Get set for an enlightening journey into genetics and writing with the remarkable Janice Berliner. Our conversation traverses her career evolution from being a genetic counselor to steering the helm as a program director, revealing her fears, inspirations, and her passion for nurturing the next generation in the field. She's also candid about her plunge into academia and the transformative landscape of genetic testing technology she's witnessed over her career.
The second half of our chat takes a thought-provoking turn, exploring the crossroads of ethics, genetics, and writing. Berliner's decade-old book on ethics in genetic counseling is a testament to its enduring relevance. Hear her insights on the delicate dance of discovery and patient communication and her aims of making genetics more accessible to the average person. We also discuss the representation, or lack thereof, of genetic conditions in fiction, and the importance of authenticity in writing. A conversation with Janice Berliner is a deep dive into the human side of genetics and the power of storytelling in science. Tune in, you won't want to miss it!
https://janiceberliner.com/
https://a.co/d/2OdBE29
https://a.co/d/6aP8yOs
Get set for an enlightening journey into genetics and writing with the remarkable Janice Berliner. Our conversation traverses her career evolution from being a genetic counselor to steering the helm as a program director, revealing her fears, inspirations, and her passion for nurturing the next generation in the field. She's also candid about her plunge into academia and the transformative landscape of genetic testing technology she's witnessed over her career.
The second half of our chat takes a thought-provoking turn, exploring the crossroads of ethics, genetics, and writing. Berliner's decade-old book on ethics in genetic counseling is a testament to its enduring relevance. Hear her insights on the delicate dance of discovery and patient communication and her aims of making genetics more accessible to the average person. We also discuss the representation, or lack thereof, of genetic conditions in fiction, and the importance of authenticity in writing. A conversation with Janice Berliner is a deep dive into the human side of genetics and the power of storytelling in science. Tune in, you won't want to miss it!
https://janiceberliner.com/
https://a.co/d/2OdBE29
https://a.co/d/6aP8yOs
G'day and welcome to Demystifyin Genetics. My name is Matt Burgess and I am the host. Today. I am Demystifyin Genetics with Genetic Counselor Janice Berliner. So Janice is a board certified and licensed genetic counselor in New Jersey and she is the genetic counseling program director of the Masters of Genetic Counseling at Bay Path University. But not only that, she is an author as well. So on the program today we mainly talk about her writing career and interesting little tidbits that she has to share along the way. Hello and welcome to Demystifyin Genetics with Janice Berliner.
Janice Berliner:How exciting.
Matt Burgess:Thank you, janice.
Janice Berliner:Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Matt Burgess:Now you're a genetic counselor, a genetic counseling program director, but also a celebrated writer, so I would love to discuss all of those things with you today.
Janice Berliner:I would love that as well.
Matt Burgess:So, just in passing, I remember you saying one day and I didn't get a chance to ask you about it but you said that you always wanted to be a genetic counseling program director and that kind of just stood out. I thought, oh, I need to ask you about that. How, how or why, how did that come about?
Janice Berliner:It's a good question and I don't even know that I can answer it. I remember the timing better than I remember the reasons. So my very first job as a new genetic counselor was at Maasai Nye Medical Center in New York City, and the only reason I left that job is that I was getting married and I was moving, and the very day that I announced my resignation was the day they announced they were starting a genetic counseling training program and I remember I went home and cried because if I had known they were starting the program, I would have stayed. So I don't remember the reasons why I wanted to do it. I just remember knowing from you know, a year and a half into my career, that that was something that I wanted to do.
Janice Berliner:I had a little bit of a not difficult relationship I'm trying to think of how to say this. I felt very intimidated by my program director. I felt like I had let her down in a lot of ways, that I wasn't as good a student as I could have been, and maybe it stems from that. You know, I don't know if it's so psychologists are probably analyze it and say you know you're trying to please your parents or something like that, but it's something I had always wanted to do and I looked for multiple opportunities throughout my career to switch from the clinical counseling I was doing into academia. And it wasn't because I didn't enjoy the clinical counseling or that I didn't think I was doing a good job with it. It's just I felt like mentoring and nurturing the next generation of genetic counselors was a calling of mine.
