Biotechnology:
A Geneticist’s Personal Perspective
Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Cyclops, Dr. Caligari, Dr. Strangelove. The scientist who does not face up to the warning in this persistent folklore of mad doctors is himself the worst enemy of science. In these images of our popular culture resides a legitimate public fear of the scientist’s stripped down, depersonalized conception of knowledge— a fear that our scientists, well-intentioned and decent men and women all, will go on being titans who create monsters.
—Theodore Roszak
A Personal History
I would like to begin by providing some history and context that may elucidate where my perspective comes from. I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1936. Both of my parents were born in Vancouver about twenty-five years earlier. In 1942, my Canadian-born and -raised family was stripped of all rights of citizenship, our property and assets were seized and sold at fire sale prices, our bank accounts were frozen and ultimately looted, and we were incarcerated for three years in primitive camps located deep in the Rocky Mountains. Our crime was sharing genes with Canada’s enemy, who was also our enemy because we were Canadians. As World War II drew to an end, we were confronted with two choices: renounce citizenship and receive a one-way ticket to Japan or leave British Columbia and resettle east of the Rocky Mountains.
Pearl Harbor and our subsequent evacuation, incarceration, and expulsion shaped the lives and psyche of all Japanese Canadians. For me, those events created my hang-ups (about my slitty eyes) and my drive to prove my worth to fellow Canadians. And the results of the war left me with a lifelong knee-jerk aversion to any hint of bigotry or discrimination and a passion for civil rights.
Falling in Love with Genetics
All my life, nature was my touchstone, my life, my passion. As a boy, my love of fish and fishing led to a hope of becoming an ichthyologist. Later, when my mother sewed me a net for collecting insects, my dreams were transformed to a life of entomology. After moving to Ontario at war’s end, I was fortunate in receiving a generous scholarship to Amherst College, where I did an honors degree in biology and fell madly in love with the elegance and precision of genetics. I declined my acceptance to medical school in order to pursue a degree in genetics at the University of Chicago. After spending a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the famous Biology Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, I decided to leave the racism of the southern U.S. to return to Canada.
My first academic position was as an assistant professor in genetics at the University of Alberta. As the most junior faculty member, I was assigned to teach genetics to second-year agriculture students. To my delight and surprise, they were the most enjoyable class I ever taught in my academic career. They asked questions about plant and animal breeding, about cloning and the future of genetic engineering—questions I hadn’t studied or thought much about. So I had to do a lot of reading. When I took a position in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia a year later, most of my students were premedical students. Again they asked questions that I was not prepared for—this time about hereditary disease and medical genetics—and I had to read up. And it was in the reading to answer student questions that I encountered the grotesque intersection between two great passions of my life: civil liberties and genetics.
The Dark History of Genetics
I discovered that the genetics I had been taught had been expunged of much of its history. I found that early in the twentieth century, biologists were justifiably enthralled with discoveries of principles of inheritance and their broad applicability from plants to insects to mammals. There was a sense that with these laws of heredity, scientists were acquiring the capacity to control evolution and shape the biology of organisms, including humans, at will.
Extrapolating from studies of petal color in flowers, wing shape in fruit flies and fur patterns in guinea pigs, geneticists began to make pronouncements about the role of genes in human heredity and behavior. A new discipline was created—eugenics, the science of human heredity. Eugenics was supported by leading scientists of the time and taught as a discipline in universities. There were eugenics journals and textbooks and eugenics societies. At last, it was believed, here was a solid basis on which human evolution could be directed. Positive eugenics was the increase of desirable genes in a population; negative eugenics was the decrease in incidence of undesirable genes. Not surprisingly, those traits deemed desirable were disproportionately exhibited by upper-middle-class Caucasians, whereas those that were undesirable were expressed in blacks, the poor, and criminals.
Characteristics for which hereditary claims were made included syphilis, tuberculosis, drunkenness, indolence, criminality, and deceit. Eminent scientists backed eugenics and gave it legitimacy. For example, Edward East, a Harvard professor and president of the Genetics Society of America, states in his eugenics text: “In reality, the Negro is inferior to the White. This is not hypothesis or supposition; it is a crude statement of actual fact.” The problem, of course, is that “inferior” is not a scientifically meaningful category. Like “superior,” “better,” and “worse,” it is a value judgment. In their enthusiasm and zeal for the exciting discoveries in genetics, scientists like East confused their own personal values and beliefs with scientifically demonstrated “fact.”
