Liberation biology - molecular biologist Lee M. Silver - Interview

Reason, May, 1999 by Ronald Bailey

The original version of that project was simply going to catalog all the genes present in human beings - the genome. There are, according to the latest estimates, somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 genes comprising the human genome. The catalog by itself doesn't do very much - which is where the DNA chips come in. The 70,000 human genes come in different forms. For example, say gene A comes in forms 1, 2, and 3. Using the DNA chip, we can look at people that have form 1; look at people that have form 2; and look at people that have form 3. By looking at the various forms of gene A, we will be able to determine what effects the different forms have on people - how they affect their health and their behavior, etc. That will be the next step of the Human Genome Project.

Reason: What do you think about artificial chromosomes? Are we going to have those soon?

Silver: Yes. An artificial chromosome will again give you unprecedented power to alter cells. Because right now when we put genes into cells, we are putting in one gene at a time. The artificial chromosome means that you can create what I call "gene packs." You can hook 40 genes on this chromosome. The function of some of the genes will be to shut down natural genes, while others [will] replace natural functions. In the next two or three decades, we are going to be able to build modules of 30, 40, 50, or 100 genes on an artificial chromosome and insert it in the genomes of human embryos and other creatures.

Reason: In Remaking Eden, you basically come out in favor of human cloning. Would you consider cloning yourself?.

Silver: I am not interested. I already have my children. Obviously, I have been asked this question many times. I felt the need, probably instinctive, to have children with my wife. And I didn't want to have children that were just for me. I wanted to have children that consummated my relationship with my wife to the greatest extent, and that is why I have my children.

Reason: Why do you think there was such a negative reaction when Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced that he had cloned a sheep? Why do most people oppose human cloning?

Silver: Let me answer you this way. In the spring of 1998, I gave a lecture to a group of well-educated residents from Princeton, New Jersey, who were not scientists. I began by telling them about the bewildering number of high-tech treatments now available to infertile people. I told them that there were a number of reproductive protocols under consideration, including cloning. But before I discussed cloning in detail, I wanted to get their opinion on another fertility protocol. The protocol under consideration is for cases of severe male infertility, when only the precursors of sperm were present. The proposed treatment entailed the injection of one of the man's testicular nuclei containing all of its DNA into an egg cell from his wife that had previously had its nucleus removed. Anyway, I go through this whole long thing and I say, you come out with a baby and the baby kind of looks like the father. The baby might even kind of behave like him, but unless you told anybody, nobody would know that it wasn't just a son produced in the normal way between him and his wife. Is his son a clone? And two-thirds of the people said, no, the son is not a clone.