Matt Burgess:Excellent. Okay, it's so funny. I think that a quality that a lot of us have as genetic counselors is conscientiousness, so it sounds like probably at university. You know, I'm sure you were a great student and maybe we can all do a little bit better.
Janice Berliner:But yeah, I don't know I don't think I was a great student. I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think I was a great student. I think I worked really hard and I and I meant well, but I think that I was right out of my college years, didn't have the world experience that my classmates had in a job.
Matt Burgess:Okay, well, it's interesting that you're able to sort of sit back and reflect on that now, and hopefully that makes you a better genetic counseling director.
Janice Berliner:With 150 years of my study time.
Matt Burgess:So when I was preparing for this podcast, I did a little bit of background checking of you and it's really obvious that you'd like writing, you're a writer, so that sort of came through in the fact that you edit, or you edited a book, and then you've written a number of academic journal articles, but also written fiction. So one of the speaking of 150 years what of the articles that I came across was an article about genetic, genetic counseling for fragile X, and that was back in 1994. That's scary, and I was kind of, you know, doing the math so I was like, oh god, that's like 30 years next year. Yeah, yeah, so did you. I think you said that your first sort of career in genetic counseling was general or prenatal, and then you sort of went into cancer and then you went into teaching. Is that how it worked?
Janice Berliner:Yes, the first nine and a half years, I want to say, were largely prenatal, with some pediatrics sprinkled into it.
Matt Burgess:Okay and like it was really interesting reading the abstract of that article because technology has changed so much and how we test for fragile X and what we know, and you know how fast we're able to test. It's amazing that you know like things have changed and evolved so much.
Janice Berliner:Funny story I would love to Related to technology. I have what I think is a very funny story. When I was a genetic counseling student at the University of Michigan in the very late 80s, we had to do two student seminars once it first year and one in our second year and we weren't doing our own research. So therefore we were presenting someone else's research, which is, for anybody who's ever done it, as an extreme challenge, because then you ask questions about it. I don't know. And in my second year I did a seminar on the brand new no One's Ever Heard of it technology of PCR. And one of the people in my audience because he was then a medical geneticist at the University of Michigan was none other than Francis Collins. And for your listeners who might not know the name, he was first the director of the Human Genome Project and then the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute for a very, very long time, just stepped down maybe six months ago. So when I tell people I taught Francis Collins about PCR, I think that's hysterical.
Matt Burgess:That is hilarious. That's hilarious. Sure, yeah, it kind of reminds me, you know, like I did genetic counseling at university in 2004. So you know, that's nearly two decades ago now and although I loved the course, I think at the end I was so ready to get out and work and I think by the time the end of the course came around, I had had enough learning and I kind of it's really funny to say it out loud now, it's a bit embarrassing, but I remember thinking okay, I've learnt chromosomes, I've learnt carrier type, that's all I need to know. I've got no more room left in my mind for this new thing called an array. Like it's too complicated, I don't understand it, I won't need to think about it. It's kind of like, okay, I've got a job, I settled down, and then it's like okay, I think I do need to learn about this new thing called an array, I think it'll be around for a while. So it's kind of a similar thing.
Janice Berliner:It kind of is. But you know, when I graduated, there was, there were chromosomes and, of course, and there was DNA testing. I'm not gonna graduate the Stone Age, but there wasn't a lot more than that. I mean there were no micro arrays and there wasn't PCR yet. I mean there was, but not in really common usage and we weren't learning about polygenic risk scores or like a million other things that now we're trying to teach our students and we're thinking, oh, we never really learned this, at least not in an academic setting. In fact, we didn't even learn anything about cancer genetics Part of the profession I spent 20 years of my career working on.
Janice Berliner:We didn't learn in school because it didn't really exist yet. I mean, fundamentally we knew there was something hereditary about a lot of cancers, but it was in its infancy then, kind of the way we look at psychiatric genetics now, where you know we know there's something hereditary and we can certainly counsel families about risk, but we can't do anything about it without the molecular tools, right? So we didn't have cancer genetics clinics. We didn't learn about cancer genetics in our training. So any of us my age or older, or even maybe five years younger, who do cancer counseling have learned it on our own on the job which has been interesting.
