Studying Adam Lanza: is evil in our genes?

Studying the DNA of gunman Adam Lanza could revolutionise our understanding of spreekillers. Why are so many scientists against it? Julia Llewellyn Smith reports.

Adam Lanza Photo: REX FEATURES

By Julia Llewellyn Smith

6:30AM BST 10 Apr 2013

Adam Lanza was a loner: highly intelligent with a ghostly pallor;; awkward but pleasant seeming;;described by his own brother as a “nerd”.

On December 14 last year, Lanza, 20, walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in the affluenttown of Newtown, Connecticut, and over the next two hours shot 20 children and six adults dead,before turning the gun on himself. Already that day, he’d killed his mother with her shotgun.

Why had this young man, as opposed to millions of other “geeky” outsiders, murdered 27innocents? The media talked about Lanza’s mother’s gun collection;; the fact he had no Facebookpage and no photo of him appeared in his high-­school yearbook, only the words “camera-­shy”.But at the same time, scientists at the University of Connecticut were embarking on a different

line of inquiry. The genetics department was analysing Lanza’s DNA.

The university refused to give any details about these investigations – possibly of cells fromLanza’s brain, but equally likely from cells taken from his hair or the gun he used – or what theyhoped they could reveal from the analysis. But the news shone a light on an area of behaviouralgenetics that provokes deeply divergent opinions both within the scientific community and inwider society. Is it possible that there is a gene that makes some people “evil”? Could futuremurderers be spotted before they have committed a crime? And should they be punished if theyare simply prisoners of their own biology?

Some scientists rejected the announcement, saying it was “almost inconceivable” there was acommon genetic factor among mass murderers. But others applaud the initiative.

“Only by studying individuals [like Lanza] as thoroughly as possible will we some day be able toreduce the frequency of these sad episodes,” says Dr Art Beaudet, chairman of the Department ofMolecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “The geneticresearch should include genomic copy number analysis, whole genome sequencing andepigenetic analysis of post-­mortem brain tissue.”

Kathleen Taylor, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, agrees that no line of investigation intocriminal behaviour should be dismissed out of hand. “More knowledge is always useful,” shesays. “We don’t know nearly enough about extreme violence and its effects on the brain. There’sonly one person involved in this analysis, so we can’t really draw any conclusion, but if they findLanza has a very unusual type of gene or a particular type of neurotransmitter, they could at leastbe making a start.”

This is thought to be the first time scientists have analysed the genetic blueprint of a “spreekiller”, but it’s far from the first attempt to examine a murderer’s biology. In 1931, the brain of the“Vampire of Düsseldorf”, Peter Kürten, a serial killer, was removed from his corpse after hisexecution for examination, although no useful conclusions were published. Today, it is displayedin Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum in Wisconsin.

Over the past decade, Dr Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico, has visitedeight high-­security prisons in two US states with a mobile MRI unit, scanning the brains ofcriminals to see if those defined as psychopaths have different brain structures from “someonewho commits a robbery out of poverty”, as Kiehl puts it.

Dr Kiehl’s and others’ research

has found that psychopaths’

brains tend to have very low

levels of density in the

paralimbic system, the area of

the brain associated with the

processing of emotion,

something that may be

genetically determined. The

result is that psychopaths tend to

have impulsive personalities and

show little evidence of feeling guilt, remorse or empathy.

In contrast, “spree killers” tend to be extremely depressed, to the point of suffering from a

delusional psychosis accompanied by voices or hallucinations, or – as in Lanza’s case – to be

young people with physiologically immature brains, who in their state of ultra-­sensitivity decide

to exact “revenge” on the world for perceived injustices.

Recent years have seen huge advancements in DNA research, with researchers now able toidentify specific genes that are linked to anti-­social or aggressive behaviour, in particular the

MAO-­A gene (nicknamed “the warrior gene”), which appears to be hereditary.

A study of Danish twins concluded that a Danish man who has an identical twin with a criminal

record is about 50 per cent more likely to have been in prison himself than the average Danish

male. Non-­identical twins are between 15 and 30 per cent more likely to both have criminal

records. Similarly, adoption studies around the world have shown that a child of criminal parents

is more likely to become a criminal, even if the adoptive parents are law-­abiding.

Irving Gottesman, a psychologist at the University of Virginia who has worked on the Danish twin

study, believes the results show that “criminals are not born, but the odds at the moment of birth

of becoming one are not even”.

But so controversial are the links between biology and violence that only the bravest scientists

have dared tackle it. “There are many political objections and that means there’s not been enough

research into the area,” says Kiehl.

In the United States, projects set up to investigate the issue have been shelved after public uproar.Scientists are haunted by the ghosts of the pseudoscientific eugenics movement, which held thatmankind could be improved by breeding out the bad. Peaking in the early 20th century, itsinfluence led to the sterilisation of mental patients and prisoners and, by extension, to Hitler’s“final solution” of eliminating the “Untermenschen”.

Today, opponents of such research worry that because minority groups tend to commit mostcrimes, we will blame their colour, which is genetically determined, rather than their low socio-­economic status. Others fear that if criminal urges are shown to have biological or genetic origins,then crime will no longer be associated with parents, society, education – or anything else that hasthe potential to be improved.

