paul mchugh: some psychiatric disorders are due to a damage or an injury to the brain, and thus can be construed as diseases, and the problem that the patient faces in life is what they have... they have alzheimer's disease, they have manic depressive disorder. they have schizophrenia. on the other hand, those aren't the only ways that we can experience mental trouble in our life. some of the things that give us trouble, is how we're constituted. not what we have, but who we are, will influence how we feel in certain situations, and sometimes how we feel in certain situations becomes so distressed, we need help with it. and then finally, everyone knows and appreciates that you can have difficulty in life because of what's happened to you, what you've encountered. damage to the brain... the interplay of personality and environment... difficult life situations... all can contribute to mental distress. so can family history. andrew leuchter: if an individual has a first-degree relative, that is a father, mother, brother, sister, who suffers from bipolar disorder, manic depressive illness,

paul mchugh: genes are just dna. they aren't destiny. some aspect of our life experience, what we choose and what we do, how we form our character given our constitution, is what ultimately makes us the kinds of people we are. the idea that somehow or another we're destined because of genes to be a particular kind of person is-- is not only not true in human life, but it's also, of course, not true in anything in life. occasionally, a chemical error in a gene can alter the body's biochemistry and cause someone to be born with an inherited disease, a physical or mental abnormality, or susceptibility to a disease. this was one reason the human genome project was launched in the early 1990's. edward mccabe: the goal was to sequence the enre set ohuman genesct d alof the material. there's a lot of material on these chromosomes, in-between the beads on the string, there's a lot of information that we don't understand yet that appears perhaps to be junk, though i think many of us are reluctant to really call it junk. the goal is to sequence al