Brian Rudman: Gene-pool scientist misses mark

With 30,000 genes to investigate, I wonder how long it will be before someone discovers the "naive" gene that a high proportion of scientists seem to carry. For sheer stupidity - I'll give him the benefit of the doubt - the claim of geneticist Dr Rod Lea that Maori men are strikingly over-represented as carriers of the "warrior gene" must take first prize.

Particularly when he goes on to argue the presence of the gene "goes a long way to explaining some of the problems Maori have" and that "obviously, this means they are going to be more aggressive and violent ..."

His claim is "controversial", he brags, because he is saying possessing the gene "definitely predisposes people to be more likely to be criminals and engage in that type of behaviour as they grow older".

Talk about lighting the fuse and standing well back. What was this Aussie immigrant trying to do? Achieve fame - or notoriety - and bugger the consequences?

Having discovered the scientific key to Maori criminality, what's his next move? A grand plan to breed it out of the population. Or worse? Does he know nothing of the ghastly eugenics experiments to achieve racial purity that spread through the "civilised" Western world in the first half of the 20th century, culminating in the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Along the way were such horrors as the forced sterilisation of tens of thousands of "feeble-minded" Americans for such deficiencies as "hereditary degeneracy" and "excessive masturbation".

A clause to sterilise New Zealand mental defectives and forbid their marriage was dropped from a 1928 act, but a register was set up.

The only light relief came yesterday when a Maori elder popped up on National Radio to declare the warrior gene discovery was proof of his tribe's links back to the mythical Maui.

Unfortunately, I think he meant it.

I'm no expert, but it doesn't take much delving to find that carrying the so-called warrior gene doesn't mean either of the above.

Writing in the Times of London, Professor Johnjoe McFadden of the University of Surrey's molecular genetics department, likened past attempts to make a causal link between this gene and criminal behaviour to the 18th century phrenologists who claimed to be able to read criminal personalities from lumps on heads.

Scientists became interested in this gene in 1995 when it was discovered that mice that lacked it suffered serious anger management problems. A 2002 study found that men who inherited a variant of the gene and who suffered abuse as children tended to be more prone to violence. Two years later it was found that forms of the gene were linked to aggressive behaviour in macaque monkeys and had been around in primates for at least 25 million years.

Both the human and monkey studies showed that carrying the gene in itself didn't cause aggression in later life. Carrier adults were only more prone to violence if they'd been abused and highly stressed when young.

Scientific study of the gene remains sparse and hardly definitive. But that hasn't stopped Dr Lea pouring the inflammatory ingredient, race, into the mix. (Race, ironically, is a concept which geneticists now agree, as a result of the human genome research, is just a social construct.)

Of course Dr Lea is not the first to suggest Maori are born trouble-makers. Once Were Warriors author Alan Duff told the Listener in 2002 about the "warrior genes" kicking around inside him from his Maori side. "I've got real civilised Maori mates and we all laugh about our warrior genes. If something happens, then suddenly boomf - and it's there ... those warrior genes come out."

If that happened it was better "to take it out on the football field".

And that's the point. How we handle the "boomf", or whatever other circumstance we find ourself in. None of us is born the same. And as the experts further explore the human genome, Professor McFadden predicts many more "behavioural genes" will be uncovered. Just as genes have already been discovered that predispose some people to heart disease, cancers, you name it.

A century ago, the eugenicists' answer would have been to breed so-called impurities out of the human stock - and much worse.

Dr Rea should read his history. And if that "grandstanding" gene of his needs feeding, couldn't he discover a Mozart gene to tell us about instead.