INTERVIEW:
Question 1
So my first question will be, is biotechnology really going to revolutionize our life? Do
you think so?
Answer
We are on the cusp of one of the greatest changes in the history of civilization.
We are moving out of the industrial revolution into the biotech century. For 40 years, two
emerging technologies have been operating on parallel tracks: computers and genetic
engineering, the information sciences and the life sciences. They are now fusing together
- computers and genes - to create a powerful new foundation for a whole new era in world
history. Increasingly, the computer is being used as the language to organize genes, to
decipher genes, to download genes and to manage and to exploit genes. And the real shift
going on in the global economy is the shift from fossil fuels, metals and minerals - the
raw resources of the industrial revolution - to genes, genetic commerce, the raw resource
of the biotech century. Genes for food, new ways to re-engineer genes for pharmaceutical
products and medicines, but also for building materials, using genes and genetic
manipulation for fiber construction, even new sources of energy. So this is one of the
great changes in history. We now have powerful new tools available to life science
companies and molecular biologists that allow human beings to play God in the laboratory.
We can begin to reconfigure, to redesign millions of years of evolution to suit the needs
of the marketplace and present generations. This is the most powerful intervention into
nature in all of history, and its raises chilling environmental, ethical and social
issues.
Question 2
What is the meaning of 'biotechnology' and what is the big change that biotechnology
brings? What can you do now with genes and that you couldn’t do in the past?
Answer
This technology is unlike the traditional breeding technologies. We have been breeding
nature for thousands of years, since the dawn of the Neolithic revolution in agriculture.
But in classical breeding, you can only cross relatives who are closely related in the
biological kingdom. For example, we can cross a donkey and a horse because they are close
relatives, and we can get a mule. But in classical breeding, we cannot cross a donkey and
an apple tree and get anything. With the new tools of biology, recombinant DNA, cell
fusion and other technologies, we can now take genetic information from any species and
place it into the genetic code of another species. For example, scientists have taken
human growth hormone genes, micro-injected those genes into mice embryo, the mice are born
with human genes replicating in every cell of their body. These mice grow twice as big and
twice as fast as any mice in history and they pass those human growth genes into every
generation of their offspring.. Being able to put human genetic material into the
biological makeup of a rodent is extraordinary. I will give you another example:
scientists have taken the gene that emits light in a firefly, injected that gene into a
tobacco plant and the plant lights up 24 hours a day. We cannot do that with classical
breeding. And even more interesting, years ago scientists took the embryonic cells from a
sheep and a goat. Now, these are unrelated species; they cannot mate. But in the
laboratory they fused those cells together and created an entirely new species that never
existed. It’s called a "geep"; it has the head of a goat and the body of a
sheep. That cannot be done in classical breeding. And finally, the cloned sheep. For the
first time in history we have been able to bypass male and female, bypass normal
reproduction between male sperm and female egg, and now we can mass replicate identical
copies of living organisms with the same kind of quality controls and engineering
standards we apply to mass assembly line production in the 20th century. So we
have these powerful tools now that allow life science companies to create a second
genesis, to remake evolution, to play God, to become the architects of a new future.
Certainly, while there are many benefits, one has to stop and pause and ask what are the
environmental, social and ethical implications of this extraordinary breech in history,
this leap into a brave new world of biology.
Question 3
Is it possible to apply biotechnology to human beings?
Answer
We already have the first gene therapy trials going on in the United States.
Over 600 people have been part of a medical protocol where genes are pumped into their
bodies to change their genetic makeup to try and correct disease that they have. To this
point, none of the therapies have been effective. They have not worked, but they are
attempting it. More radical still is that in the last month in the United States one of
our top molecular biologists, W. French Andersen, has petitioned the federal government
for permission to make the first experiment on a human fetus, where his scientific team
will change the genetic instructions on a fetus shortly after conception to change their
genetic makeup. And of course the next stage is programming babies by design, even before
conception in the sperm and egg. There are children alive today, who are now 4 or 5 years
old who when they’re 25 years old or 30 years old and want to have a baby, husband
and wife will be able to go into a medical clinic, and get an assessment of their entire
genetic makeup, exactly what their genes are and what they predispose them to. So the
husband and wife will know what their baby will look like when that sperm and egg meet.
They will actually have a crystal ball, and be able to know the genetic makeup of their
child. Now, if you’re a parent and 25 years from now you know you are going to pass
on childhood leukemia to your baby even before conception, wouldn’t you want to
eliminate that in the egg and the sperm? What if you’re going to pass on
Huntington’s chorea, sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis? Most parents want to do the
best for their children. The problem here is once we begin this journey, where parent
become the architects of their own children even before conception, this changes the
parent-child bond fundamentally in history. And the parent now is in the position of
programming their child and the child becomes the ultimate shopping experience. Where do
you draw the line? If you knew, as a parent, you were going to pass on the predisposition
genetically for manic depression, obesity, extreme short stature, dyslexia, wouldn’t
you make all those changes in the sperm and the egg? So the problem is, once we have begun
this journey into engineering our children, we move dangerously into a commercial-eugenic
civilization where we begin to engineer our progeny with a kind of engineering standards
we used in the industrial age with chemical products. How does a parent decide what a
perfect baby should look like? What if you’re the baby, and you grow up and you are
not happy with the genetic program you parents designed for you? You are caught, you
cannot do anything about it. And what about the child who is born and isn’t
genetically engineered, who is born in the old-fashioned way.
