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Report from SGR Conference 'Genetics and Ethics' (1998)
Report written by Dani Kaye, SGR
Dr Mae-Wan Ho is the author of a thought provoking polemical book on the subject of Genetic Engineering and its human, ethical and environmental implications1. Members of the Conference were treated to an articulate and impassioned development of the arguments against the corporatisation of biotechnology she had presented in her book.
Dr Ho began her talk by acknowledging the influence of the Third World Network, which had alerted her to the extent to which reductionist methods were wreaking havoc on world economies and social structures. "Under the guise of objectivity, neutrality and value-freedom, scientific endeavour colludes with big business to undermine life and life supporting systems, as well as human values, on a global level," she said.
The issue of social and moral responsibility of science had "dropped out of sight" and was seldom explicitly addressed, much less questioned, in the profit-driven mindset of the western, developed world. Dr Ho then listed the more fallacious, Ivory Tower excuses around which bad science is conducted, as follows:
(a) You cannot impede scientific progress;
(b) Science is never wrong, it is only its applications which may be bad;
(c) Scientific inquiry is always objective, neutral and value-free.
These excuses have no bearing on reality, she insisted, for science is conducted by humans, and all humans are by nature subjective, value-ridden and biased.
Dr Ho then postulated the view that Darwin had reflected the values of imperialist, capitalist western society when he outlined his theory of natural selection through the survival of the fittest, and this in turn had given rise to a mind-set which had driven corporate activity for the subsequent 150 years.
The "Absolute" moral responsibility of science
In reality, the moral responsibility of scientific knowledge is absolute, Dr Ho insisted, and cannot be abdicated in the name of profit or value-freedom . This fundamental truth is disregarded by political and business communities, which are increasingly locked into the growth and profit paradigm, feeding the consolidation of unaccountable corporate power characterised by a global free market with no barriers and the liberalisation of trade. As a result, unelected corporate rule has become the true power behind the throne , progressively replacing elected rule by governments. Dr Ho noted that regrettably this awareness had yet to penetrate into academic circles to any significant extent.
Turning to gene technology, Dr Ho cited this as an example of the capitalist paradigm at its extreme, with the biotechnology business community imposing its will on "the very stuff of life". Organisms are treated as little more than a series of collections of genes amenable to modification by corporate biotechnology, which disregards the demonstrable fact that Nature refuses to conform to intervention in a linear, predictable way, is organically interconnected and finite, and has already rebounded on our mismanagement with all the ills already confronting us, including global warming and the BSE crisis. Despite these proofs of the fallacy of such an attitude, said Dr Ho, genetic determinism is still being taught in our universities "as if no other theory existed".
Absurd situation
The situation had become so absurd that governments were now being sued for not allowing potentially toxic organisations across their borders, and almost all genetic engineers and researchers were linked to companies which dismissed safety warnings and suppressed findings of environmental hazards resulting from their activities. Proof of this last allegation was to be had from leaked copies of internal correspondence within Monsanto. Not surprisingly, public trust of scientists and government regulators was plummeting, while honest, concerned scientists found themselves increasingly marginalised and harassed by the corporate community. The end result would be corporate control of all aspects of food production, and the manipulation of human life, with made to measure babies and tailored public education not far over the horizon. "Our entire life and life-support system will be in the hands of unaccountable, non-elected corporations," she concluded. As an example of corporate control she cited the recently -developed Agrochemical Terminator Technology which results in sterile cereal crops, forcing farmers to buy in fresh seed stock each season.
Unsound determinism
All this activity rested on the unsound deterministic theory that research scientists can precisely identify a gene which governs a desired trait, extract it, and copy it such that the organism and its offspring will then have the desired trait , said Dr Ho. However, genetics did not function in a linear way , and such proponents of genetic determinism as Doctor Richard Dawkins, who explain biological activity in terms of selfish genes , made the mistake of assuming a one-way linear information flow from gene RNA to protein and thence to phenotype, and open the door to absolute exploitation of life forms. We had already seen human frogs (frog embryos containing human DNA) and mice with ears, and the the cloning of humans for the purpose of tissue replacement was already being discussed, and in all this, the voice of moral concern was being increasingly drowned out by considerations of profit. "Appalled people have their honest moral scruples dismissed as an irrational YUCK factor , and are castigated for the sin of attempting to impede scientific progress," she said. "However, keep in mind that the only motive for this activity is money. Only two percent of all diseases are genuine single-gene diseases, amenable to treatment by genetic manipulation. The majority of virulent diseases which scourge whole sectors of humankind are disregarded by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in their headlong rush for profit."