Matt Burgess:I think it goes to show the point that in genetics we are constantly learning and you know to be on top of our game it's important to have that ongoing professional development and things are changing all the time and you know it's important for us to keep up with that. You know I was going to say I teach genetic counseling at uni and you're actually my boss, so you know that I was.
Janice Berliner:I don't think of myself that way. Just so you know we are colleagues.
Matt Burgess:One of the things I think about, or I thought about last year, was oh, do I need to teach the students about linkage? And like, on one hand, I think it's important that they know this process. That used to be very, very, very important, but you know, you can go years now in your career and never have to discuss it or understand it, and, yeah, it's interesting, it's true.
Janice Berliner:You know there are certain aspects of our field and medicine in general that become antiquated fairly quickly and you go back and you look at journal articles, like you did with the Fragilex article, and think, okay, so this used to be state-of-the-art and now it's almost funny, it's sort of cute that that's how we used to do things and not anymore. But you know, every lesson we learn makes the next lesson that much easier. So we can learn at I don't know if it's an exponential rate, but certainly at an accelerated rate, because everything we learn is the basis for new things and makes it easier and quicker and generally less expensive.
Matt Burgess:Exactly less expensive than faster? Yes, Right, so you edited a genetic counseling book about ethical dilemmas in clinical genetics. I know it's sort of during our you know, when we study genetic counseling at uni, there's a big component that is about ethics and morals and that sort of thing, and I think it's completely appropriate. However, I was kind of thinking back like day to day. It's not like we have 40 hours a week of ethical dilemmas as a genetic counselor, but it's something that we do need to know about, and I was just wondering if you could tell us how that book came about and how you sort of picked which chapters, and you know that sort of thing.
Janice Berliner:I think this is an interesting story. I had gotten a call completely out of the blue one day from an editor at Oxford University Press who I didn't know. Who said how did he find my name? I think I was on the board of directors of the American Board of Genetic Counseling at that time and I think that's how he found my name. And he said I've been at some genetic counseling conferences recently and genetic counselors are avid readers but they have nothing to read. We're trying to sell books to them, but there's nothing on your field really to sell.
Janice Berliner:Would you be interested in writing something? And I was dumbfounded. I said well, maybe. What do you have in mind? He said we would love for a study guide to prepare students for boards, which was kind of comical. It's not exactly a book to read. But I thought well, that's funny that you say that, because I had actually written a study guide years prior for the boards. That was simply based on my efforts at studying and my late father's admonition that I'm putting so much work into putting this together, I might as well not be the only one to benefit from it. So I had put together a study guide for three different cycles of the exam and back then they were only given every three years. So I did a first, second and third edition in 1993, six and nine I think it was. So I thought, well, that would be interesting, because I've kind of done this before. But because I was on the board of the organization that created the exam, I said I can't, this would be wholly inappropriate for me to do. Total conflict of interest.
Janice Berliner:He said so well, what would you like to do instead? Because I'd still like to have you write something. I said let me talk to a couple of colleagues, and I called a genetic counselor, a colleague who I utterly respected and adored, and said what do you think about this? She said, janice, I have five minutes to talk, but let's talk this out right. She said I think we need a book on ethics and here are some of the topics I think you should do, and I think, instead of five, we probably talk for 10 minutes.
Janice Berliner:But in that 10 minutes we banged out which chapters we should have and, potentially, who could write them, and then I took it from there. She said good luck. And I took it from there and I contacted all of these genetic counselors, many of whom I already knew, and recruited them to write their chapters and then kind of cracked the whip to make sure they all got done on time so that I had time to edit them. So the only thing that I wrote, or I created, I should say, for the book is the case example that we then used as a thread to tie all the chapters together, so you don't have to read it in any kind of order, but a family is presented at the beginning of the book and then each ethical principle described in the chapters relates back to that family in some way. So I created that and kept on top of the chapter authors and was the liaison back to Oxford University Press OK and edited it.