Racism Justified by Science
With such enthusiasm and grand claims being expressed by scientists, it is not surprising that politicians noticed and began to use these ideas to justify their own prejudices. A.W. Neill, a British Columbia member of Parliament, stated in 1937: “To cross an individual of the white race with an individual of a yellow race, is to produce in nine cases out of ten, a mongrel wastrel with the worst qualities of both races.” Although it was not quite a Mendelian ratio, Neill actually put a number to his claims.
In February 1941, Neill told the prime minister: “We in British Columbia are firmly convinced that once a Jap, always a Jap.” In other words, it didn’t matter that there were second- and third-generation Canadians who had been born and grown up in Canada. If they were Japanese genetically, Neill and others in British Columbia believed all the traits of treachery, untrustworthiness, and so on were genetically encoded. This attitude was reflected by General John deWitt, who was charged with the evacuation of Japanese Americans during World War II and said in February 1942:
Racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of American citizenship, have become “Americanized”, the racial strains are undiluted … It therefore follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today.
Our evacuation was justified by the claims of the scientific community about the significance of their discoveries. To my horror, I discovered as well that genetics had flourished in Germany before the war. It was scientists who helped shape some of the “progressive” legislation of the Nazi government, including the Race Purification Laws that resulted in the Holocaust. The infamous Josef Mengele was a human geneticist who held two peer-reviewed grants to carry out his study of twins at Auschwitz. By the end of World War II, revulsion at the revelation of Nazi death camps shifted the predominant opinion of geneticists to the notion that human intelligence and behavior were shaped primarily by the environment (nurture) rather than heredity (nature). The important point to remember is that this shift occurred with no significant new insight or breakthrough in science. mmn
Biological Determinism Again
The belief in the overriding influence of nurture held until 1969, when Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist at Berkeley, published “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” in the Harvard Educational Review. This massive study pulled together many reports of differences in IQ test scores between black and white populations. To geneticists, the question of what an IQ test actually measures is not an issue. The distribution of scores in both populations forms the familiar bell-shaped curve, but repeatedly, the two curves have a mean difference of about one standard deviation, the white means always being higher than the black means. Using extensive mathematical analyses, Jensen purported to show that the difference in means was determined primarily by heredity. His study was immediately cited by politicians such as Mississippi governor George Wallace and President Richard Nixon to justify cutting back programs such as Operation Headstart that were designed to help disadvantaged children.
Nature versus Nurture in a Racist Society
Jensen was not a geneticist. Oxford’s Walter Bodmer and Stanford’s Luca Cavalli-Sforza are respected population geneticists and wrote the most definitive treatise on the issue of race and IQ. If we use a less emotive illustration than race and IQ, say, the height to which bean plants grow, it can be demonstrated that there is a hereditary component in the familiar bell-shaped curve of the distribution of plant height grown from a population of seeds. That is, seeds taken from short plants will on average grow up on the short side, seeds from tall plants will be taller, and seeds from the center will fall in between. So there is a strong component of heritability determining plant height.
If we then plant one handful of seeds in moist, fertile soil and plant another handful in sandy, dry soil, we will get different results. There will be a bell-shaped distribution from both plots, and in both populations, we can show that seeds of short ones will grow up short, seeds of tall ones will be taller, and those in the middle will be in between. So in both populations, there is a strong factor of heritability in plant height. But it is absolutely incorrect to conclude that the difference in mean height between the populations reflects a component of heritability, because the only difference between them is the environment in which they are grown.
Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza conclude that only when society is completely color-blind—when being black or white makes no difference in the way children are seen or treated—can we even begin to try to compare IQ scores to determine the component of heritability. Despite that definitive conclusion, a number of scientists, none of them geneticists, began to suggest that human intelligence and behavior have a large genetic component. Psychologist Hans Eysenck and Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Hans Krebs began to publish papers purporting to show that criminality has a high component of heritability. Harvard’s Richard Herrnstein claimed that social class in a meritocracy like the U.S. is far more likely to reflect genes than work habits. And in Canada, a president of the Canadian Medical Association suggested that before receiving a welfare check, people should be sterilized to keep their genes from being perpetuated in future generations. mmmmm
Molecular Genetics—History Repeats Itself
Where did the doctor’s great project go wrong? Not in his intentions which were beneficent, but in the dangerous haste and egotistic myopia with which he pursued his goal. It is both a beautiful and terrible aspect of our humanity, this capacity to be carried away by an idea. For all the best reasons, Victor Frankenstein wished to create a new and better human type. What he knew was the secret of the creature’s physical assemblage; he knew how to manipulate the material parts of nature to achieve an astonishing result. What he did not know was the secret of personality in nature. Yet he raced ahead, eager to play God, without knowing God’s most divine mystery.
