“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” William Shakespeare, The Tempest.  

Scientists from around the world gathered in Washington this month to discuss the potential for gene modification in treating diseases, and to consider whether there should be limits on the use of genetic engineering technology - where ‘faulty’ genes can be replaced or repaired. 

Gene editing technology offers hope to sufferers of genetic disorders such as Huntington’s disease. But many are concerned with its possible misuse in producing ‘designer’ babies, or in enhancing body function. They are concerned also that it will change how we consider our identity. But should we be concerned? What makes us who we are?

The gene-centric view applies a mechanistic and reductionist approach to what makes us who we are. With this concept, our defining characteristics are in the largest part determined by our ‘genetic make up’. It separates out an inner self in the form of our genome from how we function, or our ‘phenotype’. The genome is regarded then as a kind of ‘recipe for life’ written in the form of a DNA code.  It is a profoundly deterministic view of life and of what makes us who we are.  It is also a limited view of who we are and what 'makes' us. 

We see this genome-centric view expressed in many ways. But all use phrases such as ‘a set of instructions’, ‘a recipe’, ‘a universal language’, or even ‘a cook book’.  Of course all these are metaphors. Our genomes do not and cannot have a life of their own!  Our genotype does not create our phenotype. On the contrary, it is part of our phenotype.

We are led to believe, then, that much of what makes us who we are is ‘in our genes’. We see certain traits or characteristics ‘running in families’. We have a sense of lineage and continuity from one generation to another. Genealogy has become a thriving industry with increasing numbers of people wanting to discover their ‘origins’.  Origins matter. We are firmly embedded in a historical understanding of who we are.  We have a sense of the past, of what went before, and of the present and the future – we have regrets, hopes, fears, loves, hates, fulfillment, disappointment, all in a historical context. We have a sense of time, and a sense of our moment. We are positioned in space and time. But this has little to do with genes. It has a lot to do with our social and cultural being. We tell our story, who we are, through our relationships with others. We make each other.

In past times, people lived as extended families with grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins living, if not in the same house, then in close proximity. Many of my cousins grew up and still live in or around a Yorkshire village a few miles outside Leeds. When I visited as a child in the 1950s it was a small village, now it is more like a small town.

Family was an unquestioned part of our individual identity.  People saw themselves and were seen not so much as distinct from each other, but through their relationship to others. People were not defined by their DNA, but by ‘blood’ or family.  The saying ‘blood is thicker than water!’ reflected a familial, communal and cultural identity. We are who we are because we ‘belong’. A sense of belonging is I believe a major ingredient of how we see ourselves.  Our relationship with others is like a mirror from which we experience the reflection of ourselves. It is a compass in time and space, and this sense of belonging is an essential part of who we are.

Now there are daytime television programs devoted to tests of paternity, or to determine whether people within a family are siblings. When I watch these programs I often wonder whether it focuses on the right aspects of our biology.  They pander to the gene-centric view of who we are. This is not to say that paternity is not important - it is - but genes do not and cannot make us who we are. Genes are essential in making proteins, and we are not simply bags of proteins, any more than we are simply bags of water (80% of our bodies is water!).  We are not simply vehicles for our genes.  We are people with loves, hates, desires and needs. We are people as much formd by experience as our biology. 

My father, George, died when I was a child, and whilst I believe he has been a strong influence on who I am, I am never sure exactly what that influence is or how it manifests itself.  Is it simply that I am the ‘son of George’? In truth, I knew very little about him. He was, and in many ways remains an enigma.

My father was born in a very different age.  Born in 1896, he was a Victorian. My mother was 20 years younger than my father.  When I was at school, my contemporaries had fathers who had fought in the Second World War; my father had fought in the first. He enlisted in 1914. He was shot in the first few minutes of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.  He survived, and by the end of the war he had trained as a pilot.

I like to tell this story because it reveals the extraordinary fact that my father and I straddle, as it were, three centuries - centuries of rapid economic, social and cultural change. I sometimes feel I can reach back and touch the people of the 19th century. My father and I had profoundly different formative experiences.

I once found online a photograph of the street in Leeds where my father lived as a child. The street has long since gone, but there it had been, a row of terraced houses. I placed my finger on it, the street where my father would have trod, as if by so doing I would connect with him. I could sense the sooty smell of the coal fires. I imagined the Victorian schoolhouse where he would have learned to read and write, and the horse drawn trams.  His was an age of empire, with the British Empire stretching across the globe. My father’s understanding of the world would have been so different from my own. His was an age of steam and horses, not of petrol. In the year he was born, Henry Ford built his first automobile, the Quadricycle. Yet, by the time my father was 18 he would be flying an airplane.

Over the years, relatives who had known him would tell me there is a lot of my father in me.  “There’s a lot of George in you!” They would say. My mother would also say it. It was a comforting thought, but I wondered what it really meant and where it came from. A reflection of George is in my thoughts. I sometimes wonder what he would have thought about things. 

We are time-travellers he and I together, and I wonder what he would think of man walking on the moon, or satellites transmitting our messages around the globe. I wonder what he would have thought of the internet! So much has changed in so little time. 

I left school at 15 in 1964. I had no qualifications. My formative years were a decade of ‘finding myself’ in the process of becoming me. It was an odd time in my life. I became a musician – I sang blues and folk - and I read a lot. So much of my time was spent in my local library. I read books on history, on science, on politics as well great works of fiction. One book that influenced me was the seminal work of the sociologist, Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy published in 1957.

In the Uses of Literacy, Hoggart documents the break-up of the old, class culture, lamenting the loss of the close-knit communities and their replacement by the emerging manufactured mass culture.      

What Richard Hoggart said in his book is that common language is used as much as a means of identity as it is of communication. In the language of identity, the use of cliché and seemingly meaningless statement is used to exchange recognition one to another. It says, “I am one of you!” Hoggart warned that this usage was being diluted by what he saw as ‘mass culture’. He also warned that rapid economic change was undermining the meaning of social language.

I have said that we are grounded in space and time. But what happens to our sense of identity and our relationships one to another if the pace of change is such that our lives are no longer located in space and time?

Where we lived and worked were once relatively fixed.  This was generally so in my father's time. Now mass migrations  extend families across the globe. Our sense of being grounded in place has changed.  Many live as neighbours only in the sense of  living next door, or in the same locality, but not in the sense of a communal being.  Where we live is just a place and not a sense of social relationship.  We are localised but not socialised.  Perhaps it is this that has the more profound impact on who we are and how we see ourselves.