In the Zone, Part 1

What comes over a man, is it soul or mind- That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined? You would say his ambition was to extend the reach Clear to the Arctic of every living kind. Why is his nature forever so hard to teach . . . There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed. from "There Are Roughly Zones," Robert Frost, 1936 As Robert Frost's poem posits, humankind will always seek to extend its reach. In a literal sense the poem, only a few lines of which we've quoted, is about a peach tree planted too far north. But its message has a timeless figurative meaning. Seventy years ago, Frost's depiction of the hubris of planting a fruit tree beyond its climatic limits may have had the commonsense ring of truth. One can see the reader mulling it over: "Ah, yes, too cold. What were they thinking?" Or, "How foolish to expect this would work out well." If Frost were with us today he might reconfigure his poem, updating it, exchanging transplanting a tree with transforming a cell, cloning an embryo, or creating genes in a computer. Now it is not a zone of adaptability we consider; it is changing the code of life, in essence engineering life from the roots up or, more accurately, from the cell out. Even though the setting and method have changed, the question hasn't: Are there roughly zones-limits we should not cross? PLUG-AND-PLAY: Frost died in 1963, a decade before the advent of gene splicing. Color television was a new marvel. It was the midpoint between the discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s and the first genetically engineered cell in the early 1970s. Now almost 40 years old, the concept of genetic engineering through gene recombination, or recombinant DNA, is the foundation on which much of the biotech industry has been built. Early efforts at genetic modification led to the creation of bacteria that could synthesize human insulin. Miraculous as that seemed at the time, it isn't too difficult from today's perspective. In fact, it could be performed in an elementary school science class with little specialized equipment: the human gene for making the protein is cut and pasted into the bacterial genome and is thus recombined. It works because, just as an MP3 file can be read by any appropriate player, so the universal character of the genetic code makes any gene "playable" by any cell. Biotechnology merely takes advantage of the remarkable plug-and-play nature of the genetic system of life. Of course, this was all new territory then, a leap forward-and not without detractors. Initial safety concerns were addressed in a kind of grassroots gathering in 1975. The Asilomar Conference is noted for its effectiveness in generating scientific agreements concerning how research should move forward. Those who continue to advocate that science should regulate science also see it as a benchmark, in that participants didn't hinder laboratory work by jostling over ethics or messy political issues. BEYOND RECOMBINATION: A key player at Asilomar was Paul Berg. In accepting the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, he reiterated the pivotal nature of the scientific work: "The development and application of recombinant DNA techniques has opened a new era of scientific discovery, one that promises to influence our future in myriad ways." Berg, a pioneer of the recombinant technique along with Steven Boyer and Stanley Cohen, noted later that "it was like an avalanche behind us" as other scientists used the new tools for both research and profit. Controversies today have turned to patents: who owns the genes, the processes and the created organisms? The U.S. Supreme Court approved the first patented organism in 1980-a bacterium engineered to eat oil as an aid in oil-spill clean-ups. The first patented animal was DuPont's transgenic OncoMouse (1988). Harvard researchers engineered the mouse to develop cancer and thus serve as a drug-testing platform. Others produced a mouse designed to lose its hair, for use in baldness studies. In that instance, however, the European Patent Office denied a patent because the potential human benefits did not outweigh the cost to the mouse. Meanwhile genetic modification of plants has become common, with patented staples such as GM corn, soybeans, canola and cotton out-performing natural forms. Many still oppose this trend, though protest tends to wax and wane as world grain supplies peak or dwindle. The reality is that all domesticated crops are manipulated in the sense that they are the products of intense breeding programs. In terms of agriculture, we rely on very little that we have not in some way altered. Of course, the kind of alteration that is now in full swing is of a different order than has been the case for millennia. But as more consumers accept GM as the newest breed, the fear of so-called Frankenfoods fades. Deaf to our debates on the safety issues of mixing genes from different species, nature carries on, however. Crops built to withstand herbicides or make their own pesticides give way to weeds becoming hardier and pest species growing immune to the very herbicides and pesticides that GM organisms were designed to tolerate and make more effective. As ecologist Paul Ehrlich has warned, "Nature bats last." (See our interview, "And Then What?".) These examples give some historical perspective to the newest form of engineering: to create genes and cells digitally. The first such synthetic organism was announced in May 2010 by J. Craig Venter and funded by Synthetic Genomics, Inc. It's important to note that Venter's group did not achieve spontaneous generation of life. Still, the new degree of genetic manipulation is remarkable. After sequencing a bacterial genome and recording it as a digital file, they edited the file, just as one edits a text. At one point they inserted a salient quote attributed to physicist Richard Feynman: "What I cannot build, I cannot understand." Of course, they wrote it in code using the DNA language of A, T, C and G, but they made their point: Now we can