—THEODORE ROSZAK
Just as eugenicists early in the twentieth century became intoxicated with the discoveries being made, molecular biologists have created a climate of belief in the basic role of genes in just about every human trait. Powerful tools to isolate and manipulate DNA confer truly revolutionary powers. Almost weekly, headlines proclaim the latest isolation of a gene for a trait, from risk taking to depression, shyness, alcoholism, and homosexuality. Few note that in the months after the initial claims, follow-ups generally fail to corroborate the original claim or they show that hereditary involvement is far more complex.
One of the big mistakes made is a confusion between correlation and causation. Take, for example, the gene controlling the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (adh). There exist two different states of this gene, adhA and adhB. Suppose a study demonstrates that 80 percent of alcoholics have the adhA gene whereas 80 percent of nonalcoholics have adhB. That is a correlation. But it is completely incorrect to conclude that adhA causes alcoholism, yet the press and even scientists themselves frequently fall into that trap.
Think of it this way. Suppose you study all people who die from lung cancer in Vancouver over the past ten years and discover that 90 percent of them had stained, yellow fingers and teeth. That is a correlation. Who would ever conclude that stained yellow fingers and teeth cause lung cancer? Yet it happens over and over when molecular biologists isolate fragments of DNA that correlate with traits, some as diverse and complex in expression as homosexuality.
Rapid Growth of Revolutionary Science
Genetic engineering is a truly revolutionary area of science, made possible by the incredible speed and power of newly acquired techniques. When my daughter was in her last undergraduate year of university, she isolated, sequenced, and compared mitochondrial DNA of three geographically separated but related plant species for a senior research project! It was breathtaking to me because such experiments were inconceivable when I graduated forty years earlier. So I understand why there is so much excitement. I too am excited and have followed genetic engineering vicariously for many years. But in a revolutionary area where excitement abounds, history informs us there is all the more reason to encourage vigorous debate and to be critical and cautious.
By the 1970s, it had become clear to me that molecular genetics was going to revolutionize the field and have profound social ramifications. Biotechnology refers to the field of applied genetics wherein molecular manipulations are carried out in living cells and organisms. The impetus for biotechnology was the ability to make combinations of DNA molecules from diverse species and to test those molecules in living cells. The technique was known as recombinant DNA. As a columnist for the National Research Council of Canada publication Science Forum, I wrote in 1977: m
For young scientists who are under enormous pressure to publish to secure a faculty position, tenure or promotion, and for established scientists with “Nobelitis,” the siren’s call of recombinant DNA is irresistible.… In my own laboratory, there is now considerable pressure to clone Drosophila DNA sequences in E. coli.… My students and postdocs take experiments and techniques for granted that were undreamed of five or ten years ago. We feel that we’re on the verge of really understanding the arrangement, structure and regulation of genes in chromosomes. In this climate of enthusiasm and excitement, scientists are finding the debate over regulation and longterm implications of recombinant DNA a frustrating roadblock to getting on with the research.
A year later, having encountered little support within the scientific community to engage in critical discussion about the social, moral, and ethical implications of recombinant DNA, I tried to explain the reluctance in Science Forum:
I can appreciate the pressures that are brought to bear to stifle dissent within the scientific community. Peer approval brings with it invitations to give lectures, to speak at symposia and honorary positions in scientific organizations. The driving priorities of young scientists are to get and keep good sized grants and achieve recognition, tenure and promotion. Therefore, outspoken criticism is understandably rare in this group and they depend on people higher up in the scientific hierarchy to set their objectives.… What am I saying? Not that scientists are evil, malicious or irresponsible— rather that our personal priorities, membership in a vested interest group, ambitions and goals prevent us from objectively weighing the social against personal consequences of our work.
