Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Greg Gibson

2005; Elsevier BV; Volume: 15; Issue: 14 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2005.07.016

1879-0445

Greg Gibson,

Animal Genetics and Reproduction

Greg Gibson grew up in Canberra, Australia, and did his undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Sydney. He moved to Basel, Switzerland, for his PhD on the specificity of homeotic genes in Drosophila, and then to Stanford for post-doctoral research, where his interests turned to the quantitative genetics of development in flies. After a year at Duke University he took up a junior faculty position at the University of Michigan, where he received a David and Lucille Packard Foundation fellowship that was the key to establishing his research program. He moved to the Genetics Department at North Carolina State University, also as an Assistant Professor, in 1998, where he adopted genomics approaches to quantitative evolutionary genetics. Together with Spencer Muse, he wrote ‘A Primer of Genome Science’, published by Sinauer Associates, now in its second edition. He is currently conducting research on association studies and quantitative transcription profiling in relation to morphogenesis and physiology on Drosophila, with a growing interested in canine genomics as well. How did you become interested in genetics? Well, both of my parents were biologists, so naturally I didn’t want to have anything to do with biology in high school. At Sydney Uni, I was studying science and law together, struggling with the mendacity of torts. My father gave me a book on genetics to read. By the time I finished chapter 3 I’d decided to make solving the genetic code my life’s work; then I discovered in chapter 5 that the problem was solved. But I was hooked. If not the genetic code, then what hooked you? Pattern formation. The next year we were introduced to transdetermination — the change in fate of Drosophila imaginal discs from, say, antenna to leg, when you culture them for a long time in larvae. Walter Gehring, who did much of that work, happened to be on a tour of Australia, just at the time his lab was cloning the Drosophila Antennapedia complex. This complex encodes a series of genes that, when mutated, change antenna into leg, for example. He gave a seminar on the homeobox, and it was just amazing to learn that this little bit of a gene holds a key to the evolution and development of the body plan. The next thing you know I was on the plane to Switzerland for a PhD. Who else have been your greatest influences? I’ve been very lucky to have been mentored by a series of extraordinary scientists, who approached science very differently but all respected the essential need for individual exploration. At a critical juncture as a post-doc, while I was deciding, without really realizing it, to switch from developmental to quantitative genetics, I went to a workshop at Stanford. One senior geneticist told me straight up that I was naïve and misguided. Technically he was right, but luckily Andy Clark was also there and he immediately offered support and encouragement. One chance encounter can change the course of a career. What advice would you give young scientists? Be passionate, find your niche, and let the environment around you make you better. I think it is important to work with someone whose work inspires you, but most of the time you are going to be learning more from all of the other colleagues and peers around you. The other important thing is to be open-minded to diverse approaches. For example, coming to North Carolina State University was novel for me, because there is definitely a different atmosphere in land grant universities. After a while, I realized that people working on pigs and maize are asking basically the same questions as Drosophilists and Arabidopsans. Genomics enables us all to talk together now, so there is great potential for cross-fertilization. Hence your new interest in canine genomics? Yes, dogs are obviously a wonderful system for studying developmental and behavioral evolution, but they are also emerging as a very useful model for toxicology and parasitology. For example, one quarter of the world’s population is infected with intestinal hookworms that contribute to enormous loss of human potential, yet they receive little attention, so we have done some work on canine hookworm as a model. What are the big questions all biologists are asking, then? I’m not so sure if we’re really asking them! I guess consciousness and the origin of biological complexity are two areas where we are pretty much clueless. The latter is closest to my research interests: I’m probably best known for my work on canalization, which is the evolution of the buffering of development. When you perturb genetic systems, you don’t just change the mean value of a trait, you also usually increase its variability. I suspect this phenomenon has something to do with the epidemic nature of what we tend to think of as genetic diseases, like diabetes, depression and asthma. In the modern environment we may just be exposing much more ‘cryptic’ genetic variation. Solving this riddle also has implications for understanding how novel biochemical, physiological and developmental genetic networks arise and evolve. These are all genetic questions, what about other sciences? Actually, I think our biggest issues are educational and cultural. If biology is going to be the science of the 21st century, we really have to pay attention to the social upheaval this is feeding. I think people are afraid of genetics at some level, because they do not understand it and it butts up against beliefs and value systems (which is something that I do not understand). Biologists and theologians are going to have to work together to counterbalance the extreme fundamentalist attitudes that threaten pluralism and rationalism. Are you saying that religion is also something that geneticists should be studying? No, not at all. Every individual has to find their own accommodation between their spirituality and their scientific knowledge. For me personally, there is no need for a god, and a secular world view is much richer and more hopeful, but obviously there are millions of Christians and Jews and Hindus and others who have no problem integrating faith into their scientific worldview. The tragedy is that there is a strong echo-chamber out there that equates ‘belief’ in evolution with immorality. I suspect we have ourselves partly to blame, arrogantly proclaiming threatening ideas from selfish genes through sociobiology to social Darwinism as if they are some higher truth. What is the educational challenge then? To help people to understand genetics, which like it or not is going to play a bigger and bigger role in everyone’s lives, without being threatened. Approaching half of all American college students, including probably over a quarter of all biology majors, now regard intelligent design and evolution as equally valid explanations for the origin of life on Earth. Another quarter reject evolution altogether. That isn’t a problem in itself, except that it tends to come with a whole package of anti-intellectual stuff. If the fraction approaches fifty percent, I worry that we will enter a social phase transition that starts to reject rational enquiry itself. I guess we need to stop casting evolution in opposition to religion, and start seeing these as two arms of the quest to understand human nature, working together and building on a common tradition of enquiry.