Matt Burgess:Like it's interesting, as we were talking before about fragile X in your paper and how it's kind of comical now, but this textbook is about 10 years old but still completely relevant. And there's a chapter about director-consumer testing and I think that's even more relevant now. There's a chapter about incidental findings and I think, as genetic testing is becoming faster and cheaper and more complex and complicated, we're coming across more and more things that we weren't planning on coming across. And then what is the ethical thing? Should that not be reported? If it is reported, should we not tell our clients? But then, if it's written down, do we tell our clients or do they want to know about that? And how do we consent them for that? Yeah, I find that fascinating.
Janice Berliner:I do too.
Matt Burgess:Yeah Well, I recently went to a conference and one thing that I hadn't even really considered was there was a little, there was a session where the scientists were talking about how they felt about discovering things and not reporting them, and as a clinician that orders genetic tests, I kind of thought, oh you know the lab people, they're used to that. You know, just don't put it down, I don't want to know about it, but you know, it doesn't matter if you know. But then for them to actually say, well, actually this is a burden for me as well and I thought, oh, the scientists, maybe they need like supervision and they need to sort of come together and talk about these cases.
Janice Berliner:So yeah, it was really interesting Point. Yes, and I think you know we end up being somewhat siloed in our lanes, right, you have the research scientists. Then you have the laboratory people who are actually physically doing the test but not seeing the patients connected to them. And then we have the physicians and the genetic counselors who are actually physically seeing the patients but didn't do the research to find out how to do that test in the first place. It didn't actually implement the test, you know. And then you have the patients, who don't care about any of that, except how does this affect my life and what do I do with this information? And so we act as the liaison, really, between the research and the lab and the patient, but we are not the patient, right, we don't actually go home with that. I mean, some of us are, some of us do actually have genetic conditions, but it is a different lens to look at it through, which is terrible grammar, but I think you know what I mean and that was part of the reason.
Janice Berliner:Actually, if I may segue, that I wrote the novels. That I did is in order to make genetics a little more relatable to the average person. You know, you can pick up a novel and, yes, you're learning something, but you're not being hit over the head with it and it doesn't necessarily apply to you, but you can at least maybe see how genetic disease affects families and their relationships and the way they look at their futures and their health care and their finances and their everything that relates to it that we think we know about as genetic counselors but we don't go home with it. So that was kind of the ideal to give you a way to kind of go home with it.
Matt Burgess:OK, perfect segue. We need to talk about your books. And it's interesting because you know we're genetic counselors. We could sit down and talk about genetics with each other all day long, you know, over a cup of tea or glass of wine, and that was one of the reasons that I started this podcast. You know the mystifying genetics. I think that laypeople like to sort of understand a little bit about genetics and I hope that you know people are able to listen to these podcasts and understand what we're talking about and take things away. But I know that the genetic counselors love it as well. But, yeah, so it's interesting to hear that that was sort of one of the reasons that you started writing your fiction. So the first book I think the first book is my favorite.
Janice Berliner:So it's probably mine too.
Matt Burgess:Are you allowed to have favorites as an author.
Janice Berliner:I don't know. It's kind of like picking a favorite child you love them equally for different reasons, or something like that.
Matt Burgess:So your first book is Brooks Promise. When I was thinking about this, I feel like with your second book, in Good Conscience, I can talk about it without giving things away. But with Brooks Promise I feel like I have to be really careful what I say, because I don't want to give anything away, but so how there are a lot of spoilers in that one for sure. How do you explain or describe Brooks Promise? What is it? What's it about?
Janice Berliner:I do it very simply and it really probably doesn't do the book justice in total, but I simply say that it's a story of a young couple who wants to have a baby, has some difficulty at first doing that, but through in vitro conceives a pregnancy and when the baby is several months old they find she has a fairly significant failure to thrive. That at first the pediatrician isn't too concerned about and then after a while decides yeah, maybe this baby ought to see a geneticist who ultimately diagnosis the baby with a pretty serious metabolic disorder. And in trying to figure out how did this happen to them, the couple ends up uncovering all sorts of repressed memories and secrets in the family that pretty well threatened to pull the whole family apart and nearly do, and there's a lot more to it, but that's the basic premise in mind.