A Personal Moratorium on Genetic Engineering
My own personal experience with the consequences of well-intentioned but scientifically unjustified claims and the insights I had gained while trying to answer my students’ questions had made it clear to me that there was a very important need for scientists to engage in public discussions about the significance and implications of their work. Because I wanted to be able to participate credibly in this discussion, I declared in a 1977 column in Science Forum:
Can the important questions be addressed objectively when one has such high stakes in continuing the work? I doubt it. Therefore, I feel compelled to take the position that … no such experiments [on recombinant DNA] will be done in my lab; reports of such experiments will not acknowledge support by money from my grants; and I will not knowingly be listed as an author of a paper involving recombinant DNA.
I had achieved far more in science than I had ever dreamed of or hoped for. It had been the joy of research that absorbed me for a quarter of a century. I loved the excitement and camaraderie of the lab. I was proud of our group, at one time the largest in Canada, and the work we did.
But it was the muddy area of extrapolation of scientific insights to broader society that concerned me, because there were numerous examples of individuals making claims far beyond their scientific legitimacy. I felt that some of us whose careers and reputations were not in jeopardy had to forgo this work in order to take part, as scientists, in the discussions of the moral and ethical questions free from the bias of vested interest in the work. Scientists working for the nuclear, tobacco, and petrochemical industries, either as employees or recipients of research grants, speak from a perspective of those with a stake in continuing income and research support, and therefore it’s natural that they would tend to deflect criticism rather than discuss it openly. There was no reason to suppose that scientists in biotechnology would be any different. Eventually I stopped taking government grants altogether because grants are awarded by peers, almost all of whom are promoters of research without regard to social or ethical concerns. I didn’t want to be dependent on, and thus vulnerable to, the influence of outside agendas.
Damned If I Do, Damned If I Don’t
As a popularizer of science through newspaper columns, television, and radio, I am able to survey a far broader range of topics and questions than I ever did as a research scientist. Rather than losing my interest in the field of biotechnology and all of its implications, I have a broader perspective to reflect upon and have written extensively on the subject over the years. In 1986, I discussed moral and ethical issues of genetics in my autobiography, Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life. I wrote syndicated columns on genetics that became chapters in the best-selling books Inventing the Future and Time to Change. In 1988, science writer Peter Knudtson and I coined the term genethics and co-wrote Genethics: The Ethics of Engineering Life, which became a best-seller and continues to be widely used in university courses.
So it has been puzzling to me when individuals, some not even scientists, but spokespeople for the biotechnology industry, call my credibility into question. I deliberately gave up the day-to-day excitement of scientific research to remain a credible discussant on the moral and ethical implications of the new genetics. But I didn’t forget all I’d learned and practiced as a scientist. At the very least, all of us who participate in the discussion ought to be forthright about the sources of our funding, our position in companies, and any other factors that might influence our perspectives and bias our statements.
Biotechnology Is Here
Today products of biotechnology are being rammed into our food, onto our fields, and into our medicines, without any public participation in discussions and with the complicity—indeed, the active support and funding—of governments. But there are profound health, ecological, and economic ramifications of this activity. At the heart of biotechnology is the ability to manipulate the very blueprint of life, removing and inserting segments into diverse species for specified ends. While plant and animal breeding over the past ten millennia has built the agriculture we depend on, biotechnology takes us far beyond the crude techniques of breed and select. It behooves us, therefore, to examine the underpinnings of the claims, the potential, and the limits of this young field.
Biotechnology to Feed the World
Perhaps the most frequently cited rationale to get on with genetic engineering as rapidly as possible goes like this: Human population continues to increase by more than 80 million a year, most in the developing world. To avoid clearing more forests and draining wetlands to meet the needs of this burgeoning population, proponents argue, the only option to protect nature and feed the masses is to increase yields per hectare through biotechnology.
This argument carries a lot of weight, despite the irony that the number of people suffering from severe malnutrition is about equal to the number of people afflicted with obesity in the rich nations. However, biotechnology is being driven by vast sums of speculative money. To justify those investments and to attract even more money, a product is needed. That’s why so many companies have already foundered—they’ve failed to live up to the expectations of a product. The very survival of biotech companies depends on the expectation of profits from the company’s products, whether pharmaceutical or agricultural. Those products are made at enormous cost. In the case of food biotech, the people who are most desperately in need of food are also the poorest. James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, claims that 1.3 billion people exist on a dollar or less a day, while 3 billion struggle on two dollars or less daily. It would be a breathtaking reversal if free-enterprise capitalists were suddenly overwhelmed with generosity and concern for those less well off and made genetically engineered products available at prices the needy can afford. Feeding the starving masses through biotech is a cruel hoax that cannot be taken seriously.
