Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to The Extra Mile with me, Spencer Matthews. And me, Olly Patrick. Today's topic of discussion, genes versus environment. And I know you love it when I pronounce the N. You're the only person who pronounces the N of environment. I don't think I do usually.
Chapter 2: Are athletes born or built?
I think it's a special. You bring out a special side of me. Are you born... a good runner? Are people naturally athletically gifted? Or can your body be built and moulded to it?
One of the great questions of our time. Some people might call this nature versus nurture. So that was the way we framed genetics versus environment in this sort of original discussion. The answer is broadly not entirely known. There is no singular gene that is going to make you an unbelievable athlete. And that's a really important piece.
The general theme seems to be that those who are extreme elite athletes, particularly in endurance sport, have some genetic advantages. They have things that they were built with that meant they had a better adaptability to training. They had a better injury resistance. They had a better ability to lay down new blood vessels. And so they had the capacity to be a greater athlete.
But is that... So the genetics... Or their environment. So, for example, that just took me straight to Nepali climbers, right? They're born, you know, with advantages because they are at altitude and they spend a lot of time at altitude. And so the air and oxygen, you know, being thinner and less is...
something that they are physiologically used to so that when they come down to sea level, they find it easier to exert themselves more because their body is used to having less oxygen. So that is...
Not genetic, or it is? Correct. That would be environment. That's an environmental adaptation in the fact that if you and I go somewhere where there's lower partial pressure of oxygen, we still need to get oxygen to our tissues, so our body will make more blood vessels. Your genes are basically the code for you. So if we go back one step, you and I are unique, but we're not that unique.
So interestingly, across all human species, we're all 99.1% the same DNA. Isn't that quite interesting? That's remarkable. Isn't it? Everyone. Everyone. So across the whole of sort of humanity, our DNA, if you look at it, so the code inscripted in every cell of your body that codes for Spencer, codes for Ollie, is 99.1% the same. Well, that sort of answers the question then, doesn't it?
Well, in that 0.9, there's a hell of a lot that could be going on. There's a hell of a lot that could be going on.
But surely you can't gain that much of an extraordinary advantage with less than 1%. So you're saying that my genetic DNA is exactly the same as Dwayne the Rock Johnson's?
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Chapter 3: What role do genetics play in athletic performance?
Not more than 0.9% than somebody that's not then.
Agreed, but that 0.9 could be defining. Bear in mind in that 0.9 there could also be a gene that codes for a protein that stops me getting a disease. So there are some genes, and genes are stretches of your DNA which code for proteins. That's what we understand. So there's also a fascinating thing about DNA that most of it was classed as junk protein.
So when we look at all of the DNA, and we might have something like what's called 6 billion base pairs, the only 2% of them seem to do anything. So there's two ways you can look at that. We probably go, well, there's a great inefficiency to the human machine, or the science we currently understand is not the science we'll understand in 20 years' time.
And so there's a huge amount about DNA that we still don't fully understand, that it would be really odd that this code that's in all of the cells of your body is only 2% of it is used. That's an odd thing. That's wild. Isn't it? And so this used to be called sort of junk DNA. Now we're going, well, that DNA has a role in turning genes on and off.
And I think, again, to look at genes, your gene is the script.
How is it that they still know so little about it? Because we only uncoded this. DNA was kind of, you know, became mainstream-ish in the early 80s?
No. So the full genome project was really, I want to say, either late 90s, early 2000s, when they uncoded the whole thing. When was the O.J. Simpson case?
What?
Because he's seriously lucky that DNA wasn't really a thing.
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Chapter 4: How does environment influence athletic ability?
No, no, no, we've gone off genomes now. I'm just thinking it's pretty useful in like a murder case. I was actually thinking just this morning when I knew we'd be talking about this, like how...
easy it may have been to be a murderer prior to dna being a thing me determining your dna from mine was easier before we uncoded what a particular gene coded for and what the implication of that was so there's an ability to understand different people so you could see that that's spencer's dna that's ollie's dna but what's really happened is working out okay within the dna you've got these these pairs of chromosomes you've you know 46 chromosomes effectively
23 from your mother, 26 from your father. And that makes you completely unique, right? And that is something we could identify ages ago. What we couldn't work out is on chromosome seven, this particular strip codes for a protein. What job does that do? And if you've got a broken version of that, does that mean your hair goes gray and mine doesn't?
Who figures this stuff out, honestly? Because it's quite, it's pretty like, you know, whoever thought to look into any of this?
Well, everyone's wanted to know, I mean, when DNA was first decoded, Bill Gates, who was, I think he was president of the United States at the time, said, Well, today we learned the language in which God created life. And everyone's like, right, we'll find the gene for cancer. We'll find the genes for graying. We'll find the gene for baldness. And we'll do the whole thing.
And then those genes just didn't exist. And what you've got now is you've got the power of two things. Sequencing DNA has become much cheaper. It would cost several billion to decode the first person's DNA in its entirety. And now you can do it relatively cheaply. So for a few hundred quid, you can get your whole genome sequenced.
And we can look at all of those 20,000 genes and look to see whether they are the traditional version or a slightly different version, which we often call single nucleotide polymorphisms. Even as I say that, I know you're not going to enjoy that. You're quite wrong, actually. I really am. Well, they've been shortened to SNPs.
So let's imagine, and this is where it gets relevant to when we look at how would one of us have a greater athletic potential than the other, that there might be a gene that codes for how quickly we recover from exercise. So it might be involved as a section of my DNA that's been identified through this human genome project to code for a protein that repairs tendons.
But surely, you know, at the end of the day, if you're an elite professional athlete, there may be some edge in having, you know, this particular advantage.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the Human Genome Project?
That's a practice thing. But there is also genes involved in our psychological state. There's a gene called COMT, which is very popularized.
Like the French cheese.
Similar, without the E. COMT. Yeah, so without... C-O-M-T. Yeah, yeah, C-O-M-T-E, though, for cheese. Like a nice 18-month. And it's a really interesting one. So in your brain... it breaks down. So this gene codes for an enzyme that breaks down some of these stress hormones. So it'll break down dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline.
So people who've got a faulty version of this gene, a SNP, no less, a single nucleotide polymorphism, they won't break down those neurotransmitters and chemicals as quickly, and therefore stress will stay in them for longer. And if you have a really accelerated version of Com-T, you break those things down really quickly. And actually, they're so definable.
They actually give people different personality traits. Again, there's great debate on all of this. Whereas if you have the version that breaks down slowly, you're called a strategist because you avoid stress because your body's not good at breaking down stress hormones.
If you've got the one that breaks it down rapidly, you're called a warrior because you're the sort of person who walks into a room unprepared and goes, whatever happens, I can deal with it.
A warrior, like a warrior, not a warrior. Yeah, no, a warrior, like the wrestler. Like a samurai. A samurai. But not somebody that worries about things.
No, probably a little too close to warrior. Yeah, because that sounds like the other one. So warrior, as in you are a samurai. Because if you've got the version of this gene that breaks down stress hormones really, really quickly, then, of course, you're less concerned about entering stressful environments.
If you've got the version that breaks those things down really, really slowly, then you mitigate those stressful environments by overplanning. So you rehearse your speech, you do all the things in advance, you control all the variables. Now, that takes psychology and reduces it to a gene. It doesn't work like that. But these are interesting things where if you are, again, an athlete...
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