During the summer I came across this Land Rover advertising campaign, (which is posted in the link below if you are interested) which equates its brand of sport utility vehicles with adventuresome types who like to base jump and do all sorts of exciting things like that.  It does this by explaining excitedly about this so-called “adventure gene”, known as DRD4-7R, which supposedly drives humans to explore and discover new things.  Now as a science student I was obviously skeptical of Land Rover’s claims that one single gene can be associated so strongly with a personality trait and at the same time I was curious about the scientific research regarding the 7R variant of DRD4.  A quick Google search containing the words adventure gene yielded a Nature article published in 2001 regarding the 7R allele of Dopamine receptor D4 and its association with novelty seeking.  This article was mostly geared towards psychology but from what I gather there was some controversy back then regarding findings related to this gene. Apparently, novelty seeking decreases with age so most of the test subjects were fairly young-aged 12-35 in studies that found a positive correlation, whereas  studies that failed to find a correlation used subjects aged 18-62.  In spite of this however, the writers of the article  concluded that there may be a correlation between the DRD4 long repeat allele and novelty-seeking, which is basically what the ad claimed, except that the article doesn’t feature any of the  enthusiasm exhibited by the Land Rover ad.  Additionally, the review seemed to also correlate the gene to substance abuse problems or at least an increased likelihood for the development of drug related dependency. A more recent review from a psychiatric journal (although it was citing papers from 2002 and earlier…) seems to implicate that the R7 allele has a role in substance abuse as well.  Now obviously Land Rover isn’t going to associate its ad campaign with negative high-risk behaviour like hard drug use, but in the end it is still an aspect of the same high-risk, high reward behaviour.  The conclusion I have come to, based on the little research that I have gathered is that the research related to DRD4 is more complicated then the ad lets on, which is obvious I guess considering that Land Rover is only interested in making their product sound exciting, they don’t want to let esoteric scientific minutiae get in the way of that.

As a side note, I think it is interesting to see Landrover use popular genetics for the purposes of advertising.  To the best of my knowledge I have never seen an advertising campaign do something like this before, perhaps we will see more advertising like this in the future.  More specifically, ads that use genes associated with personal qualities that will make the consumer feel like they to possess those qualities if they purchase said product.  I can see the ads now: “People with the cool guy gene use brand X, do you?”

Here is the write up land rover gives on DRD4-7R:

http://www.landrover.com/above-and-beyond/adventure-gene/adventure-gene.html

Here is the Nature article:

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v6/n5/full/4000918a.html

here is the Psychiatric review:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26146874