The Real Nature of Scientific Knowledge
I have no doubt that important products will come out of genetic engineering— but in the more distant future. It is the profit-driven rush to grow genetically engineered organisms in fields, where they might contaminate other species, and to introduce new products into the market that is most disturbing. My major concerns are based on simple principles. Every scientist should understand that in any young, revolutionary discipline, most of the current ideas in the area are tentative and will fail to stand up to scrutiny over time. In other words, the bulk of the latest notions are wrong. This is by no means a knock on science; it is simply an acknowledgment that science progresses by demonstrating that current ideas are wrong or off the mark. The rush to exploit new products will be based on inaccurate hypotheses, so supposed benefits are questionable and could be downright dangerous.
I graduated as a fully licensed geneticist (that is, I had a Ph.D.) in 1961. It was eight years after Watson and Crick’s famous paper, and we had learned a lot—we knew about DNA, the number of human chromosomes, the operon, and so on. But today, when I tell undergraduates about the hottest ideas of chromosome structure and gene regulation in 1961, they laugh in disbelief. In 2003, the best notions of forty years earlier seem naïve and far from the mark. But those students are less amused when I suggest that twenty years from now, when they are established scientists, the ideas they are excited by now will seem every bit as quaint as the ones I was excited by in my early days. In any new area, scientists make a series of observations and then set up a hypothesis that makes sense of the observations. That hypothesis enables a researcher to design experiments to test its validity. When the experiment is performed and the data gathered, chances are that the hypothesis will be discarded or radically altered, and then further experiments will be suggested. That’s how science proceeds. But that procedure suggests we ought to proceed with far less haste. This sentiment is reinforced by Roger Perlmutter, executive vice-president of research and development for the biotech company Amgen: “Things we take as the absolute truth now are going to look pretty silly a few years from now.” He’s right on, but then the question is, why rush to exploit ideas that will turn out to be “pretty silly”? Isn’t that foolhardy, even dangerous?
Not Quite Ready
When a biotechnologist can clip out or synthesize a specific sequence of DNA, insert it at a precisely specified position in a host genome, and obtain the predicted expression of the inserted DNA with no other complications, then we can say that it is a “mature” discipline. But when that happens, one can’t publish papers on such a manipulation because it will be old hat. If you’ve checked biotech publications these days, you’ll be amazed at their number and variety. Those reports are based on experiments in which the researchers didn’t know what the results would be; after all, that’s why experiments are done and reported. Doesn’t the abundance of biotech papers inform us that we still have a huge amount to learn? That suggests strongly that the discipline is far from mature enough to leave the lab or find a niche in the market.
The problem with biotechnology as it’s presented today is that those pushing its benefits stand to gain enormously from it. I believe that they start from a sincere faith in the benefits and in our ability to “manage” the genetically engineered organisms and products safely. But we’ve learned from experience with the tobacco, nuclear, petrochemical, automobile, and pharmaceutical industries and military establishments that vested interest shapes a spokesperson’s perspective and precludes an ability to examine criticisms or concerns in an open fashion.
Linear Science—An Illusion
Promoters of biotechnology foster a version of how science proceeds that is totally at odds with real science. They confuse the way scientists write grant requests with reality. The game scientists play in grant applications is to act as if the money will be used to do experiment A, which will lead to experiment
B and on to C and D, and then, voilà, a cure for cancer. Scientists perpetuate the illusion that science progresses this way as justification for receiving a grant. It’s as if scientific discovery proceeds in a linear way—but nothing could be further from the truth. Experiment A is carried out because the researcher doesn’t know what the results will be and so has no idea where the results and then subsequent experiments will lead. That’s why despite all of the hoopla over biotechnology, so few concrete products have come forth and there is considerable controversy surrounding those that have reached test plots or the marketplace.
The great strength of science is in description. We discover things wherever we look because despite the enormous growth of science in the twentieth century, our knowledge of how the world around us works is still minuscule.
