This differing opinion suggests that if you have a family member who is conservative, don't give up. Its not too late to try various forms of therapy or medical treatment to correct the problem:

When the highly anticipated sequencing of the human genome was completed, a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle announced: "Genome Discovery Shocks Scientists." The discovery was that many fewer genes were found (30,000) for the human genome than had been expected (100,000), and discussion focused on the wonder of it all: that a fertile human egg could create such a different organism than a mouse egg, where the human egg had only 300 unique genes not found in the mouse.

News articles also made much of the fact that many genes interacting with one another seemed to be as important in determining human diseases as a few "major" genes. Another bit of news was that there are more proteins and genes and this was a surprise because of the accepted idea that each gene encodes a single protein.

But on all of these matters, except for the 300 unique human genes, the "discoveries" were not new, nor were they shocking. We have seen suggestions of 30,000 to 40,000 genes for at least a year; we have known for some time that different species have highly similar genomes--humans and chimps for example; and genetic interaction has been part of freshman genetics for at least 30 years. Finally, we have known for years that DNA sequences within one gene may be used in coding many proteins.

In short, many biologists, world wide, have known for decades that genetics alone is not sufficient to explain life's complex outcomes, and that another kind of information management system must be present (see below). For them, none of this news was a surprise and we must ask why our HGP scientists appeared to be so shocked.

But after almost a century of life sciences dominated by this theory, and after ten years of the HGP dedicated to finding the genes for human diseases, their diagnosis and cure, and with the human genome finally sequenced, and biotechnologists and drug companies standing by around the world to implement these diagnoses and cures-after all that, to announce that the entire project was based on an incomplete and flawed theory would have been much more than "shocking." It would have been a scandal.

So, instead of being appraised of deeper problems with the HGP, we have been distracted by press reports of lesser failures having to do with mistakes concerning gene numbers and comparisons of human beings with other species (neither of which is new). Nevertheless, these disclosures are damning enough and led Craig Venter, the president of Celera, the U.S. corporate group, partnered with the U.S. government and other national DNA sequencing teams, to conclude: "This [the surprising findings] tells me genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are."

So, at a minimum, we may conclude that the theory behind the technology to be applied to living cells is flawed. While it does tell us much about our genome, it tells us little about who we are and how we got that way.

If Gould and Venter are correct in saying that genes alone cannot tell us who we are, then what will tell us? If the program for life is not in our genes, then where is it, and what is it? Many of us have been saying for years that there is no program in the sense of an inherited, pre-existing script ready to be read. Rather, inside each cell there are regulatory networks of proteins that function to sense or measure changes in the cellular environment and interpret those signals so that the cell makes an appropriate response.

from Toward a new paradigm for life; Beyond genetic determinism
By Richard Strohman)