• Question: has the sciene genentics ran down in the family ?

    Asked by emilybrockwell to Emma, Jen, Joseph, Michael, Mona on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Michael Taggart

      Michael Taggart answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      nope, I’m the only one from a family of four and neither of my parents were scientists. Each of the other three siblings also studied at university but did languages (two sisters fluent in French) and History and Politics (brother).

    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Kind of – my parents are both medical doctors and I guess you’ve got to be scientifically minded to be a doctor. There have actually been a lot of doctors and nurses in my family so I think my parents were initially a bit disappointed that I didn’t go into medicine! My sister is doing a PhD in Corpus Linguistics which apparently means that she looks at text and uses computers to see if there are patterns.

    • Photo: Joseph Finlayson

      Joseph Finlayson answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      It’s very unlikely that there’s such a gene that makes you a scientist. As Michael has mentioned in a previous post, genes actually only code for proteins – it would make many genes working in tandem to code for the proteins that would contribute to scientific ability (even if scientific ability is genetically based).

      But no. Most of my family are distrustful of science.

    • Photo: Emma Bennett

      Emma Bennett answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Quite possibly, both my parents are scientific but my brother is the complete opposite and he’s really into history instead. So maybe it’s a combination of genetics which might make me more suited to be a scientist and the environment I grew up in helping shape this interest.

Comments