Matt Burgess:Excellent and one of the things I sort of was interested in. Like I really enjoy reading. I like reading fiction. I don't really read that much nonfiction, apart from journal articles and that sort of thing. When you are a writer, can you remember everything in the book, like because I remember I read it but then I've forgotten a lot of details. But is it sort of like, do you remember all of the details of the book?
Janice Berliner:I'm sure I remember more than you do, not only because I wrote it to begin with but because I've read it so many times in the editing process.
Janice Berliner:But there are certain things, like I did a book group last night about In Good Conscience, the second novel, and we were talking about the main characters, two siblings, and I thought, darn it, I don't remember their names. They were pretty unceasing characters and shoot, I don't remember the names that I gave them. And somebody said something about a character named Kevin and I was, oh yeah, kevin, what about him too? Because he was not a huge part of the story. I don't think he was unimportant, but he just wasn't that big a part of the story. So when I think about the book I don't, that's not the first place my mind goes so no, I don't. I don't remember every single detail and sometimes when I do reread something I think, oh, wow, like I can make myself cry by reading my own writing. Which is just weird. It's kind of nice, like, yeah, I wrote that and it still makes me sad or frustrated or angry Cute.
Matt Burgess:Oh, that's funny. Oh, so we're going back to Brooke's promise. You know, there's not a lot of fiction that I read where there are genetic conditions in there. And then, you know, I hardly ever see genetic counselors sort of represented in books or in TV shows. What's that? Oh, Gadica, I remember Gadica and the genetic counselor was a black man and I thought, oh my God, like that's amazing because most genetic counselors are white women. So he's like I was like, oh, that's like me. But do people in genetics give you good feedback about your books and is it different to people that don't work in genetics?
Janice Berliner:Well, it's different in the sense that they know where I'm coming from in what I'm writing, and so it means, in some ways it means more to me, you know, because you don't see a lot of genetic counselors represented in books, and so when I saw it the first time I saw it represented in a book was in one of my very favorite books called Inside the O'Brien's, which is written by Lisa Genova, who wrote Still Alice and a bunch of other books about neurologic disorders, and she was one of my biggest inspirations for writing. I thought perhaps I could do for genetics which she did for neurologic conditions. Anyway, she had what you and I would think of as a genetic counselor. In her book she called him a social worker, which a little irritated me, but the session that she portrayed was really very good and really showed this person also male, by the way in a very good light, so I was happy about that.
Janice Berliner:When I hear back from genetic counselors who've enjoyed my books and say that it's authentic to them, very, very meaningful.
Janice Berliner:The most powerful thing, though, is when I hear from a patient, from somebody who says I actually have, for example, a family history of a hereditary cancer syndrome, and it rings true to me and I heard that last night in this book and I have to tell you that means the world, because it's hard to know. You know, when we're counseling our patients, we think we're being empathic, we think we're being understanding, we think that we are listening actively and really kind of get into the meat of what the patient means, but we don't always know that we're actually succeeding in doing that. So when I feel like I wrote something that speaks to somebody in a situation like that, I think so. I did listen to my patients, you know, maybe not every one of them I'm not saying I did everything perfectly certainly not but that I gathered enough information over the years that I was able to write something that feels authentic both to the genetic counselors and to the patients. It's awesome.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, I would think that that is the hardest thing to do being authentic. It kind of reminds me I mean this is a bit of a segue, but with the new Sex and the City at the moment I don't know if you watched the old series and then I did.
Janice Berliner:I watched the old one, not the new one.
Matt Burgess:The new one. It just doesn't feel authentic. You know, like I think we all love the characters, that we wanted them to come back, and then you watch it and it's like, oh okay, it's not authentic. So I think that I mean that authenticity is really hard and it's. You know, it's amazing when you're able to do that. You know, as genetic counselors, it's a stressful job and you know we're empathic and it's good to be there for our clients. However, you know it's not about us and for a lot of our clients, it's the worst thing that they'll ever go through or, you know, one of the most horrible sort of processes.
Janice Berliner:So, yeah, I think to be able to write Right, and for us it's almost, you know it's Tuesday. I mean it doesn't mean that we don't care about our patients. It's just that, yes, we're hit by it a lot and we have to find ways to care for ourselves in ways that we can, you know, maybe not take it home.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, I also loved Inside the O'Brien's. It's about my favorite of the genetic condition that I like working with the most Huntington disease. I really like fragile X as well. I like cancer, but yeah, I think Huntington disease is probably my favorite condition to work with, even though it's sort of a horrible condition and as someone that if you can have a positive impact on a family.
