The Human genome in sickness and health

Just before midnight of July 13, 1966, Richard Speck broke into a Chicago townhouse and murdered 8 nurses. His legal team focussed on an insanity plea. Based on reports the previous year in the prestigious scientific journals Nature and The Lancet that XYY males are hyperaggressive - and Speck’s appearance, a Vanderbilt professor and doctor of Endocrinology and Genetics suggested that Speck was XYY and that this would be a good defense foundation. Following this, an Elwyn Institute biochemist reported to the media that Speck was “the archetypal XYY male”. ... Speck wasn’t XYY and no significant association between being XYY and increased aggression has been shown.

If the genome is the instruction manual and nucleotides are its letters, then the diploid human genome would be 300 full-length Encyclopedia Britannica sets long. What’s in there? What’s important, what’s not? How different is my manual from yours? How, and how fast, can it change - over the life of the individual, over a generation, over thousands of years? How, and what, can we diagnose? What can we change? Should we?