1 - Man And Superman

Man and superman Mar 27th 2003 From The Economist print edition

Biotechnology could transform humanity —provided humanity wishes to be transformed WARNING against intellectual arrogance, Alexander Pope wrote: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; the proper study of mankind is man.” But his words have turned out to be misguided. Though studying man may not exactly have led scientists to scan God, it has certainly led to accusations that they are usurping His role. More drugs; cheaper food; environmentally friendly industry. Who could object? But people do. The image that haunts biotechnology, and perhaps the most influential piece of science fiction ever written, is Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein”. When the book was first published in 1818, most people did indeed believe that life was created by God. Shelley's student doctor apes that act of divine creation and comes a cropper. He has come to epitomise the madscientist figure: either downright wicked, or at the least heedless of humanity's good. The book's subtitle, though, is telling: “The Modern Prometheus”. Prometheus, in the Greek myth, stole fire from heaven and gave it to mankind with the intention of doing good. The reason Prometheus was punished by his particular set of gods was that he gave mankind power, and with that power, choice.

Biotechnology is not about to create a human from off-the-shelf chemicals, nor even from spare parts. But it may soon have the power to manipulate human life in ways which could bring benefits, but which many will find uncomfortable or abhorrent. A choice will have to be made.

Cells called oligodendrocytes may even help to repair the insulating sheaths of nerve cells in people with spinal injuries. Geron is also working on liver cells. In the first instance, these would be used not to treat people, but to test potential drugs for toxicity, because most drugs are broken down in the liver.

Clones to the left of me...

Such transplanted tissues might be seen as foreign by the immune system, but Geron is keeping its corporate fingers crossed that this can be dealt with. Embryos have ways of gulling immune systems to stop themselves being rejected by the womb. In case that does not work, though, the discussion has turned to the idea of transplanting adult nuclei into embryonic stem cells as a way of getting round the rejection problem. This idea, known in the trade as therapeutic cloning, has caused alarm bells to go off. The technique would create organs, not people, and no one yet knows whether it would work. But some countries are getting nervous about stem-cell research. This nervousness has not been calmed by the activities of Advanced Cell Technology, a firm based in Worcester, Massachusetts, which announced in November 2001 that it had managed the trick of transplanting adult nuclei into stem cells and persuading the result to divide a few times. In effect, ACT created the beginning of an embryo.

No one has yet cloned a person, or genetically modified one, at least a whole one. But people are working on technologies that could help to do these things. An existing individual might be cloned in several ways. The first would be to persuade a cell (say a skin cell) from the individual to be cloned that it was, in fact, a fertilised egg. That would mean reactivating a whole lot of genes that skin cells don't need but eggs do. As yet, no one knows how to go about that. The second way is the Dolly-thesheep method, which is to extract the nucleus of an adult cell and stick it in an egg from which the nucleus has been removed. That seems to trigger the desired reprogramming. Or instead of putting the nucleus into an egg cell, it might be put into a socalled stem cell from an early embryo. Embryonic stem cells can turn into any other sort of cell, so might possibly be persuaded to turn into entire people. Regardless of that possibility, embryonic stem cells have medical promise, and several firms are currently studying them. Geron, the most advanced of these firms, has worked out how to persuade embryonic stem cells to turn into seven different types of normal cell line that it hopes can be used to repair damaged tissue. Blood cells could be grown in bulk for transfusions. Heart-muscle cells might help those with coronary disease. “Islet” insulin-secreting cells could treat diabetes. Bone-forming cells would combat osteoarthritis. A particular type of nerve cell may help sufferers from Parkinson's disease.