DDT—A Case Study
The fatal weakness of science is in prescription of solutions. A classic example is DDT, a complex ring molecule first synthesized in the nineteenth century. In the 1930s, Paul Mueller found that it kills insects. The power of chemistry to control a scourge that had plagued humankind since the beginning of time was widely trumpeted. At the time Mueller made his discovery, geneticists could have suggested that using an insecticide would simply select insects carrying mutations conferring resistance to the chemical. They would quickly replace the sensitive strains and thereby set farmers on a treadmill of requiring an endless string of different pesticides. Ecologists of that time could also have suggested that of all animals in the world, insects are the most numerous and diverse and play critical ecological roles such as pollination, predation, and feeding of other species. Perhaps one or two insect species per thousand species are pests to human beings. Using a broad-spectrum insecticide to get at the one or two species that are a nuisance to humans seems analogous to killing everyone in a city to control crime— pretty crude and unacceptable.
But in their exuberance over the power of chemistry, geneticists and ecologists failed to raise these concerns, millions of kilograms of DDT were manufactured and used, and Paul Mueller won a Nobel Prize in 1948. Years later, biologists discovered biomagnification of DDT up the food chain that eventually affects fish, birds, and mammals.
The history of DDT and later, CFCs, reveals that we are very clever at applying scientific insights for specific purposes, but the repercussions in the real world (for example, biomagnification and ozone depletion) could not be predicted beforehand and were only discovered after widespread use. There is absolutely no reason to think genetically engineered organisms and products will be free of such unexpected consequences.
A Clockwork Universe
Ever since Isaac Newton and René Descartes, scientists have assumed the cosmos is like an immense mechanical construct whose components can be examined piece by piece. If this is so, then, in principle, we can learn about parts of nature and eventually acquire enough knowledge of the fragments that we could put them all together to recover a picture of the whole. Biologists have been especially critical of any suggestion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; they see this idea as an expression of vitalism, a discredited notion that living organisms possess a kind of vital essence absent in nonlife. Few biologists are concerned with the problem that life arose from the aggregation of nonliving matter, even though the state of aliveness cannot be anticipated from the properties of the nonliving components.
Reductionism, the focusing on parts with the goal of understanding the whole of a mechanistic universe, has been a productive methodological approach. Thus, scientists focus on a subatomic particle, an atom, a gene, a cell, or tissue, separate it from everything else, control everything impinging on that fragment, measure everything within it, and thereby acquire profound insights—into that fragment. But physicists learned early in the last century that parts interact synergistically, so new properties emerge when you combine them that could not be anticipated from their individual properties. After defining all of the physical properties of atomic hydrogen and atomic oxygen, physicists would be at a total loss to anticipate the properties when two atoms of hydrogen are combined with one atom of oxygen to make a molecule of water. Biologists and doctors have yet to internalize that understanding. Thus, it was long assumed that by studying a chimpanzee in a cage, for example, one could learn everything there was to know about the species. It was only when Jane Goodall went out into the field and studied chimps in their natural habitat that she discovered a completely different animal. Biophysicist Brian Goodwin has shown that the collective behavior of ants within a colony cannot be explained by the sum of the behavior of individuals of each caste.
Missing the Whole by Focusing on Parts
In focusing, we lose sight of the rhythms, patterns, cycles, and context that make the object of study interesting in the first place. Biotechnology is the ultimate expression of reductionism, the faith that the behavior of individual pieces of DNA can be anticipated by studying them individually. Richard Strohman, a leading scientist and former chair of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at Berkeley, stated the problem this way:
When you insert a single gene into a plant or an animal, the technology will work … you’ll get the desired characteristic. But you will also … have produced changes in the cell or the organism as a whole that are unpredictable.… Genes exist in networks, interactive networks which have a logic of their own.… And the fact that the industry folks don’t deal with these networks is what makes their science incomplete and dangerous.… We are in a crisis position where we know the weakness of the genetic concept, but we don’t know how to incorporate it into a new, more complete understanding. mmm
Biotechnologists assume all pieces of DNA can be removed and inserted as if they are equivalent. But as Strohman points out, genes don’t exist as independent entities, they exist within complex sets of networks. From the moment of fertilization, whole suites of genes are turned on and off in an orchestrated sequence that leads to the development and differentiation of an individual. It is ultimately the total expression of that sequence and suite of genes that produces the phenotype—the visible characteristics—of the organism, and that is what natural selection acts upon. So the genome should not be seen as a bunch of individually functioning and selected genes; they act in concert. Biotechnologists assume that they can simply take a gene from a flounder, for example, and stick it into a tomato plant, where it will function and produce a predictable result. But that strikes me as comparable to taking Bono out of U2, sticking him into the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and asking him to play his music while the other musicians play theirs. They will all be playing music, but how it will all sound together cannot be anticipated.