build what we want; we are not reliant on only what nature gives us to work with. The researchers plugged their handmade genome into another type of bacterium and booted up the cell using the new software. "We refer to such a cell controlled by a genome assembled from chemically synthesized pieces of DNA as a 'synthetic cell', even though the cytoplasm of the recipient cell is not synthetic," Venter and his coworkers explained in their report. Venter's goal is to build cells that will be useful to humans by, for example, ameliorating disease through new vaccines. Asked about potential downsides, he replied at a press conference, "It's not clear there are any." (See more on Venter's work in "The New Synthesis.") HOW TO PLAY GOD: When once asked whether understanding DNA leads to playing God, James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, infamously answered, "If we don't play God, who will?" And so, in a way, we have. Perhaps believing that God was out of touch or otherwise occupied, humanity has always striven to make the world a better, more comfortable place. Biblical passages, even if seen only as a record of secular hopes, speak to this eternal desire: the wolf and the lamb together at peace (Isaiah 11:6); spears turned into pruning hooks (Micah 4:3); a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26); victory over death (1 Corinthians 15:54); a new heaven and earth (Revelation 21:1). While today these may have lost some of their familiarity, the imagery holds out compelling possibilities. But with these, the Bible also conveys in Genesis the story of humankind's eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Can we trust our decision-making when we have determined to, so to speak, go it alone? Those who see the biblical promises as prophetic statements of things to come, endpoints that God alone can bring to fruition, often accuse those on science's frontier of overstepping their bounds. Indeed, for those who also take seriously the statement "Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them" (Gen 11:6b, English Standard Version), it seems clear that we have a responsibility to limit ourselves-to accept certain boundaries and refuse to cross them. Could it be that "playing God" is not so much about doing all the things we can think to do, but more about caution, more about wisdom and self-control? In whatever light one views human beings-whether our creative consciousness is the byproduct of evolution or the key attribute of being created "in the image of God"-we must take responsibility for what we know. The heretofore hidden powers we have wrested from the natural world are now our powers. It is an unfortunate foible of human nature to lean toward expediency, so the need to walk with care is often neglected, irrespective of underlying belief. Only sporadically do we overcome this common shortcoming as individuals; even less likely would one expect it of an entire group. Surprisingly, however, walking with care was exactly what the President's Council on Bioethics focused on when in 2002 it began looking deeply at the range of possible futures that lay at our biotechnological fingertips. "Such exploration is unlikely to result in a large number of policy recommendations, but that is not its aim," wrote Gilbert Meilaender, professor of theology at Valparaiso University and a member of the council throughout the tenure of U.S. president George W. Bush. "The aim, rather, is to help the public and its elected representatives think about the implications of biotechnological advance for human life. . . . The Council thought of the task of public bioethics not as protecting scientific research from oversight but as enriching public deliberation about the place of research in our common life together." The lack of specific policy directives, and especially of recommendations that researchers be given carte blanche or that "science knows best," continues to stoke an undercurrent of criticism among scientists. For instance, at the 2010 International Society for Stem Cell Research conference in San Francisco, Vision found that many still dismiss the Council's work as biased, the odious product of authorship stacked in favor of "Christian morality" and the Bush doctrine of restricted stem-cell research. Some still complain that funding restrictions beyond those set by a scientific consensus have been an unnecessary roadblock to progress. It is ironic that the Bush policy was actually more liberal, in fact opening sources of federal funding to human embryonic stem-cell research, than U.S. law had previously allowed. [As this article goes to press, it appears that the Obama administration's policy of allowing greater latitude in federal funding for research may be disallowed on legal grounds. The exact implications of the August 23 ruling are currently uncertain.] Criticism from each side notwithstanding, research continues apace. It is only wise to follow the developments, because we all move together; like cells in a body, we are separate, but we are one. As individuals we may not feel a need to know or to participate in the discussion. But as a 2003 report by the President's Council on Bioethics notes, "because the choices made by some can, in their consequences, alter the shared life lived by all, it behooves all of us to consider the meaning of these developments, whether we are privately tempted by them or not" ("Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness"). DAN CLOER dan.cloer@visionjournal.org Source: www.vision.org SELECTED REFERENCES: 1 Ronald Bailey, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution (2005). 2 Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest (2008). 3 Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (1985). 4 Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003). 5 The President's Council on Bioethics, "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness" (2003). 6 Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and Colin Tudge, The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control (2000).