Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
Hello.
Actually I wondered why I am speaking now and not in 'Science for Life.'
Probably a lot of people still do not consider genetics a science,
but rather something of a witchcraft, with some kind of a fashionable flavour,
performed by not always very honest guys.
And that in a sense, we do have something to do with fortune tellers,
and, you know, fortune tellers, witches, card readers
intimidated people, and people were scared by them,
scared by fairy tales like the Grimm brothers's fairy tales.
Nobody today is scared of these things,
but people need to be scared all the time.
So here we are, geneticists, who are scaring people.
You can say you're intelligent people, you are not scared of genetics, OK?
Try a genetically modified tomato!
Be careful, it contains genes.
As a person, being involved in genetics for more than 20 years,
I can assure you that genetics is simple.
If a child looks like his father, that's because of genetics.
If a child looks like a neighbour, it's the influence of the enviroment.
(Laughter)
It's not a joke.
(Applause)
And clearly, we all are some kind of compromise
between the genes we inherit and the influence of environment.
Actually, the most difficult thing,
and the only difficult thing in genetics
is to distinguish where genes finish and environment starts, or vice versa.
As we learned, God doesn't play dice.
God plays cards.
Our genes are shuffled and dealt like cards.
Sometimes you have a strong hand, and sometimes a poor hand,
meaning you have some mutations.
Diversity of deals, of course, provides diversity in us,
and provides for a diversity of different predispositions,
for example, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases,
cancers, and so on.
Then, in some hands,
you have just one card which spoils that particular deal,
and you cannot basically play anything.
This is what maybe we can call in clinical medical genetics
a delirious mutation.
Such a mutation will, instead of predisposition,
turn into predetermination.
For example, an average woman in Europe
has a 9-10% lifetime risk of acquiring breast cancer.
Unfortunately, a person who is carrying a particular mutation in some gene,
has an 80% risk, and it is almost inescapable.
Even in this relatively small audience,
it's a fair bet to make
that at least one of you here is carrying such a mutation.
But it's not enough that you all are mutants.
Nothing personal, I'm also a mutant. (Laughter)
Our cells are acquiring more and more mutations
during division.
It's just like an imperfect Gutenberg machine:
every time our DNA gets replicated,
it aquires new mutations and carries old mutations,
and it makes all our cells a bit different in the sense of fitness,
in a sense of the universe where they are living, meaning, in us.
And our cells are selfish, they do not very much care about us.
They try to be fit, to get more oxygen from what we breath,
more food from what we eat or more, I don't know what, coffee, wine, whatever.
So fitness of our cells and our body is starting to [differ]
because they have acquired different mutations.
At this point,
a small, evil Charles Darwin starts working within us,
and the [fittest] cells are starting to proliferate with the highest speed.
Which means that our best cells turn into our worst enemy.
Cells proliferating out of control is a cancer.
Clearly, we don't know when we, or if we, already have cancer or not.
We can put the date of our birth
- and nowadays this is more precise,
my grandfather didn't know precisely, he had plus, minus a year -
we probably can put the time of conception,
and we can put the time of diagnosis,
but we cannot say clearly
when one or few of cells accidentally acquired such a mutation
which has already started an avalanche of invisible events leading to a cancer.
Basically, it means that if you or anybody else
is living a long, nice, healthy life,
at the end of the life, you will be rewarded with a cancer.
Cancer is basically inescapable.
Of course, these are the cards
which we are keeping in our hand and which we inherit,
but for those who are familiar with bridge,
we have a partner, a dummy, who puts the cards on the table,
and we can choose to improve our hand; this is enviroment.
The choice of these cards is to choose the precise card fitting our cards;
this is the art of doing.
Some years ago, maybe two years ago,
I was speaking on the radio about cancer and then I got the phone call.
An elderly man said: "Why do companies [deliberately]
put a substance into shampoo which causes a cancer?"
He was looking for a cause of it.
I said: "OK, maybe at first, stop smoking. Stop running the red light.
And then maybe we will come back to your shampoo."
The guy was not lazy, he called me back to the radio in 10 minutes and said:
"You know, we were four people in the cancer ward,
and only three people were smokers.
And you are speaking about smoking, tell me [rather] about the shampoo."
I will not tell you about the shampoo, I will show you some choices.
Of course, I said cancer is inescapable which is not exactly true.
If from childhood you go three times a day to a fast food joint,
eat Tommy's hamburgers,
and then you get hyperhistaminemia or something that sounds equally nice;
before the tender age of 37, no chance for cancer.
23,4% of 8-years-old first grade pupils
are either overweight or obese.
Smart kids: eat fast, die young. (Laughter)
I said [there are] some unlucky people who have this mutation
which basically predetermines them to breast or ovarian cancer.
There are not many things you can do,
but one of the most effective [ways] to avoid or delay it
is risk-reducing surgery, meaning, mastectomy or ovariectomy,
and I'm talking about young, bright, healthy women who go for this surgery.
It may look like a quite difficult choice, but, trust me, it is not,
because in some countries, up to 60% of such affected, healthy women do this.
I said that on average, women in Europe
has a 10%, 9% lifetime risk of getting breast cancer.
This risk can be reduced twofold if you deliver three or more children;
the first before you are 25.
This is a much more difficult choice
because only 8% of the families in Latvia - and something like that in Europe -
have three and more kids.
Actually big pharmas are now thinking
about drugs imitating pregnancy without delivery.
This is not a joke.
There is no such drug yet, but this is considered an option.
Welcome to the brave new world. We're already there.
Now the most difficult choice.
Lung and respiratory cancers are caused only, almost...
- OK, I will be conservative -
smokers-friendly, about 95% are smokers.
So if you don't smoke, or at least you give up smoking,
you reduce your probability of getting lung cancer very [significantly],
but it is a very difficult choice.
During the last 12 months,
only 2.1% of smokers in Europe gave up.
Now, I learned to play cards before I learned to read, that's true.
Which means that you have to estimate in [cold blood]
what you have in your hand:
if you are brave enough, you can apply for genetic tests
- they are quite good, and not so expensive anymore;
they are getting cheaper and cheaper -
then you estimate your chances,
and the important thing is
that you don't drop aces and use false arguments
because card game is a game of cool mind.
Last, but not least:
genetics incline, they do not compel.
The game is in your hands.
Thank you for your time.
(Applause)