Going home, genetically

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More than twenty years ago, my then-boss Sharon took a trip to Africa. She took a balloon trip across the Serengeti, and did everything that moderately wealthy people do when they visit Kenya; I think she even stayed at Treetops.

As she showed me the pictures she took there, she said something that echoes in my head to this present day: “It was strange there. It felt familiar. They say our first ancestors came from Africa, and maybe we feel at home there.”

I’ve thought about that statement many times since.

My friend Bill, Irish by descent, spent his honeymoon in Ireland. He visited the Burren in the western part of the country – a strange stark landscape, with limestone moonscapes – which also happened to be the traditional ancestral country of his family. “It was eerie,” he told me. “It was like going home.”

And then there’s me.

Last October Partner and I went to France, and spent four or five days in Normandy. I loved it. It was perfectly wonderful: green fields, grey seashores, tiny fussy villages, narrow streets, ancient farmhouses, medieval ruins.

I felt at home there.

My DNA analysis from 23andme.com tells me that my mother’s DNA stems from Doggerland, a now-submerged country along the North Sea, contiguous with Normandy.

Well, what do you know about that?

My genes felt at home there.

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Atavism

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There’s a tree down the street from our apartment building that I always marvel at. It’s a honey locust, which is common enough around here – they plant it as a shade tree frequently on the East Side of Providence.

But this one – this one! – has huge dangerous-looking thorns sticking out of its trunk!

Partner pointed it out to me several years ago. “What the hell is this thing?” he said.

Well, I looked it up. Honey locusts, which are sweet and gentle as city trees, were originally very nastily thorny. They were bred out of it, but now and then they remember.

This is called “atavism”: the reversion to an earlier or more primitive form.

Partner and I did the 23andMe thing, which told us that we had some Neanderthal DNA (but not very much).

I see, however, that some people on line have lots more than us.

And, on a daily basis, I see a world full of short stocky people with pronounced brow ridges.

Atavism.

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Glaucoma and marijuana

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I’ve told you recently that I have been getting loads of genetic information from 23andme.com. Among other things, I have learned that I have a significantly enhanced chance of developing something called “exfoliative glaucoma.”

 

 

I have read several descriptions of this interesting condition. As I understand it, little particles of dead tissues (often described as “dandruff-like”) begin to accumulate within the eyeball. (Actually they accumulate within the “trabecular network,” but let’s not get too technical.) At any rate, your eyeballs turn into miniature snowflake paperweights, full of inert whitish material. This increases the fluid pressure within your eyeballs, and – presto! – glaucoma.

 

 

The average chance for developing this charming disease is 0.7 percent. Mine is 2.2 percent. Not huge, but more than triple the average.

 

 

This is interesting. There’s no glaucoma in my family that I know of, but we seem to be capable of generating nasty little mutations of our own, so I’m sure the folks at 23andMe.com are not making this stuff up.

 

 

So what’s to be done?

 

 

Glaucoma is treatable. There are eyedrops, and laser surgery, and other things.

 

 

Also there is always medical marijuana.

 

 

One of the first uses of medical marijuana was to reduce the fluid pressure in the eyeballs of glaucoma patients. It’s not the most highly-recommended treatment – damn medical research! – but it’s still used in many cases.

 

 

And medical marijuana gives you the nicest giggly feeling, and the most tremendous appetite.

 

 

Ah well. There are much worse things than glaucoma.

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Neustria

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When we were in Caen in October, I saw a little place across from our hotel window: Pizzeria la Neustrie.

 

 

Neustria? It rang a faint bell.

 

 

I looked it up. Neustria was an area in northern France, back in the late Dark Ages. It was, in fact, most of the northwest  of France.

 

 

I like thinking of this, even though it’s the memory of a pretty barbaric time. I’ve read Gregory of Tours, and I know that modern France and Germany were a patchwork of principalities and kingdoms in those days, full of petty tyrants and evil queens and benevolent squires. If you didn’t like the area, or the local king or queen, you just put your things in a cart, and rode down the lane a few miles, and you were in someone else’s kingdom.

 

 

Of course, this assumes that you were able to leave your home. Most people weren’t. Most people were desperately poor, and unable to leave their homes, even if the local queen was drinking out of a human skull (as I seem to recall Gregory of Tours recounting).

 

 

But what’s all this? It’s fifteen hundred years later, and everything seemed quiet and charming when we were there, in Caen and Bayeux and Honfleur and Paris.

 

 

And, too, 23andme.com has identified that part of my ancestry comes from Doggerland, which is the land around the English Channel. Which is to say: Neustria.

 

 

I am a Neustrian (partly). And proud of it.

 

 

Bring me a drink in a human skull.

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Jewish after all!

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23andMe.com, the genome-reading company, let me know recently that one-tenth of one percent of my DNA was (maybe) of Ashkenazi Jewish origin.

 

 

Aha! I knew it!

 

 

I looked through my list of “relatives” (people with snippets of the same DNA) on 23andMe.com, found a few who self-identified as Jewish, and wrote to them to see if they’d be willing to share DNA results. One, a guy my age in upstate New York, wrote back; he was skeptical, but promised me that he’d check.

 

 

Well, guess what? He and I share a snippet of DNA. And the same snippet of DNA is shared by almost all of his relations.

 

 

Aha! Aha!

 

 

What this means is that some ancestor of mine, at some point many generations ago, was Jewish.

 

 

I’m delighted. I know this is silly, but I can’t help it.