Craig Venter is a brash entrepreneur who sought to finish decoding the sequence of the three billion letters of the human genome before anyone else. Setting up his own company, Celera, he created tremendous controversy and stimulated an acceleration of the project. Yet even such a booster of biotechnology as he admitted in 2000: “We know far less than 1% of what will be known about biology, human physiology and medicine. My view of biology is ‘we don’t know shit.’ ” Venter amplified the implications of his remark the following year:
In everyday language, the talk is about a gene for this and a gene for that. We are now finding that this is rarely so. The number of genes that can work in that way can almost be counted on your fingers, because we are just not hardwired that way. You cannot define the function of genes without defining the influence of the environment. The notion that one gene equals one disease or that one gene produces one key protein, is flying out the window.
With so much yet to be learned, the rush to exploit biotechnology can only be seen as wrongheaded.
Unknowing Participants in an Experiment
The growth of genetically engineered plants over vast areas of the Prairies is already a fait accompli. Pressured by companies like Monsanto, the Canadian and U.S. governments have acted as cheerleaders for the biotech industry, approving new strains with little regard to the urgent questions that have been raised. Unlike chemical pollutants or radioisotopes, which degrade or decay, genetically engineered plants and animals reproduce and mutate. Once they are released into nature, they cannot be recalled.
The impressive feature of life on Earth is its tenacity. Despite all the changes—the Sun is 30 percent warmer now than it was 4 billion years ago, ice ages have come and gone, continents have collided and generated mountains and oceans, magnetic poles have reversed and rereversed—life has persisted and flourished over 3.8 billion years. Once it has a hold, life is incredibly tenacious. Wind, insects, rains, rivers—many factors can act as a vehicle for genetically engineered organisms to spread their genes. Lavern Affleck, a Saskatchewan farmer, testified before a New Zealand committee examining the benefits and hazards of genetically engineered crops:
Canada has gone blindly into broad scale experimentation with the Canadian land base. It is an experiment which cannot be retracted, and was entered into without sincere reflection as to possible ramifications. In our experience, crops (and weeds) are spread in so many ways (wind, the waterways, on the roadside, on farm machinery and trucks) that it is impossible to prevent accidental releases into unwanted areas. We now have some degree of GE [genetically engineered] crop contamination across our entire Canadian prairie land base.
Biotechnology and Society
Lacking an understanding of the complex relationship between scientific research and its application, governments sporadically commit money to specific areas in the hopes of stimulating economic benefits. (In my opinion, they are doomed to failure for a number of reasons; but that is not the point of this essay.) But now, federal and provincial and state governments have latched onto the life sciences, promoting biotech companies and their products. Unfortunately, molecular biology is an arcane discipline that few nonspecialists can decipher. Biotechnology companies and scientists doing molecular research are aggressively proclaiming the benefits of their work. In their zeal, objections and concerns are brushed aside as trivial or baseless, just as the tobacco industry dismissed health concerns about smoking. But how can society deal with new discoveries and applications in ways that will minimize hazards to people and ecosystems?
In my view, universities are places where these issues should be openly discussed and debated. University scientists straddle the scientific disciplines, speaking the arcane language of science while communicating with students and the larger society in nonjargon vernacular. A university is a very special institution in society—a community of scholars and students exploring ideas at the very cutting edge of human thought. Many of these ideas are perceived as dangerous to society, and thinkers are often viewed as threats to the established order. To ensure the freedom for scholars to pursue their work and protect them from outside interference, universities confer the privilege of tenure. Tenure brings with it the responsibility to share knowledge and speak out on issues where a scholar’s field impinges on society.
