Being mean and ornery doesn't mean you can face down death! And smoking is not your fault! Well, not entirely. That cigarette after dinner? That's the one your genes made you smoke. Maybe.

WebMD, in a piece picked up by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and bounced around the web, headlined a story:

Smoking Gene May Reveal Why Some People Smoke More

The story summarizes a 79-author paper in Translational Psychiatry titled "Genome-wide meta-analyses of smoking behaviors in African Americans." Halfway down the WebMD piece comes the killer subhead:

Gene Predicts One More Cigarette per Day

And that's actually rather more definite than the paper, which points at SNPs in a region that "are associated with very small changes in smoking quantity and explain a small proportion of the variance." This is historically par for the course for the tobacco industry: They have spent generations funding searches for genetic variants, to promote "a false story that smokers' risk of lung cancer and likelihood of smoking are both in their DNA." As Helen Wallace has documented extensively, the hunt for genes that don’t exist has created “a vast gravy train of funding for the human genome and a false message about cancer in the press.”

On the brighter side:

'Personality Genes' May Help Account for Longevity

That's a press release promoting a report in Aging titled "Positive attitude towards life and emotional expression as personality phenotypes for centenarians." The researchers targeted "a genetically homogeneous sample of Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians" though regrettably the sample size was limited because "most participants in the original study were unable to participate due to their health issues or mortality." Moreover:

Some evidence indicates that personality can change between the ages of 70 and 100, so we don't know whether our centenarians have maintained their personality traits across their entire lifespans.

So did they live long because they laughed hard? (The contentment is confirmed by other research.) Or are they cheerful because they've forgotten their earlier struggles? Enquiring minds want to know. Clearly a very large longitudinal study is called for. And in the meantime, Dr. Monty Python may have the best prescription:

Always look on the bright side of life

Previously on Biopolitical Times:

•    Gene of the Week: The Nice Gene
•    The Great Gene Hunt (cont'd)
•    The Geriatric Genotype?
•    A People's History of the Human Genome

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