Grew up with a grumpy parent? The fear dawns that with every passing year you’re unstoppably trudging towards that testy transformation — your temper shortening in inverse proportion to wrinkles lengthening. With every sarcastic comment muttered to a forgetful waiter, with every “idiot” involuntarily barked at Question Time, the miserable metamorphosis feels pre-ordained. And science seemed to support the idea that resistance was futile against this coming curmudgeonliness. As recently as 2005, an influential paper claimed that 50 per cent of people’s happiness was determined by their genes. Becoming a grumpy git was part of your inheritance.
But if I may momentarily stop swearing at the TV, pause the dour determinism and deliver some good news: we now know that we’re not entirely doomed by our parents’ genes. Not just the doom and gloom DNA, but the genes linked to all manner of dispositions and diseases you’d rather weren’t passed on — like diabetes and heart disease. That’s because the rapid leaps and bounds in genetics in recent years have transformed how we understand the nuanced role that genes play in our health and wellbeing — and it’s all looking a lot less pre-determined.
