LET US NOT PLAY GOD
Dolly, painting by Emily Johns
We need to begin a global debate about the ethics of genetic engineering.
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FOR THE LAST forty years two technology revolutions have emerged: computers and genes. These two revolutions have recently begun to fuse together to create a powerful new paradigm: companies are using advanced computers to decipher, download, manage and exploit the 'new' resources - genes. Genes for building materials, energy, construction, food and pharmaceuticals. We are moving from the age of physics and chemistry, which dominated the industrial revolution, to the age of genes and computers.
These two will dominate the biotechnology revolution.
In the 1970s, scientists accomplished a feat in biology: they took slices
of genetic material from two different organisms and recombined them to
create a new life form. When objections were raised scientists said, "What's
the problem? We've been manipulating nature since the dawn of the Neolithic
Revolution. Isn't this just a more sophisticated and efficient way to
get the job done?"
I disagree. Experiments have been carried out that could never have been done in classical breeding and that haven't been seen in evolution. For instance, genetic scientists took a human growth hormone gene and injected it into mice embryos. These mice grew twice as big, and they passed that human genetic information to every generation of their offspring. You can't do that with classical breeding. In classical breeding close relatives can be crossed - for instance a horse and a donkey to breed a mule - but you cannot cross a donkey and an apple tree. Occasionally genes can cross biological boundaries with viruses and bacteria, but not on this scale. Now we have a technology revolution that allows scientists and companies to bypass every single biological boundary in the plant and animal kingdoms.
That's why it's both exciting from an investment perspective and terrifying
from a social, cultural and environmental perspective.
We all missed the point of the recent report of Dr Wilmut's cloned sheep.
The story wasn't Dolly; the story was Polly, the second sheep. That's
the sheep that the investment industry was interested in, because a human
gene had been customized into a sheep's cell and the sheep was then cloned.
This demonstrated that it is now possible to both customize and mass-produce
identical copies of an original living being with the same quality controls
and design principles that were used on the assembly line with chemical
products in the twentieth century. That's why we call this 'genetic engineering'
- not therapy, but engineering!
The issue is this: do we take these engineering standards that we applied during the industrial revolution with inanimate materials and apply them directly to genes, chromosomes, cells, tissues, organs, organisms and ecosystems? We are promised a cornucopia: new foods that will feed the world, new medical advances to keep us alive forever, new sources of energy when the oil runs dry. But what's never asked is whether the artificial creation of cloned creatures en masse will mean the end of nature and the substitution of a laboratory-conceived second genesis. Will the mass release of thousands of genetically modified organisms mean spreading genetic pollution across our biosphere and irreducible damage to our environment?
What are the consequences of reducing the entire gene pool to intellectual
property owned by a handful of life-science companies? What are the implications
of genetically programming traits into the sperm, egg and embryo before
conception or after conception, and of growing up in a world where people
are discriminated against because of their genotype or their genetic profile?
What are the consequences of making a human baby by design principles?
Let's take a look at some of the issues. First, who's going to control
all this? The name of the game is patents. The human genome has been mapped
and now the rush is on to locate every one of those genes and then to
secure intellectual property rights over them. If this goes unchallenged,
in less than ten years a handful of life-science companies will own the
genetic blueprints of our species.
Do you know what Dr Wilmut's patent includes? He received a process patent
from the British Government for the process of cloning. But he also received
a product patent. Any animal cloned using his process is considered his
invention. And there's an addendum. The British Patent Office granted
Dr Wilmut's company another patent on cloned human embryos up to the blastocyst
stage of development. It is shocking that a company can now actually claim
an embryo as an invention. In the nineteenth century we fought against
the fact that you could own a human being after birth, and we abolished
slavery. Now, the technology is available to own a human being from conception
to birth. It's going to be one of the great debates of the twenty-first
century.
There's a North/South issue here. You can't create a new gene in the
laboratory; it's an extractive industry and a lot of the genetic resources
are in the Southern hemisphere. Companies are looking for rare genes and
microbes, plants, animals and humans - indigenous populations - to claim
them as property. If we allow the great gene pool to be enclosed as either
political property owned by governments or intellectual property owned
by commercial companies, I guarantee that there will be gene wars in the
future.
When the chemists isolated the chemical elements during the age of chemistry,
we allowed them process patents, but we didn't allow them a product patent.
Can you imagine saying, "You were the first scientist to isolate
tungsten ... we're going to give you a patent. This is your invention."
The patent laws are clear: you can't claim a product of nature as a human
invention. Genes, cells, chromosomes, organs and tissues, are exactly
analogous. Governments are violating their own laws for years by extending
intellectual property rights to genes.