 

 

I grew up in a rural area of the Pacific Northwest. In my (very large) high school, in the early 1970s, there were exactly two Jewish students. (I remember a note in the school paper in my high-school years: “Merry Christmas to everyone, and Happy Hanukkah to Isaac and Rebekah Birnbaum.”)

 

 

As a result, I knew next to nothing of Judaism, until I read Leo Rosten’s “The Joys of Yiddish” in high school. I discovered a whole world that lay beyond the rural Pacific Northwest: urban, civilized, European, witty.

 

 

I kept reading: Rosten’s “Hyman Kaplan” stories, and Harry Golden’s essays from North Carolina, and everything Isaac Asimov ever wrote, including his Bible-commentary books.

 

 

I loved it all. I didn’t quite understand all of it, but I loved the feeling of it, and I wanted to share it.

 

 

Then, one evening, while helping my mother do the dishes (she washed, I dried), I said, “I wish I were Jewish.”

 

 

And, good Polish/Italian Catholic/nonobservant girl that she was, she blew her top at me.

 

 

Well, of course it was a stupid thing for me to say; you can’t be something that you’re not.

 

 

But it was interesting that my mother was really that furious at me. (The Poles, you know, are famous anti-Semites. Go read Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” for more information on this topic.)

 

 

And now – what do you know? I’m one-tenth of one percent Jewish after all!

 

 

And (assuming it came through my eastern European ancestry) so was my anti-Semitic mother!

 

 

To the world at large: Shabbat shalom!

 

 

And maybe also mazel tov!

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The ACHOO gene

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Years ago, my mother used to hang her laundry out on the line in our backyard to dry. She wore sunglasses, even in the weak Northwest sunlight, because the sunlight made her sneeze.

 

 

It makes me sneeze too. Not every time, but often.

 

 

This is the “photic sneeze reflex.” It has a couple of other names, including (seriously) the Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst reflex (ACHOO!), as well as the Peroutka Sneeze Reflex.

 

 

Why? I’ve read many explanations over the years. First, it was said that blue-eyed people were prone to this, because (somehow) our pale irises let more light into the eyeball, which was somehow irritating. Well, I’m blue-eyed, so fine. But my mother was brown-eyed. So let’s try again.

 

 

How about this one? When you look into bright light, your pupils contract very suddenly. The muscles which control this don’t usually work that fast or that hard, and they twitch. This feels like a tickle inside your nose, and – achoo!

 

 

This theory doesn’t hold up experimentally either, apparently.

 

 

The reflex appears to be genetic. 23andMe, the genetic-assay project which both Partner and I joined recently, tests for this, and - guess what? - I have the gene.

 

 

So it's genetic. So what?

 

 

What else can you think of that's genetic and caused by sudden exposure to light?

 

 

How about epilepsy?

 

 

(And this, brothers and sisters, is what genetic research is all about.)

 

 

(And - you see? - I'm a mutant after all.)

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23andMe.com

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A year or more ago, Partner and I bought into a very bad gene-testing thing, which told us (ridiculously) that we were both of Iraqi origin. It turned out that the test was the same one that the FBI uses: it’s very good for identification, but it doesn’t really give you any information on heritage, or disease, or anything else.

 

 

Well, okay. I only paid about $40 for testing for the two of us, so I got what I paid for.

 

 

Now: behold! The much more reputable 23andMe.com is offering its much more comprehensive testing for only $99 per person! They give you info on your heritage, and your Neanderthal inheritance, and your likelihood to develop genetic conditions. They are very thorough.

 

 

For Xmas, I bought lifetime memberships for both myself and Partner.

 

 

Well, my results have come in. I can summarize them as follows:

 

 

1)    I have DNA.

2)    It appears to be human.

 

 

I have no genetic predisposition toward either Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease. This lowers my chances of contracting either, although nothing is certain.

 

 

I have a heightened susceptibility toward several cancers, including melanoma, prostate cancer, and especially stomach cancer. (There’s lots of cancer in my family, but none of these three. I am fascinated by this. There are risk factors that I can avoid for all three, and I need to think about this.)

 

 

I am genetically sensitive to the medication Coumadin / Warfarin, which is a commonly-prescribed blood thinner, which means that a regular dose would be too much for me, and I should be prescribed a lower dose. (I should tell my doctor. But will he listen, or just smile and pretend to listen?)

 

 

I have a three-times heightened likelihood to develop an especially nasty kind of glaucoma. Uh-oh. I’ve always had vision problems.

 

 

I am slightly taste-blind, especially toward bitter tastes. This is exactly correct. I love bitter flavors, and this is probably because I can’t taste them very well. People with “supertaste” can’t stand bitter tastes; they spit them out immediately.

 

 

I probably have blue eyes, moderately straight hair with a wave, B-positive blood, and I do not tend toward male pattern baldness. Correct, correct, correct, and correct.

 

 

They’ve churned up my national heritage too. I have a lot of northern European ancestry (my mitochondrial DNA hails from Doggerland, a place submerged beneath the North Sea, halfway between England and the Netherlands). I have a drop of Italian (not much), and lots of crazy eastern European (Czech, Hungarian, Russian, “Balkan”), and a surprising amount of Scandinavian.

 

 

Also I share tiny bits of other lineages. A tenth of a percent of something that might be Ashkenazi Jewish. A tenth of a percent of something that might be sub-Saharan African.

 

 

Gandhari says in the Mahabharata: Origins are obscure.

 

 

But sometimes we learn things about our origins, and they become a little clearer.

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