Bill Harvey: Red rain

I recently came across a new term that I suspect we may hear more of. The term ‘weathering’ has been adopted by many in the scientific community to describe the effect of ongoing external factors during everyday life that influence differences in the expression of certain traits, including disease. This has been on my mind while listening to lectures on global myopia distribution during last weekend’s BCLA conference, while working on this week’s CET on lifestyle impact upon eye disease (page 24), and while reading some of the excellent materials about diabetes just released for Diabetes Week.

The generally held view, that there are separate classes of ethnicity, races if you must, is a simplistic and reductivist view, one that Richard Dawkins wonderfully stated was due to the ‘tyranny of the discontinued mind.’ Human DNA is remarkably constant across the globe, and variations in the sequence of clusters of genes or which genes are activated or dormant is fluid, much more so now than in ancient times when localisation and social constraints supported gene pooling. So, it should not surprise us that there is greater genetic variation among North American white people than between Europeans and Africans.