Die Medien berichten in regelmaessigen Abstaenden von Forschungen, die bald diese oder jene Krankheit durch Gentechnik abschaffen soll. Es ist immer nur noch eine Frage von wenigen Jahren. Tatsaechliche Resultate gibt es jedoch fast keine. Dagegen wird ueber die Rolle von Ernaehrung und Umwelteinfluessen bei den Krankheiten der Industriegesellschaften kaum berichtet.
Ich zitiere einige Stellen aus dem folgenden Bericht, der sich mit den Problemen der Genforschung beschaeftigt.
The Great DNA Data Deficit: Are Genes for Disease a Mirage?
http://www.bioscienceresource.org/comme ... .php?id=46
… according to the best available data, genetic predispositions (i.e. causes) have a negligible role in heart disease, cancer, stroke, autoimmune diseases, obesity, autism, Parkinson’s disease, depression, schizophrenia and many other common mental and physical illnesses that are the major killers in Western countries.
… genetic predispositions as significant factors in the prevalence of common diseases are refuted. …
And of course, if the enormous death toll from common Western diseases cannot be attributed to genetic predispositions it must predominantly originate in our wider environment. In other words, diet, lifestyle and chemical exposures, to name a few of the possibilities.
… Furthermore, for most common diseases there exists plentiful evidence that environment, and not genes, can satisfactorily explain their existence.
… genes are not important causes of major diseases.
A perennial feature of research into human health has always been the mountain of evidence that environment is overwhelmingly important in disease. People who migrate acquire the spectrum of diseases of their adopted country. Populations who take up Western habits, or move to cities with Western lifestyles, acquire Western diseases, and so on …
Genetic determinist ideas, especially in the form of explanations for health and disease, are powerful forces in our society …
Politicians like genetic determinism as a theory of disease because it substantially reduces their responsibility for people’s ill-health. By shifting blame towards individuals and their genetic ‘predispositions’ it greatly dilutes the pressure they may feel to regulate, ban, or tax harmful products and contaminants, courses of action that typically offend their business constituents. For a politician, therefore, spending tax dollars on medical genetics is an easy and even popular decision.
Corporations like genetic determinism, again because it shifts blame. …
Medical researchers are also partial to genetic determinism. They have noticed that whenever they focus on genetic causation, they can raise research dollars with relative ease. The last fifteen years, coinciding with the rise of medical genetics, have seen unprecedented sums of money directed at medical research. At the same time, research on pollution, nutrition and epidemiology has not benefited in any comparable way. …
Recognising their value, these groups have tended to elevate genetic explanations for disease to the status of unquestioned scientific facts, thus making their dominance of official discussions of health and disease seem natural and logical. This same mindset is accurately reflected in the media where even strong environmental links to disease often receive little attention, while speculative genetic associations can be front page news. It is astonishing to think that all this has occurred in spite of the reality that genes for common diseases were essentially hypothetical entities.
In societies, including our own, much of the social fabric is arranged around our conception of the ‘proper’ place of death and disease. Confidence in the genetic paradigm has led us to explain non-infectious disease as primarily a natural manifestation of genetic predispositions and thus a normal outcome of aging. This normalisation of diseases has obscured the contrary evidence that these same diseases can be all but absent in other cultures and often were rare in historical times. … To be consistent with the facts, this new narrative must incorporate Western diseases not as unavoidable, but as indicators of human fragility in the face of industrialisation and modern life.
Change for better health can occur in part through individual effort. The new understanding implies that we are not fated to develop any of the common diseases and that the efforts we make to eat well and live a healthy life will be amply rewarded. …
While individual effort has a place, many positive lifestyle and social changes require the cooperation of the state. Nevertheless, most governments cooperate far more, for example, with their food industries than with those who wish to eat a healthy diet. The laying to rest of genetic determinism for disease, however, provides an opportunity to shift this cynical political calculus. It raises the stakes by confronting policy-makers as never before with the fact that they have every opportunity, through promoting food labeling, taxing junk food, or funding unbiased research, to help their electorates make enormously positive lifestyle choices. And, when their constituents realise that current policies are robbing every one of them of perhaps whole decades of healthy living, these citizens might start to apply the necessary political pressure.