Janice Berliner:That's what it's all about, because this family is going to go through their Huntington whether you're there or not, but if you can help them through it and make it an easier process, it's fabulous. So this woman in our book group last night who is part of a hereditary cancer family said that she has a very, very large family and they've all been followed by one genetic counselor over 30 years and she said we would have made it without that genetic counselor and it was just. It was really sweet for me to hear. I asked her who it was. I do know the person not well, but for a long time and it was just really gratifying to think that she had made such a difference in the lives of these family members.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, that's amazing. I was thinking about the issue when we quit a job and we move on and leave our families behind like it's such a privilege and an honor to be able to work with the same family, sort of in an ongoing way.
Matt Burgess:Track Jean has designed an electronic health record for genetics professionals. It includes pedigree drawing, demographic data, genetics information, risk tools and sophisticated reporting, all designed with the clinician in mind. It integrates within other clinical genetics software, databases and hospital information systems to maintain accurate patient records. Track Jean has an experienced team who have been working in the clinical genetics industry for over 15 years, and you can request a demo for free. Go to trackjeancom Again. That's trackjean In your second book In Good Conscience. So it's about a young man. I feel like I could explain this book Please. The wedding Too much away. But you know he's good looking, he's successful, he's an actor, he's doing really well. But then he's diagnosed with cancer and I guess it's probably not giving too much away that maybe there's a genetic component to his cancer. But is that sort of how you describe this book?
Janice Berliner:Yes, yes, I do.
Janice Berliner:I say it's about a young, successful actor who's suddenly very ill and one of the nurses in the cancer center where he's being treated not his nurse, but one of the nurses looks in his chart simply because he's famous and she's curious, which we all know is the wrong thing to do but she sees some things in the chart that make her think that this could be something hereditary, and she goes to meet with him to try to explain this to him, and he is quite naturally, I rate, because I don't even know who you are.
Janice Berliner:What are you doing? Looking in my medical records and coming to talk to me about it? I didn't ask you to do that, but she is very involved in this in her own mind, and you know you, as a reader, start to try to wonder, wow, start to wonder why is she so invested in this person? She doesn't even know, and you know you come to find that there's somebody in her past who actually suffered from the clinical effects of a hereditary cancer syndrome, didn't ever know about it and would have benefited so much if she had, and so that's why this nurse is so stuck on this topic. And, long story short, the family does eventually come around to understanding why and how important it is to have that kind of information, but not before this nurse goes through a whole ethics board violation hearing because she did violate his privacy and very easily could have lost her job and even perhaps her nursing license because of it.
Matt Burgess:And it sort of highlights the issue of duty to warn. And in genetic counseling often we diagnose people but it's not an isolated thing, it's sort of within their familial context and obviously that means that family dynamics come into it. And in a previous podcast with a genetic counselor from Australia, laura Forrest, she was an author on a paper that looked at genetic counseling and people sharing results through social media and there was a quote. It was something like I don't talk to my sister but she needs to know, and the lady was able to reach out on Facebook and let her sister know about the result in the family and it's like, oh, families are complicated.
Janice Berliner:Families are very complicated and when we think about duty to warn, sometimes it's not that the patient doesn't want her family members to know, it's that she doesn't want to have to talk to them For whatever reason, there's a rift. So if the genetic counselor or the oncologist, or whoever it might be, is able to say hey, with your permission, I will reach out to this person in the family. But can you give me a little idea of what kind of person this is Like? Is she likely to be angry? Is she likely to be scared? Is she likely to lash out, like, gather some information and go at it that way? But it isn't easy. We try to I hate to use the word convince, but try to explain to our patients why it's important for their family members to know. But my idea for that book in the first place was the issue of confidentiality versus duty to warn, and when I told people initially about it they were like, well, that sounds really dry and boring. But no, no, no, no, I won't write it dry and boring.
