DNA- Are we victims of our genetic makeup?

In the late 1980's the Human Genome Project was tasked with cataloging all the genes in the in the human body. It was going to be no small feat.  It was expected that they had to find a gene for each of the more than 100,000 proteins that make up the human body. Then there are the additional 20,000 genes to coordinate the activity in the protein genes. The expectation was that the catalog would contain at least 120,000 genes, thus having a blueprint of the human genome. This would be a revolutionary discovery. Genetic predetermination had become the explanation of choice in everything from medicine, when explaining why one falls ill while others don’t, to sports, when attributing great feats to the lucky inheritance of “good” genes. The results of the Genome Project would pinpoint the exact reason for everything from our health to our behavior.

By 2003 when the results were in, the scientific community was shocked by the findings. Of the 120,000 expected genes, the human genome consisted of only about 25,000. More than 80% of what was thought to be required DNA was missing! The concept of one gene for every protein was disavowed and the complexity of the human body could no longer be explained with a blueprint. Particularly unsettling was the fact that a parallel project found that rodents have roughly the same number of genes as we do.

During the decades that came and went while the decoding took place, the idea of genetic predisposition had become a mantra for society. The belief that some of us simply don’t have the necessary genes to accomplish great things, in matters of health and disease, weight loss, muscle gain, language learning ability or even social skills, was deeply held. Burdened with the “knowledge” that genes not only controlled our lives, but we're not consulted on which genes we get, many of us felt victimized by our heredity and saw little need to fight against our "destiny".

David Baltimore, one of the world’s most renowned geneticists and winner of the Nobel Prize, recognized the need for more information.  He said, “Understanding what does give us our complexity—our enormous behavioral repertoire, ability to produce conscious action, remarkable physical coordination, precisely tuned alterations in response to external variations of the environments, learning, memory, need I go on?—remains a challenge for the future.”

So, our genes don’t bind us to failure or success after all.  “Conscious action” –however it is that we come about it- can propel us into achieving our dreams and desires.  The only thing holding us back is what we have come to “believe” to be true about ourselves; once those beliefs shift, an entire world of previously unattainable possibilities are ours for the choosing.   Therefore, the real question is, how do we change our limiting beliefs?