    Glaucoma: average risk was 1.1 percent; mine was 3.4 percent.
    Graves’ disease: Population risk = 0.55 percent; me = 0.93 percent.
    Myocardial infarction (heart attack): Population risk = 42 percent; me = 38 percent. Wow … it was staggering to think that the average lifetime myocardial infarction risk in males is 42 percent. My paternal grandfather died of a heart attack at age fifty; my dad had one at age sixty, as did my mom’s mother. This was another obvious message that I needed to exercise, watch my diet, control my cholesterol, etc. What a shame: I had so wanted to take up smoking.
    Lupus: Population risk = 0.03 percent; me = 0.01 percent.
    Age-related macular degeneration: Population risk = 3.1 percent; me = 1.1 percent. My grandmother had it. I wondered what that did to my risk.
    Multiple sclerosis: Population risk = 0.30 percent; me = 0.17 percent. But this was based on just three markers. MS risk was mediated by dozens of them.
    Obesity: Population risk = 34 percent; me = 36 percent. Does this genome make me look fat?
    Rheumatoid arthritis: Population risk = 1.1 percent; me = 2.8 percent.
    Restless legs syndrome: Population risk = 4 percent; me = 4.3 percent.
    Psoriasis: Population risk = 4 percent; me = 2.5 percent.
    Prostate cancer: Population risk = 17 percent; me = 12 percent.
    These were interesting numbers, but they didn’t rock my world. By now I had gotten a grip. My biggest concern was about metabolic syndrome,
    basically a group of risk factors for heart disease: obesity, bad lipid numbers, high blood pressure, insulin resistance, etc. Two years earlier I had been in an exercise study because I was already known to be at high risk for this stuff and I had a modest history of diabetes in my family.
    Now I could hear the geneticists saying, “We told you so,” for another reason. Navigenics’ service was fast, efficient, thorough, and impeccably designed and presented. Its explanations of genetics were simple and clear without being condescending. But there’s no way I would have spent $2,500 (the cost in 2008) on it. The problem of course was not that the information was useless; it was that genes told only part of the story of one’s health and so far we were only a few chapters into a very long and complicated tale. Thus, until we started linking environment (as a child did I have lead paint in my house?), phenotype (how much did I weigh?), and lifestyle (what did I have for