Sadly, universities have compromised this position by entering into extensive partnerships with the private sector. In their search for funds, university administrators have found sources in corporations and now actively encourage faculty to establish companies that will provide royalties to the university. The deleterious consequences can be seen at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Forestry, where the foyer of the building is filled with plaques acknowledging the contribution of forest companies. While environmentalists have for decades decried British Columbia’s clear-cut logging practices as both destructive and unscientific, UBC’s forestry faculty has largely toed the industry line. Supporting the forest industry seems to have become more important to the forestry faculty than reasoned debate. (Interestingly, the recent growth in numbers of women in the faculty has been accompanied by more genuine interest in and debate about alternative forestry practices.)
The same promotion of industry perspectives occurs in those faculties receiving money from pharmaceutical, chemical, and military sources. Students are presented with one-sided propaganda about the potential benefits of these areas with little balance from those with concerns. Indeed, most faculty members who do have reservations seldom dare to speak out, or if they have the courage to risk the approbation of their peers, they suffer all manner of indignities. In my experience, merely questioning the activity or suggesting possible hazards is to invite strong disapproval and accusation of being “antiscience” or “emotional and nonscientific.” It is a sad state in a community of so-called scholars, where dissent or difference of opinions is supposed to be valued. One way to raise important issues without being overwhelmed by pro-biotech lobbying would be through a Royal Commission or Congressional inquiry to examine the broad societal, health, ecological, and economic implications of genetic engineering.
In Europe, where a “slow food” movement has sprung up as a counter to North American fast food, genetically engineered crops and food have been kept out of the continent. Europeans have applied the Precautionary Principle, which demands convincing evidence of both a need for the product and its safety before acceptance of a new technology. Europeans tell me they are watching North Americans for evidence of hazard or safety because we “are doing the experiment.” Canadians have been eating genetically engineered food for more than five years without being informed or provided information on labels.
Over recent decades, it has been revealed that until the 1960s scientists carried out experiments on unwitting human subjects. A few examples: patients infected with syphilis were deliberately denied treatment in order to follow the full course of the disease; inmates of mental asylums were administered the hallucinogen LSD to determine the effects; people judged mentally or physically handicapped for genetic reasons were sterilized. Out of these examples of excessive scientific exuberance, scientists have accepted the conditions for carrying out tests with humans: prospective subjects must first be fully informed of what is to be done, and the subjects must give approval before the study is carried out. Convinced by the biotech industry that genetically engineered foods are “substantially equivalent” to non–genetically engineered food, governments have demanded little in large-scale studies of the long-term effects of ingesting such food. (The one experiment by Dr. Arpad Pusztai that showed deleterious consequences of feeding genetically engineered potatoes to rats was peerreviewed and published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet. Discounted by the media and industry lobbyists, Pusztai’s experiments remain the only feeding study with genetically engineered foods published.) So, in Canada and the U.S., large numbers of people are being subjected to a massive experiment without providing informed consent. At the very least, all people should be able to see on labels what food is genetically engineered so that they can make their own choice.
A Future for Biotechnology?
As a geneticist, I continue to take enormous vicarious delight in the incredible technological dexterity being gained and the acquisition of answers to basic biological questions I never thought I would live to see solved. The exuberance of geneticists is understandable, especially when there seem to be such opportunities to engineer life according to our specifications. I have no doubt there will be important uses of these techniques and insights in the future. But we still have an enormous amount to learn. Already there are reports of and experiences with genetically engineered crops in open fields and in our food that suggest we have valid reasons to proceed with greater caution.
It behooves every scientist to remember the experience of the nuclear industry. During World War II, allied scientists rushed to build an atomic bomb before the enemy succeeded in building its own. Once the bomb was built, the Allies learned the enemy was not in the race. Atomic bombs represented a radically new weapon that not only increased the scale of destruction on that generation but afflicted future generations with a legacy of induced genetic alterations. Nevertheless, the use of these revolutionary weapons was justified by the potential to save lives by completing the war more quickly. Years after atomic bombs were created and used, scientists discovered new phenomena: radioactive fallout and bioaccumulation of radioisotopes, electromagnetic pulses of gamma rays that incapacitate electrical connections, and the vast ecological consequences of nuclear winter. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that biologists know enough to anticipate the ecological and health ramifications of a revolutionary technology such as genetic engineering. Governments must resist the economic pressures and show leadership and concern for the long-term health of people and nature. And scientists involved in this exciting area should learn from history and welcome free and open discussion about ecological, health, and social implications of their work.