Gene's Eye View - Baba Brinkman

My man’s got a bad case of cystic fibrosis

A hella pessimistic prognosis

He started out like «why god, why god?

Why did that song have to shuffle on my iPod?»

Feelin' like he got struck with a left He did the sensible thing and read a

textbook

And discovered an inherited disease

That can only be understood evolutionarily

He’s got a gene called CFTR

With one deletion in a phenylalanine part

One less amino acid,

fantastic

Hell-a-common,

one in thirty white people have it

Carry one copy and you don’t even notice

Inherit two copies and catch a diagnosis

An autosomal recessive disorder,

one of more than

Four thousand genetic diseases recorded

And my man got the shorter side of the stick

So he started askin' questions like «why does it exist?»

What kind of sadistic joke is cystic fibrosis?

Now this is what he sings when he’s feelin' hopeless

I live my life,

I love my friends,

I eat my food

Sometimes I just don’t understand the things I do

A wise man told me:

«look deeper inside you»

So now I take the gene’s eye view

It turns out my man’s got a special mutation

That goes back more than six hundred generations

CFTR is just one of twenty thousand

Protein-coding genes that have been accounted

Knock one out and it makes a vast difference

He can’t breathe right,

and he’s got no vas deferens

That’s infertility without medical help

So how did this gene spread itself so well

That one in every thirty caucasian people have it?

He found the answer:

heterozygote advantage

Two copies gives you cystic fibrosis

One copy protects you from tuberculosis

Mendelian diseases can spread because carriers

Get resistance to parasites like various

Malarias, just check out thalassemia

It’s common in the tropics like sickle cell anemia

My man’s mutation protected his ancestors

In times of pandemic it spread and became prevalent

So evolution sacrificed him for his relatives

And now this is what he sings when he’s feelin' sick

I live my life,

I love my friends,

I eat my food

Sometimes I just don’t understand the things I do

A wise man told me:

«look deeper inside you»

So now I take the gene’s eye view

My man studied evolution up to his eyeballs

Until at least he could say

«hey, this isn’t my fault»

It’s all about trade offs and average benefits

Across populations;

sometimes it’s genetic drift

Or founder effects,

it’s not always adaptive

Sometimes mutations just randomly happen

Sex chromosomally x-linked recessives

Only affect men and yeah,

that’s kinda sexist

Some are autosomal dominant like Huntington’s

Which only kicks in after reproduction’s done

So selection can’t eliminate it

Maybe human ingenuity can though;

it’s innovative

Some disorders are so rare they’re orphaned

And never get a piece of the research portion

My man’s only one in three thousand

But in 2015 you can be one in three hundred thousand

And still be counted by patient advocates

Genetic research is takin' massive steps

My man’s gettin' hitched and family planning

With his new gene’s eye view understanding

I live my life,

I love my friends,

I eat my food

Sometimes I just don’t understand the things I do

A wise man told me:

«look deeper inside you»

So now I take the gene’s eye view

I live my life,

I love my friends,

I eat my food

Sometimes I just don’t understand the things I do

A wise man told me: «look deeper inside you»

So now I take the gene’s eye view