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Last year President George Bush issued a decree restricting federal funding in America to existing embryonic stem-cell lines. Attempts are now being made in Congress to ban it altogether. Reversing the usual traffic flow, some American scientists have upped sticks and gone to Britain, where the regulations on such research are liberal and settled. Some countries, indeed, have more than just settled regulations. Singapore, for example, is actively recruiting people who want to work on the human aspects of biotechnology. China, too, is said to be interested. Cynics might regard this as opportunism. But not everyone's moral code is shaped by

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Judeo-Christian ethics—and besides, moral codes can change. At the moment, cloning mammals is a hazardous business. It usually requires several hundred attempts to get a clone, and the resulting animal is frequently unhealthy, probably because the original transplanted nucleus has been inadequately reprogrammed. Nor does there seem to be much of a market, so no one is trying very hard. Genetic modification is a different matter. GTC's drug-producing and Nexia's silk-producing goats are valuable, and people are putting in serious work on the technology. If someone wanted to add the odd gene or two to a human egg, they could probably do so. Indeed, something quite similar is already being done, although under another name: gene therapy intended to deal with illnesses such as cystic fibrosis is in fact a type of genetic modification, although admittedly one that is not passed from parent to offspring. But extending gene therapy to germ cells, to stop the disease being passed on, is under discussion. ...jokers to the right? A scene in “Blade Runner”, a film that asks Shelleyesque questions about the nature of humanity, is set in the headquarters of a prosperouslooking biotechnology company. The firm makes “replicants”, robots that look like humans, and the firm's boss describes how they are grown from a single cell. The replicants, it is plain, are genetically modified people without any legal rights. In this dystopia, it is the unaltered humans who rule. By contrast, “GATTACA”, another movie set in a genetically modified future, has the modified in charge. They are beautiful, gifted and intelligent. It is those who remain untouched by modification who suffer. All this is in the realm of fiction, but the contrasting views of the potential effects of genetic modification point to an important truth about any

technology. What really matters is not what is possible, but what people make of those possibilities. In the fantasy worlds of science fiction, people are frequently dominated by the technology they have created, and made miserable as a result. Yet so far, the real technological future ushered in by the industrial revolution has defied the fantasists. Dystopia has failed to materialise.

current woes will come to be seen as mere teething troubles. The first route to ubiquity is likely to be via the chemical industry. As people become more confident about manipulating enzymes and micro-organisms, ever larger swathes of industrial chemistry will fall into biotech's grip. Like existing chemistry, though, the results will be taken for granted almost instantly.

Perhaps, one day, some tyrant will try to breed a race of replicant slaves, but it seems unlikely. It seems much safer to predict that the rich will attempt to buy themselves and their children genetic privileges if and when these become available. But there is nothing new in the rich trying to buy privileges. The antidote is not a Draconian ban on basic research, but reliance on the normal checks and balances, both legal and social, of a liberal society. These have worked in the past, and seem likely to work in the future.

Health care will also be revolutionised by biotech: not merely through new drugs, but through the ability to deploy them precisely and to anticipate the need for their use from studies of an individual's haplotype. Medicine will become less of an art and more of a science. It may even become a consumer good, if drugs intended to let people operate beyond their natural capacities are developed. That, though, is another area fraught with moral difficulties.

Tyranny, by definition, is incompatible with liberalism. More subtly, the one near-universal feature of technologies in liberal societies is that in time popular ones get cheaper as market competition does its work. Personal genetic modification may start out aristocratic, but if it does turn out to be a good thing, it will become demotic. Conceivably, it may indeed prove to be the field's killer application. And perhaps it is a useful antidote to hysteria to point out that trite, fun applications—say, temporarily changing your skin pigmentation—are conceivable, too. Critics may say that decisions on cloning and germ-line modification are different, because they affect an unborn individual who has no say in the matter. But equivalent decisions about the unborn are routinely made already, albeit with the watchful eye of the law firmly on the decisionmaker.

What remains unclear is the extent to which bioengineered organisms will become products in their own right. The raspberry blown at GM crops, which are the only transgenic species on the market at the moment, does not encourage the idea that modified organisms will be welcomed with open arms. But captive, genetically modified microorganisms, such as those that would run Dr Venter's putative solarpowered fuel cells, probably do have a big future. Large organisms, too, may be exploited in ways as yet hard to imagine: furniture that is grown, rather than made; clothing that eats the dead skin its wearer sheds; miniature pet dragons (fire-breathing optional) as household pets. Whatever happens, however, it will be because somebody wants it to. Bacon was right. Knowledge is power—and generally a power for good. The century of Watson and Crick is just beginning.

Even if people do not choose to alter themselves, though, biotechnology is likely to become ubiquitous. Its potential is too great to neglect. Its

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