The Olympic Isle on opening night was “full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not”. The lion of the industrial revolution could lie down with the lamb. But beneath the fantasy a sewer ran, diverted but untamed: the spectre of doping. And not just doping, because this is the age of genomics: gene doping.
The man who came to warn of this prospect is himself a Spector: Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and the author of this book. The means by which gene doping might be achieved (no one is sure whether it has yet been, or in practice can be, done) is Spector’s field of expertise: epigenetics. So he has become a media pundit during the Olympics, but his real subject is twins and what they tell us about genes. Identical twins are a unique test of genes in action because, having come from a single fertilised egg, they have identical genomes, all 3bn letters of them. They are clones.
View the original article here: Identically Different: Why You Can Change Your Genes by Tim Spector – review – The Guardian
