ISSN 2397-9917 ISSN 2397-9917 Issue 3 Issue 13 Summer 2020 Winter 2016-2017 Exploring Human Heredity Exploring Human Heredity The The Galton Review Galton Review www.galtoninstitute.org.uk www.galtoninstitute.org.uk CONTENTS Editorial 3 President of the Galton Institute 4 Galton Institute Annual Conference 5 My Life in Genetics 6 Report on Artemis Trust Grant 2018-19 12 Evolution Evolving Conference 15 BOOK REVIEW Adam Rutherford: How to argue with a racist; history, science, race and reality 18 Front Cover Image: Depositphotos.com Published by: The Galton Institute, 19 Northfields Prospect, London, SW18 1PE Tel: 020 8874 7257 www.galtoninstitute.org.uk General Secretary: Mrs Betty Nixon [email protected] Review Editor: Mr Robert Johnston 2 EDITORIAL On page four you’ll find a short introduction to our new Presi- dent, Professor Turi King, who took over from Professor Ve- ronica van Heyningen in June. Some of you will no doubt remember her from our 2019 Annual Conference and we were delighted when she agreed to take on this role during these challenging times. She has already proposed some innovative changes and we look forward to hearing much more from her in the coming years. On page six we have the latest in our ‘My Life in Genetics’ series and this time it’s the turn of our Librarian, Professor Da- vid Galton. In this, he freely admits to being something of a rebel in his younger years but his career story would be an inspiration to any young geneticist. This issue’s Book Review concerns Adam Rutherford’s How to argue with a racist: history, science, race and reality. I’m sure many of you will have read this and I’d be interested to know if you agree with the opinion of our reviewer, Professor Dallas Swallow. Hopefully I’ll see many of you at next year’s Annual Confer- ence when, with any luck, some degree of normality will have returned. Robert Johnston 3 President of the Galton Institute We are delighted to announce that Professor Turi King be- came the Galton Institute’s new President in June 2020. Turi is Professor of Public Engagement and Reader in Genetics and Archaeology at the University of Leicester. Those who attend- ed our annual conference last October, ‘New Light on Old Brit- ons’, will remember Turi’s insightful talk on how DNA can be used as a ‘window on the past’. This included a fascinating ac- count of her leading role in the identification of King Richard III’s bones, found buried under a car park in Leicester in 2012. (Podcasts featuring interviews with Turi and other speakers at this event are available on our website at http:// www.galtoninstitute.org.uk/podcasts/). 4 Turi is a Canadian who started her career in Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She then joined the University of Leicester to study for an MSc in molecular ge- netics to complement this background, with the aim of applying interdisciplinary approaches to human evolutionary genetics and to answer questions in history and archaeology. For her PhD, she discovered that British men who share a surname are more likely to share sections of Y-chromosome DNA, a novel finding that sparked a huge amount of public and media inter- est. Turi’s research has since centred around combining genetics with forensics, history and archaeology. Throughout her career, Turi has continued to carry out outreach work with schools, so- cieties, museums and the media. For the King Richard III pro- ject, Turi was well placed to both lead the crucial genetic analy- sis of the remains, and also to communicate the results to rela- tives and the public. She has received several accolades and widespread recognition for both her research and her public en- gagement work. We look forward to working with Turi to contin- ue communicating scientific advances in human heredity to a wide range of audiences. Galton Institute Annual Conference Due to the current Covid-19 pandemic we have rescheduled our 2020 annual conference and plan to present this year’s programme in the autumn of 2021. The conference title will be: Genetic studies of populations: Insights into health and social outcomes 5 My Life in Genetics An Interview with Professor David J Galton Librarian of the Galton Institute Who first inspired you to study Genetics? J B S Haldane (1892-1964) was professor of Genetics and Biometry at University College London where I was studying medicine (1955-1964). He gave some of the worst lectures on genetics (or any other subject for that matter) that I ever heard. He stood up, face to the blackboard, completely ignored his undergraduate audience and started to do quite complex mathematics on what I assumed