The DNA Behind the Data

by SHAWN RYAN

About 49.6% of people in Tennessee are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, among the Top 10 lowest rates in the nation.

Some of the refusal rate is suspicion of the vaccine’s effectiveness. Some is a sense of personal freedom. And some is directly due to religious beliefs.

It’s no surprise that religious beliefs are powerful in various contexts, says Ralph Hood, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Religious beliefs have raised and destroyed civilizations and inspired dozens of artistic masterpieces and horrible desecrations. They continue to exert vast influence in the world today.

One area not always considered is medical concerns, says Hood, whose expertise is religion and spirituality. These days, that includes COVID-19 vaccines.

“It turns out that religious people and spiritual people have a wide range of reasons to use medicine. So even though medicine can be effective, you have countries that vary in religious and spiritual beliefs and whether or not they will accept vaccination,” he says.

Religious and spiritual beliefs can affect someone beyond health consequences, he says. They can make you adventurous or more cautious. They can dictate your level of education. They can determine what you read and what you eat and drink.

“If you’re somebody who likes security, if you like clear guidance, then you might like a religion that gives you clear guidelines and answers,” Hood says.

“But if you’re a person who is open to experience and investigating options, what you’ll find out is, the longer you’re in that religion, the more you find its limits, and then you look elsewhere."

They may even affect a person right down to the DNA. And that’s not speaking metaphorically.

Hood is researching just that.

He recently joined the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a longterm, population-based research project that has traced multiple generations of families from the Avon region of the United Kingdom. It started with pregnant mothers and their children in the early 1900s, continued with their children, then their grandchildren and now their greatgrandchildren. The study has tracked their entire lives from birth to death.

“One of the things we’re looking at,” he says, “is not only the changes in the physical but the changes in religious from spiritual beliefs.” Religion and spiritual beliefs are not the same, Hood explains.

Religion is built on a particular faith or system of beliefs such as Christianity, Islam or Judaism. Spirituality is belief in God or a universal power but is not connected to a denomination or specific belief system. Religion can be more rigid in the doctrines on which it’s based, he says.

In the Avon study, among other measurements, researchers have taken blood and bone samples, kept track of illnesses, what books have been read, calculated the amount of pollution they encounter and how close they live to green spaces. They’ve studied the subjects’ eating habits, what they’re studying in school, their friends and relatives, their sexual partners, their careers.

“They collected data from Day One on religious beliefs, their parents’ beliefs, their cohort’s beliefs,” Hood says. “They also are able to compare people that go to religious parochial schools vs. public schools, so we have that data.

“The study will now be balanced between physical phenomena, medical phenomena and religious/spirituality.”

The study’s overall goal is to see how all these behaviors, lifestyles and personal beliefs have affected the participants down to their very DNA and personalities.

The study recently received a three-year, $9.5-million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, a Pennsylvania-based philanthropic organization that funds research into the intersection of religion and science.

With their share of the funding, Hood and researchers from seven other American universities will take a deep dive into more than 100 years of data from past generations as well as participants now being studied, seeing whether behavior affects DNA.

“Would it mean what you eat? What your job is? And how does schooling affect it?” Hoods asks.

“The geneticists have all that data. I think I’d like to explore that more.”