We teach our young ones when they're very small that life has intrinsic value. When they're older, we introduce them to utility value. But in a world where they grow up to think that in the eyes of the law all life is utility, what happens to intrinsic value? Is there even a reference point for future generations to understand the concept, when life is reduced to sheer intellectual property?
WE CAN ENTER this biotech age in a different way. The gene pool is a
legacy and our collective responsibility. We should establish the gene
pool as a shared commons administered by 'trust' by every nation in the
world on behalf of present and future generations. The genes are a result
of millions of years of evolution. They're not the political property
of governments and they're not the intellectual property of companies.
We should absolutely prohibit any patents of any kind on genes.
Over the next few years, the term 'genetic pollution' will be much in
use. Genetic pollution is very different from chemical pollution. Genetically
modified organisms (gmos) are alive, so they're more unpredictable when
you place them in the environment. They reproduce, for instance. Chemicals
don't reproduce. gmos mutate, they proliferate, they migrate. You cannot
recall them to the laboratory.
There are currently 72,000 field tests going on in the United States.
We have herbicide-tolerant and pest-resistant genes already injected into
our corn, soya and other food crops. But the scientists never took pollination
into consideration. Genes always flow during pollination - you can't stop
them. When your herbicide-tolerant gene or your pest-resistant gene flows
offsite onto another farm and contaminates that crop, who's going to be
responsible?
I've recently met with the Chief Executives of many insurance companies
and they will not insure against long-term gene pollution. They say, "We
can't. There's no methodology to judge risk." How does the government
say it's regulating the release of these gmos when the insurance industry
knows there's absolutely no methodology by which to judge the risk?
Genetic discrimination is going to loom as significantly in the future as gender discrimination or ethnic and racial discrimination has in the past. People are going to have their genetic profile researched. Should your insurance company, your school board, your employer, know your genetic profile?
You have three people applying for a corporate job, all equally qualified.
One has a genetic predisposition for breast cancer, the second for prostate
cancer, the third no predisposition. Who do you hire? But genes are not
the only factors: they are just a small part of the puzzle. It's nature/nurture.
It may actually be that that third candidate is a walking time bomb because
they have a drink problem or smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, don't
exercise, eat a lot of fatty meat and live in a polluted community. Thus
gene technology has an inherent problem of discrimination.
We cannot discuss a biotech revolution without introducing the term 'eugenics'.
We normally think of Nazis and their social eugenics. We fool ourselves
that such a thing cannot happen in democratic societies. But let me warn
you that this new eugenics is friendly. It's banal. It's commercial. It's
market-driven. Don't we all want a healthy baby? It's the ultimate Faustian
bargain. We all want our child to have the best advantages in life if
we can afford them. Do you know any parent who doesn't? But the problem
is that it fundamentally changes the parent/child bond. That's why it's
a new eugenics. The parent becomes the architect; the child becomes the
ultimate shopping experience in this post-modern world.
The real danger here is something ethicists never talk about: what about the child who isn't engineered? For instance, the parents decide for ethical or financial reasons not to do it - and a child is born with a 'disability'. How tolerant are the rest of us likely to be to that child in a world where we've come to think of reproduction by engineering standards, quality controls, predictable outcomes, and perfectible standards of measurement? Are we likely to say, "That little baby is a defect, a mistake"? The worry is that we may lose empathy - that emotional bond that keeps us connected. We empathize with each other because we experience our frailties, our vulnerabilities, our suffering, our effort to be a human being. But in a world where we've come to think of life as perfectible by engineering standards, how empathetic are we likely to be? What will our attitude be to a child who does not conform to the standards that our companies and our engineers have set? If we lose empathy, we lose our humanity.
THERE'S A HARD PATH and a soft path towards this new biotech age. The hard path is the path that the Monsantos of this world are on: they want to reduce nature; they want to engineer it; they want to create a second genesis; they want profit and the bottom line. But there's a soft path. We could use this new science to begin to understand, for example, how to create a more sustainable organic agriculture. We could use the new science to begin to look at how we can move towards preventative medicine rather than disease management. On the soft path, there's no gene-engineering.
There's no splicing. There's no recombination. There's no playing God. Instead, we become a trustee, a friend, a partner, a caretaker of the biological kingdom. We understand our responsibility to our children's generation and to all the fellow creatures we travel with. o
Extracts from a lecture given at the Technology Teach-In, New York, February 2001.
Jeremy Rifkin is author of The Biotech Century (Victor Gollancz, 1998) and The Age of Access (Penguin, UK, 2000)