were permutations and com- binations with a stick of chalk on the board. It was all about bean-bag genetics, a conceptual model of genetics which was 6 used by him and Ronald A Fisher to keep coloured beans in bags as a way of tracking Mendelian ratios. A beanbag full of coloured beads would be considered the gene pool for the whole population. I found it quite boring. Professor Haldane ap- pealed to me in other ways. He was an ardent Marxist writing enthusiastically that ‘Marxism is true’ (whilst I was an ardent jun- ior Trotskyite at the time) and he had been on the Editorial Board of the Daily Worker, quite unusual for an ex-Etonian. He also published a wide range of very stimulating essays on scien- tific issues such as biochemistry, genetics, evolution and the origin of life. One relevant to the Galton Institute’s work was his essay on ‘Eugenics and Social Reform’. In it he concluded ‘teach voluntary eugenics by all means; but if you desire to check the increase of any population or section of it, either mas- sacre it, or force upon it the greatest practicable amount of liber- ty, education and wealth’ when they will destroy themselves by excess of luxury and lechery, he seemed to imply. Quite differ- ent from the dictatorial politicians who enforced eugenics by sterilizing everyone with traits they did not approve or forbidding them to reproduce e.g. China’s one-child policy starting in 1979. Another inspiration for me was Professor A E Garrod (1857- 1936). I was appointed as Consultant Physician to St. Bartholo- mew’s Hospital and Senior Lecturer to the Medical School where Garrod did his ground breaking work. It was inspiring stuff and he gave me some ideas on which I could spend the rest of my scientific career. He was especially brilliant by showing that Mendelian rules apply not only to garden peas but to humans as well. He demonstrated that the human disease alkaptonuria was inherited along the lines proposed by Mendel using domi- nant and recessive inheritance and yielded about a 1:3 ratio of affected individuals versus those unaffected in first cousin mar- riages in families where the disease is segregating. He also showed that if he fed about 1 gram of the metabolite homo- 7 gentisic acid to his patients with the disease he could recover almost the same amount excreted in the urine; whereas in controls he recovered none. Homogentisic acid or 2,5dihydroxy phenylacetic acid was made for him by Profes- sor Gowland Hopkins. Garrod wrote that there may be a faulty enzyme at the step catalysed by the enzyme homogentisic acid oxidase to block further metabolism which accounted for the disease. He called it in 1908 ‘an inborn error of metabo- lism’ and included three other diseases albinism, pentosuria and cystinuria in the group. He also wrote in 1908: ‘the liability to develop diabetes or gout is often inherited but the diseases themselves are not inherited...’. This for me was a career defining sentence. Where are the inherited liability factor(s) that predispose to disease and how do they work? Who has been the greatest influence in your work? I won a prize essay competition from the Mental Health Re- search Fund that awarded me a Travelling Fellowship to go to any Academic Department in the world for a year. The con- ventional place for me to go was Professor George Cahill at the Joslin Diabetic Clinic at Harvard USA. But his Laboratory was full for at least another 3 years with visiting Fellows. I had to choose somewhere else. The work of Martin Rodbell at the National Institutes of Health USA appealed to me because he had just found a way of isolating the rat adipose cell from the epididymal fat pad and was writing a series of papers in the Journal of Biochemistry on its properties (sensitivity to in- sulin and other hormones etc.) and he was now up to writing Paper III. This was well before he won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for elucidating the membrane bound G-proteins of the rat adipose cell. His Laboratory had no visiting overseas Fel- lows when I applied so I was spoilt for expert company. 8 His Laboratory was a revelation to me. Coming from London Departments which I found stuffy, rather sanctimonious, and really mean spirited regarding colleagues, Martin Rodbell’s Lab was like stepping into a sunlit world of fresh air. It all seemed so free and easy, everyone was relaxed, Marty (familiarity terms from the start) would be drinking from a can of Coke whilst giving us a seminar, he freely communicated his work and could not keep any data under wraps at the large national Science Meetings at Atlantic City where piracy was rife.