“Looking at a criminal’s environment is hard,” says Taylor. “If you say Lanza was a loner, hewatched too much television and Hollywood culture is far too violent, then it spreads theresponsibility, it makes us all feel uneasy. It’s far easier to say it’s all about the genes.” Lanzaspent hours on the internet, a fact likely to make any parent of a teenager uncomfortable. Hisparents had also divorced bitterly – tough news for similar couples to swallow.

The truth is, history is full of examples of “normal” people committing terrible atrocities.Thousands of “ordinary” Germans, Rwandans and Cambodians committed unspeakable atrocitiesin genocides, of whom only a tiny percentage could have been mentally unstable or psychopathic.

In the infamous Stanford Prison experiment of 1971, where student recruits were instructed to actas prisoners and guards, the latter group behaved with such astonishing cruelty that theexperiment was aborted. The results, said the experiment’s instigator, Prof Philip Zimbardo,showed that “the majority of us can be seduced into behaving in ways totally atypical of what webelieve we are”.

Yet, as Taylor points out in her book Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain, even in the worstatrocities brain chemistry is at work. Perpetrators’ neural pathways harden so that they end upbelieving, in the unwavering way that we believe the sun will rise the following morning, thatcertain members of society are contaminants that must be harmed or exterminated. But if allcriminal behaviour can be attributed to neurological tics, then what happens to the age-­oldquestion of free will? If a war criminal was brainwashed, or a murderer can be proved to beinsane, will they no longer be responsible for their actions? Will the concept of evil become

extinct, replaced by a black-­or-­

white notion of a functioning or

malfunctioning brain?

By the same token, would we

continue to reward virtue?

Would we continue to praise

heroes, or would we simply

acknowledge that they had a

well-­developed amygdala?

Such questions have already

made the new fields of neurolaw

and neuroethics hot topics.

Universities, law schools and,

increasingly, the judicial system

are all reviewing cases where it

seems “the brain” rather than

“the person” might be culpable.

In the US, several killers have

been sentenced for manslaughter

rather than murder after DNA evidence was produced to show the perpetrator had unusually high

levels of MAO-­A. In Italy, in 2009, a judge reduced the sentence of an Algerian called

Abdelmalek Bayout for the same reason. Bayout had stabbed a man to death in the northern city

of Udine after a comment about his appearance.

Naturally, such cases are greeted with horror by victims’ families. The flip side to such

developments is an Orwellian world where any potential criminal is locked up, and the key thrown

away. Many fear that carriers of “criminal” genes could be identified even in the womb, raising a

question of what to do with the embryos.

Essi Vidling, professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London, whohas carried out extensive research into psychopathy in children, describes the research into

Lanza’s genes as “a complete bloody waste of time”. She says: “Colleagues and I are perplexed as

to what would be the point. The authorities want to reassure people, ‘We are doing our best to

explain why this happened,’ but

the aim of the exercise is not

scientifically informative

because it only involves one

person. It’s a desire not to leave

any stone unturned.”

Yet she agrees juries love

nothing more than brain scans.

“They are seriously fascinated

by these images and studies have

shown they are much more likely

to believe an argument when it’s

backed up by pictures of the brain. But everyone I know in the field who does responsible

research, doesn’t think these data are ready to go into a courtroom. In any case, even if you have a

vulnerability, you still have responsibility and, since you do, society has no right to punish you

pre-­emptively.”

Even scientists who have proved the unusual brain structures of psychopaths believe it is still

impossible to dismiss environmental factors. Nearly all psychopaths suffered physical and

emotional abuse as children. “Genes like MAO-­A are not crime-­promoting genes in themselves

but they can create a vulnerability in someone who has already had a deleterious childhood,” says

Dr Nigel Blackwood of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, who has done

research in the field. “Even then, you can’t say this person will definitely commit a crime. Some

children are very sensitive to maltreatment, others are not.”

Scientists also point out that brain structures can be altered by environmental factors, meaning no

one is destined for a life of crime, just as someone with large hips is not doomed to heart disease if

they eat healthily and exercise. “Twin studies show DNA can be influenced by body chemistry,

what you eat, what you hear, what you feel, by the presence of various hormones,” says Taylor.

With so many other factors to consider, what is the point in investigating criminals’ brain

chemistry? According to Dr Blackwood, it’s to tailor appropriate therapy for those who commit

crimes in “hot blood”, as opposed to the differently wired “cold-­blooded” criminals. “For most

conduct-­disorder children parent-­training programmes work well, but they’re less successful with

children with callous and unemotional traits,” he says. “We need to adapt treatments for this

group.” What treatments would be best is still far from clear, although researchers largely agreethat with this group, rewarding good behaviour works far better than punishments, to which theyare usually indifferent.

Could things have been different for the Lanza family if their youngest son’s brain had beenscanned at an early age? It’s all conjecture. As Dr Kent Kiehl says: “The only thing we can be sureof is that if Lanza’s mother had locked away her guns, this tragedy might have been avoided.”

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