The obessive compulsive cleanliness disorder gene

As I inspected the house yesterday to see whether it is ready to receive the parents, I was stuck by the injustice of it all. I mean to say that the family as a whole (the parents, the brother, the sister-in-law) all seem to be stuck on cleaning, cleaning, and some more cleaning, while I do not care. I mean it is a case of it is okay, I can live with it, and when it becomes too much I will clean everything up. In that process I usually end up throwing away valuable things which sort of then justifies my not cleaning, if you follow my argument.

So I thought about it a little bit. After all today I know more about genetics than I did four years back thanks to teaching the subject every year.

The more I thought about it the more I became convinced that there exists an obsessive compulsive cleanliness gene. Looking at the pattern of inheritance (it has skipped me) I think it is a dominant gene.

Let us designate the gene OCD. This is the dominant form. When expressed the patient wants to clean everything. The recessive form is ocd, where the person can live with some amount of untidiness.

The parents I think are heterozygous to this gene. If they were homozygous, then I too should be afflicted with this disease. As I am not, the parents have to be heterozygous, with one copy of the disease gene and one copy of the normal gene. Therefore, the genotype of both the parents is OCD/ocd.

This means that F1 progeny (that is my brother and me) had 50% chance of being OCD/ocd, 25% chance of being ocd/ocd, and 25% chance of being OCD/OCD.

Given the way my brother cleans every thing (he beats the parents hollow) I am convinced that he is OCD/OCD. Extremely clean. He gets up in the morning and starts cleaning. What amazes me is that he got a wife who is exactly like him in this aspect.

And I am ocd/ocd-there is no such concept as clean, clean, clean all the time in me.

It is all in the genetics. I felt little better.

The house is not cleaned up despite my best intentions. But then if it was cleaned, what would the parents clean when they come? Then they would be bored. And their expectations would rise up. Every time they come they would expect the house to be ultra-clean. So thinking overall about it, and taking consolation from the genetics, I have given up on the idea of getting the house clean to their standards.