Martin HenryIT IS done. The long awaited map of the human genome is an accomplished fact. Now what? "This is the outstanding achievement not only of our lifetime, but in terms of human history", says Dr. Michael Dexter of the Wellcome Trust which funded the UK section of the work. The publicly-funded international Human Genome Project is the most ambitious and expensive project ever undertaken in the biological sciences.
And with public funding, the spectacular results belong to everybody.
They are in the public domain and will not be patented. Results were posted on the Internet every 24 hours, except on weekends, at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/seq.
The Human Genome Project could be compared to the Nuclear Bomb Project and the Man on the Moon Project. All three marked major dramatic breakthroughs which transformed humankind's understanding of the world and our life on the planet. They marked transitions from an old order to a new order. But there are big differences between the Bomb and the Moon projects on the one hand and the Human Genome Project on the other.
The first two were outside ourselves; the Human Genome Project is about tampering with the most basic stuff of our own existence, assuming God-like powers over our own being. The Bomb and Moon Projects were largely the efforts of one nation the United States and were wrapped in secrecy. Up to now, nuclear weapons are under the control of a handful of nation-states which are subject to international pressure and amenable to negotiation.
Space is expensive and is accessible largely to governments and giant corporations. Regulation and policing, while difficult in both cases, are possible.
In the case of the Human Genetic Map the information is public and free and the spin-off technologies will be on a scale small enough for wide access. Already the hope, the hype and the fears are pouring in. The Reuters report of the breakthrough, which The Gleaner correctly positioned as its Page One lead story on Tuesday June 27, began by claiming that the completed working map of the human genome gives scientists a genetic blueprint that will transform medical care in the 21st century.
The big hope and hype focus has been on medicine, giving the uncomfortable impression that humankind are genes and diseases. The language of another Reuters report "Sceptics fear 'Book of Life' could spell death", is instructive: "the researchers have whittled down the human body to a complex string of [genetic] letters that should revolutionise the way doctors see the body and treat its shortfalls."
Optimism, medicine, reductionist science. According to Dr. John Sulston, the leader of the British team, "This sequence will inform all of medicine, all of biology, and will lead us to a total understanding of not only human beings, but all of life."
Focus on medicine and biology, benefits, and total understanding of all life. The physical scientists have been that way before. Spurred on by the triumphs of Newtonian physics, Laplace (1749-1827) grandly announced that if the position and velocity of every particle in the universe could be known then every future event in the universe could be calculated.
The 'scientific' formula: Matter + Energy = all of Reality is still very much with us as the grand definer of avante garde, sophisticated thought.
Are humankind merely their genes? Quite apart from the known impact of environment which is at least as important as genes in determining our humanness, some 97 per cent of human DNA is 'non-coding', that is it is not 'functional' genes. This amazing degree of 'non-functionality' should be a genetic word of caution to those anticipating 'total understanding' in purely biophysical terms. As the simple, mechanical universe of Newtonian physics was superseded by an evermore complex and fluid Einsteinian universe, so biology may have crossed a threshold into evermore subtle complexity and dynamism rather than simplifying anything.
An exciting prospect of the new advances is that science will again meet God, religion and philosophy at the frontiers of the universe, the atom and the cell. Already purely naturalistic explanations are proving to be less than adequate to accommodate many observations. Human gene research is bound to raise the old question 'what is man?'
The research will provide some answers unexpected by a science which has spent the last couple of centuries seeking 'total understanding' in terms of matter and energy. The sceptics, as far as the reports go, are largely concerned with the abuse of the new knowledge for discrimination and for eugenics engineering people to specifications.
Childish optimism
According to Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, "mapping the human genome is a great human achievement. Like climbing Mount Everest, it will benefit few people, leaving most untouched. But unlike climbing Mount Everest, it has the potential to damage large numbers of people". The fact of the matter is that new scientific knowledge and technology derived from it will play out their hand in interaction with complex dynamic social forces.
Nobody is in charge of, or can determine, or control outcomes. And we know from hard historical experience which rebukes childish optimism that the 'hand' always holds both good and evil, like human nature itself. The more fundamental and powerful the science and the technology, the greater is the risk that the evil may overwhelm the good. But science cannot be switched off, reversed, or even channelled into 'good' directions and away from 'bad' ones. Each direction is at once good and bad, as humankind, beyond genes, themselves are.
We can be absolutely certain that the new knowledge will not only be about 'good' medicine. It is going to play out its hand with some disastrous consequences in politics, the military and economics, and in general society and culture. One of the researchers has said in essence: we have generated the knowledge; it is up to governments and society to decide what to do with it and to regulate it.
Governments and societies have no mechanisms and no wisdom to accomplish this. But the pressure for control and regulation will be great as the manipulation of the basic stuff of our lives begin in earnest.
I am very confidently predicting that the tentative movement towards a one world absolute government under a single supreme political and moral authority will be strengthened and greatly accelerated by the exigencies of the exploitation of the new knowledge.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
