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“When I was a young adolescent, I thought for a while that I might want to be a priest or a minister,” he laughed. “But that’s because I was such a troubled child and had such a huge case of attention deficit disorder that I just wanted some way to get out of all the trouble I was in at the time. So for me it was probably not so much a deep sense of spirituality as a deep curiosity, combined with a willingness to do stuff that you’re not really supposed to do in science. That’s why I studied the gay gene, that’s why I studied personality. These are things that normal scientists are afraid to do, and I’m just, like, Heck, why not?”7

“So you’re still that troublemaking adolescent,” I observed.

“I’m still that troublemaking adolescent. But now I do it with a DNA extraction kit and scientific tools.”

Hamer described his study, which he conducted on his own time, using data collected for his work as a cancer specialist at the National Institutes of Health. He recruited about a thousand people, whom he asked to give a DNA sample and fill out the Cloninger “self-transcendence” test, the same one I had sprung on my mother.

Once Hamer knew which people scored high on spirituality and which scored high on cool rationalism, he looked for variations in their DNA.

Hamer found that the most spiritual people had one small difference in their DNA that was not present in the less spiritual people. The variation was located in a gene called VMAT2, which regulates dopamine and serotonin, both chemicals that affect the way people perceive the world and the way they feel about it.

“Everybody has the so-called God gene, the VMAT2 gene,” Hamer said. “But they have very slightly different versions of it. So it’s like different flavors of ice cream, some people like chocolate, some people like vanilla. Some people have the more spiritual version of the VMAT2 gene, others have the less spiritual version.”

Did this gene alone account for all of the difference in spirituality between two people? No. Half of it? Wrong again. The discovery, it turns out, was somewhat more modest: VMAT2 accounted for less than one percent of the difference in spirituality between two people. It raises the temperature from, say, 45 to 46 degrees, not from freezing to the boiling point. In other words, this is not the DNA equivalent of the Almighty who fills heaven and earth. It’s more like Pan, or Persephone, or the Furies: one small gene in a pantheon of genes.

“Clearly this is not the gene that makes people spiritual,” Hamer conceded, adding that he regretted the title of his book (although that title has surely accounted for robust sales). “There probably is no single gene. It’s one of many different genes and factors that are involved. As a biochemist, I don’t expect to solve the mystery of spirituality with one genetic analysis. But I do hope that it will inspire other scientists to get involved in this area.”

I asked him if his research had influenced his view of God.

“When I started out, I was a typical scientist, completely skeptical of anything religious—you know, ‘the opiate of the masses.’ As I was researching the book, I made it a habit to do various spiritual or religious things. I went to religious services every Sunday. I spent a week in a Buddhist retreat in Japan, studying Zen. And the more I did this, the more I realized that, yeah, this really is a very powerful thing.

“But it hasn’t affected whether I think there’s a ‘God’ or not,” he continued.“I don’t see any compelling evidence that there is. I have no disproof, either, so I’m your classic agnostic.”

This rooting around for God in the genes reminded me of an acquaintance of mine, a neurosurgeon who loved carving tumors out of people’s brains. The surgery is so interesting, he would say to me, but he never mentioned whether the patient lived or died unless I asked him. As I talked to Hamer, I recognized the same sentiment: whether or not God exists didn’t really matter to him; he had no dog in that fight. I wanted