I work at a lovely place. It’s five blocks from my house, so I can walk to work most days and come home for lunch; it’s an all-women company; and the vast majority of patients are very satisfied when they leave. It does have what we call in California a woo-woo component, which while not necessarily pejorative here, certainly is not really me, but no job is perfect.

Occasionally though, there are rough spots. I had a conversation recently with a lovely therapist whose treatment I have experienced and found transformative, who authoritatively notified me that people with type A blood shouldn’t eat meat. That’s a third of all people! Blood type is one of the few human genetically-determined characteristics, and I couldn’t help thinking, That statement is so genetic! Which to me means, outdated, as opposed to epigenetic, which is au courant.

The tipping point is exemplified in the 1997 movie Gattaca, a vision of a future society anchored in genetics, while the triumph of the main character is to excel beyond the expectation of his genetic code, which to a 21st-century viewer makes sense, because of course his real abilities are based on epigentics. It’s a terrific movie, so I will take this moment to recommend it, along with the completely unrelated 2019 movie The Good Liar, which my husband and I happened to see last weekend, and which is also has much more depth than one would expect from either its plot description or its trailer.

Musing about our misguided obsession about the human genome set me to thinking about other mistakes of the 20th century, which is starting to seem like the worst century ever, at least for Western society, which is different from Chinese, Indian, South American, hunter-gatherer, and other societies. The discoveries seemed good at the time, and those in physics still seem valid, but for biology, not so much.

The germ theory of disease was a huge turning point, and helped curb a lot of infectious diseases, but it shaped our thought processes so much that we not only did not notice but even exacerbated all the non-germ-based diseases, which include most of the nutrition-deficit diseases plaguing us (Westerners) today, and led to a huge overuse of antibiotics and a peculiarly symptom-based, as opposed to cure- or prevention-based, medical system. Industrial farming took all the healthful foods off our tables and led to said diseases. We filled our homes and air and water and soil with toxins, and our environment and bodies with microplastics. We learned to fear outdoor air pollution while missing the very likely more damaging indoor air pollution. We way overused petrochemicals, so are now suffering climate vengeance.

The twenty-first century is not covering itself with glory either, mostly due to the demise of democracy, which was well-analyzed in Science last week, and the miniaturization of technology, which heroicizes pettiness. I choose to be optimistic however. The rough spots we all face now, the sacrifices we personally have to make, the struggles others endure to benefit all of us, and the hardships forced on others we only read about, all will surely make us reflect more deeply, resist more strongly, and react more kindly.