The feedback effect
In reality, Dr Ho pointed out, no gene functions in isolation; each depending on other genes within the genome. The transfer of a gene to a foreign genome was likely to give rise to new and unexpected effects, known as the feedback effect . Furthermore, genes can travel outside the genome (horizontal gene transfer). Dr Ho contrasted the deterministic central dogma with the new genetics which incorporates the concept of a fluid genome with a very complicated ecology, and stressed the danger of unnatural horizontal transfers which are currently being conducted in genetic engineering research, including the transfer of pig DNA to fish, and so on. She reminded the audience that dangers perceived in the vector technology of the 1970s had led pioneers to declare a moratorium on genetic engineering due to a fear of generating new, pathogens which were resistant to antibiotics. This moratorium had been cut short as a result of business pressures, and Dr Ho asked whether we had now opened the highway to the emergence of such resistant pathogens. The spread of soil fungi and bacteria was probable, for it had been achieved in the laboratory. Transgenic DNA was liable to spread by inserts and had been demonstrated to be up to 30 times more likely to escape into the environment than original DNA. It was a well known fact that the integration of foreign DNA into a genome was one of the causes of cancer.
Call for a moratorium
Dr Ho ended her talk with a plea for members to join her call for a moratorium and inquiry into the implications of genetic engineering for health, the environment, biodiversity and public liberties, stressing the need to embrace the new genetics , which "compels us to adopt an ecological, holistic perspective" regarding life and sustainability.
There followed a spirited question-and-answer session with a variety of views being aired. A questioner asked whether European Countries could start to rein in such organisations as Monsanto by forcing them to underwrite all experiments. Dr Ho pointed out that any action taken should be on a global level, as was her campaign for a moratorium, because if it were limited to the so-called developed nations, the dodgy technology would simply be more intensively dumped on to the developing nations instead.
Dissenting views
One significant dissenting voice to the talk was raised by Dr Michael Barnes, who stated that he considered Dr Ho's talk "extreme and misrepresentative", and said that the original moratorium had been imposed due to concerns about laboratory safety, that genetic determinism had arisen as the result of protein interactions, and insisted that when considering a moratorium one should distinguish between the medical and agrochemical spheres. In the medical arena, the majority of discoveries such as the Human Genome Mapping Project were in the public domain and organisations involved were largely against gene patenting. Corporations did not have the same hold in the medical sphere as they did in the food sphere. He supported a call for a moratorium in the food sphere because here Genetic Engineering was quite different; it consisted of tinkering and the results were not in the public domain; but in the medical sphere there was overwhelming support for the genetic approach, for example in the identification of genes which predispose individuals to various illnesses.
Riposte
Dr Ho replied that even in the medical sphere the problem with this approach was that it could blind researchers to the potential effects of environmental factors, for example in cancers, where predisposition was believed in many cases to combine with life-style and environmental factors to result in illness. As regarded the point about the original moratorium having been for contained use , Dr Ho pointed out that releases to the environment were much more dangerous than events within a laboratory, and she wondered at the priorities underlying such events. Finally, she said, there were demonstrable, fundamental misconceptions inherent in the whole notion of safe genetic engineering. "It is assumed that if a certain strain of bacteria has a characteristic requiring a specific amino acid and is deprived of it - turning it into a so-called crippled strain - it will not survive in nature," she said. "In reality this has been disproved by observation. The environment is not a quantifiable entity and you can and do get horizontal transfer." Dr Ho ended the session with a final appeal to members to subscribe to the call for a moratorium.2
Footnotes:
1 Dr Mae-Wan Ho (1998):
Genetic Engineering, Dream or
Nightmare? - The Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business, Gateway
Books, Bath, UK.
2 A transcript of Dr Ho's Moratorium on GE biotechnology
and No to Patents on Life first appeared in her 19981 publication
and is reproduced in this issue.
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