Matt Burgess:Excellent. So Rook's Promise came out in 2019. In Good Conscience came out in 2021. It's now 2023. Hi, does that mean you have another book of the horizon?
Janice Berliner:I do, but not. You know, this seemed to be a September, october kind of thing. It's not going to be ready for that, unfortunately. My job, as you well know, is big and busy and takes a lot of time, so I have not had the time to devote to the next one. I've written nine chapters so far. I don't actually know how many it's going to be, because I've only outlined maybe 10 chapters ahead of where I'm currently working, although I have an idea of where I'm going in the end. Certainly this one's going to be about familial psychiatric illness.
Janice Berliner:Oh interesting, which I find a very interesting topic and somewhat near and dear to my family history. So it's important to me to talk about it and my main two goals with this are, first, to try to work with others to destigmatize psychiatric illnesses to some extent, to make everybody realize everyone has these things in their families, whether they realize it or not. You didn't do anything to cause it. You couldn't have done anything to prevent it. But there are things you can do to mitigate it to some extent.
Janice Berliner:And I also want people to understand that what is inherited is not the specific disorder but the predisposition to psychiatric disorders as a general topic. So somebody doesn't pass on schizophrenia, but what might be passed on is a propensity toward psychiatric illness that may take many different forms and different members of a family. So you may have one person who has schizophrenia, one who has bipolar disorder, one who has a gambling addiction and one who's anorexic, something like that. Much like autoimmune disorders right, where you might see a family where there's many more autoimmune disorders than you might expect just based on statistics alone. But they're not all the same.
Matt Burgess:Yes, yeah, I guess we sort of refer to that as multifactorial inheritance. So there's genetic component, but environmental and whether if we stay healthy or if we take drugs or abuse alcohol and all of those things can affect the outcome. So, yeah, that sounds very interesting and I guess in the last few minutes I think we need to talk about our dogs. Oh, okay.
Janice Berliner:Always happy to do that.
Matt Burgess:So I've got a dog called Banjo, Since I've never had a dog before and now I'm obsessed. And you have a dog called Winston, and Winston and Banjo are about to have their first play date. Yes, very excited.
Janice Berliner:Yeah, the one time I met Banjo, you dressed him up, you showed me his Halloween costume and you look like a little hot dog and it was the cutest thing I ever saw.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, I mean dressing up in costumes is not his favorite thing to do, but it was good to dress him up.
Janice Berliner:Every game day we put Winston in the University of Michigan Jersey and he's okay with it. Okay, he has his little go blue collar around his neck all the time. He is a big Michigan fan.
Matt Burgess:Do you think he identifies as a person from Michigan?
Janice Berliner:I hope not, since he's never been in the state, but he's a good fan of the team basketball and football.
Matt Burgess:Oh, that's good, Because, yeah, banjo is about to become an Aussie doggy. We're taking him back to Australia. However, he is Amish. He was actually born in Pennsylvania, lancaster County, so I'm not quite sure how he identifies, but he's becoming more Australian every day.
Janice Berliner:Well, Winston was born on a dairy farm in upstate New York. For all I know, he's Amish too Good and dying.
Matt Burgess:Lovely Okay, before it gets any more ridiculous, maybe we should stop there.
Janice Berliner:Well, ridiculous is our middle name, Matt.
Matt Burgess:Thank you so much for demystifying genetics with me today. I am going to put the links to your fabulous books in the show notes and yeah.
Janice Berliner:I wish you and my website as well, janisforlinnercom, if you're looking for more information, blog posts and things like that.
Matt Burgess:Excellent Sounds good, so I wish you good luck writing your third book. Thank you All the best.
Janice Berliner:Thank you. Same to you. We will miss you when you move back to Australia. Their gain is our loss.
Matt Burgess:Thank you, I'll still talk to you.
Janice Berliner:I hope so. Hopefully you'll still work with me too.
Matt Burgess:Sounds good, thank you, bye-bye.
Janice Berliner:Thank you Bye.
Matt Burgess:So that's our show. I'd like to thank Janis for being a lovely podcast guest Always fun to chat with her. I would also like to thank Track Jean for sponsoring this episode and, as always, a big thank you to my producer, omiya.