Barcoding life: are geneticists really getting closer to understanding life itself—or are they seeking to subdue it and make a mint? Jordi Pigem inspects a flawed enterprise - Ethics - Column

New Internationalist, Sept, 2002 by Jordi Pigem

THE businessman was busy counting and owning the stars: 'Five-hundred-and-one

million, six-hundred-twenty-two thousand, seven-hundred-thirty-one... I own them.., they belong to me, because I was the first person to think of it.' This was the fourth planet the Little Prince had visited, his brief stay increasing his puzzlement at how grown-ups can delude themselves.(1) And they do indeed. In 1980, a Californian by the name of Dennis Hope hopelessly claimed the Moon to be his. He staked a claim at his local federal office and notified the US, the USSR and the UN. Since then a number of grownups have bought plots of lunar land from this lunatic at $15.99 an acre. In that same year, more worryingly, the US Supreme Court defined living forms as 'machines or manufactures', and it ruled in consequence that living beings can be patented. Grown-ups can patently delude themselves.

The Supreme Court ruling didn't come out of the blue. It just gave legal form to what Descartes had claimed more than three centuries earlier: living beings are machines and we should aim to be 'masters and possessors of nature'. A generation before him, Francis Bacon dreamt of 'enlarging the bounds of the human empire' by, for instance, 'the transformation of bodies into other bodies' and 'the making of new species'. His dreams - and the Little Prince's nightmares - are starting to come true.

Quest For control

The Little Prince, incidentally, knew more about life than most of today's molecular biologists. He had imagination and a sense of wonder. They have abstractions - and a quest for control.

The mechanical view of life - so alien to all indigenous and traditional cultures - leads to treating life forms as machines; that is, as things that can be patented, mended, bought and sold and used at will. But that view is as immoral as it is insane. For genetic reductionists like Richard Dawkins and his peers, humans are not exempt: 'Each of us is a machine, like an airliner only much more complicated.'(2) They are believers in the central dogma of genetics, the belief that genes determine an organism's traits. We hear every week that scientists have identified and sequenced the gene for a specific trait or illness. That makes good news: it helps us feel we are in charge of the world. Later research ends up showing that in other contexts the same gene acts in very different, uncontrollable ways. That contradicts the dogma -- and therefore is silenced.

Genetic modification is as inaccurate as trying to improve a published poem by dropping on the page lots of bits of paper with your favourite word in them: occasionally one of the words may fall in a place where it makes sense. That's why, as geneticist David Suzuki says, 'For every genetic-engineering success there are thousands and thousands of failures.' And even the 'successes' could be eventually undermined by multiple side-effects. Genes, like words, make very little or no sense without their context -- but a meaningless word can be innocuous, whereas a gene out of place can self-replicate and have devastating effects.

Honest scientists would admit that we know very little about the intricate balance of the web of life that sustains us. What we do know is that life has proven time and again to be more unpredictable than the experts of the day ever thought. What molecular biologists call 'genes' are just temporary arrangements in the cell that instruct it to make proteins. They are not lasting things waiting there to be discovered: they are brought forth by an extremely reductionist and decontextualised view of life. (3) Once you buy the gene-centred view, organisms are ready to be patented and engineered and gone is all reverence for life. In a future, saner society, people will find it laughable that so many learned people took life to be nothing more than 'genes'. Many of our indigenous contemporaries find it laughable already.

At war with nature

In the 1920s Erwin Chargaff chose to devote himself to the study of biology, fascinated by the wonder and diversity of life. 'Life is the continual intervention of the inexplicable,' he later wrote. He became one of the greatest biochemists of the century, and he inadvertently gave Watson and Crick the clue that would lead to the double-helix model of DNA. He deeply regretted that. 'My life has been marked by two immense and fateful scientific discoveries: the splitting of the atom, and the recognition of the chemistry of heredity and its subsequent. manipulation... In both instances... science has transgressed a barrier that should have remained inviolate.'

Chargaff's autobiography Heraclitean Fire (4) is a testimony of how biology became increasingly dogmatic and removed from life. Not just biology: 'Science was to grow into a machine for solving all kinds of problems which, in being solved scientifically, would give rise to even greater problems.' He saw 'genetic meddling' as an 'unthinkable crime' and as a worrying sign of a 'pathology of the scientific imagination' (even more than 'the desire to hop on the moon'). A letter he published in the journal Science in 1976 finished thus: 'This world is given to us on loan. We come and go; and after a time we leave earth and air and water to others who come after us. My generation, or perhaps the one preceding mine, has been the first to engage, under the leadership of the exact sciences, in a destructive colonial warfare against nature. The future will curse us for it.'