Question 4
Is it possible to apply biotechnology to human beings?What are the ethical problems and
limits ?
Answer
What about the baby who is born who is not genetically engineered, who is not programmed
by his or her parents? What if that child deviates from culturally accepted standards of
what a perfect baby should look like? What if this child, who is not engineered, has a
disability? Or a handicap? Are we likely to be tolerant of this child? Or are we likely to
be less tolerant and say this is a mistake, this child is an error that could have been
avoided with proper engineering and quality controls. The biggest casualty in programming
babies, creating perfect babies, may be empathy. Empathy is that thin, emotional strand
that keeps us united to our fellow human beings. We empathize with each other’s
frailties, our inconsistencies, our attempt to be human. But when we begin to see all of
our babies as products, as a shopping experience, as engineering standards, it’s
likely we will be far less tolerant of any baby who is born with any kind of
"abnormality" or "defect". So I believe that we are on the cusp of a
new era, where we have to ask the question, just because it can be done, does that mean it
should be done? We now have the capability in the next 20 years to program our children,
to engineer them even before conception in the sperm and egg. Should we use this new
knowledge to begin a eugenic civilization? Or perhaps we ought to think twice, and perhaps
say no. Do we have the right to intervene into the future evolution of our species? To me
the most chilling prospect is that the future evolution of our species may be determined
by individual consumer choice in the marketplace. I believe in the marketplace. A
marketplace does a good job for short-term decisions but the marketplace is the last place
that one would make decision effecting future generations because they are not here to
have their voice heard. So I believe that we should not do germ-line therapy, we should
not begin the process of engineering sperm and egg, because we are not wise enough to
dictate the future course of human evolution. That is a gift. It should not be a product
designed by parents as consumers in the biological marketplace.
Question 5
In your book The Biotech Century you talk of the risk of biological castes and the
risk of replacing a meritocracy with a genetocracy. What do you mean by this?
Answer
We are at the beginning of a new era of discrimination. We normally think of
discrimination based on gender or race or ethnicity or religion. But now as we are able to
screen individuals for their genetic makeup, we’re beginning to see a new and
insidious form of discrimination based on genotyping people. In my book, The Biotech
Century, I have included a survey by Harvard University that already shows widespread
discrimination by institutions based on people’s genetic information. Insurance
companies, adoption agencies, schools and employers are beginning to discriminate against
people based simply on their genetics. For example, employers may want to know before they
hire a man or woman, what is their genetic predisposition for cancer or manic depression
or any number of other physical or mood and behavior traits. They may say, "Look, why
should we hire somebody who has a genetic predisposition for breast cancer or prostate
cancer when we’re going to have to spend a lot of money training them and then they
may come down with the disease?" The problem is that just because someone has the
predisposition, genetically, for the disease does not mean they are going to manifest it.
And even if they get the disease, it could be controllable. For example, an employer may
say, "Well, we don’t want to hire someone who has a genetic predisposition for
manic depression in a sensitive job like air traffic controller." On the other hand,
that person may be able to control that manic depression with the proper pharmacological
intervention. Then again, someone who doesn’t have manic depression predisposition
may have some terrible thing go on in their life and go berserk. So you never know. What
I’m saying here is judging people simply on their genetic predisposition is
discrimination, because the gene is not all powerful. The gene interacts with environment,
the gene mutates with changing environments, so the gene does not tell you all of the
story. I’m afraid we’re going to see a new form of discrimination separating
people by their genetic makeup. It is going to be dangerous and insidious. We are going to
see a counter-reaction. We are going to see the emergence of a genetic rights movement
over the next 10 years as powerful in the political arena as human rights and civil rights
were in the last 50 years, as more and more people around the world become victims of
genetic discrimination. They’re going to demand their right to genetic privacy.
They’re going to demand legislation to protect their genetic privacy. They are going
to say that no institution ought to be able to use, misuse and abuse their genetic
information. So genetic rights will loom as powerfully in the next generation as civil
rights and human rights did on the political agenda of the past 50 years.
Question 6
Is there also a question of patents?
Answer
The name of the game is genes. Whoever controls genes controls the biotech century. We are
moving our raw resource base from fossil fuels, metals and minerals to genes. Genes for
every economic activity. Now, the public may be surprised to know that the consolidations
and mergers going on in the life science industries dwarf the consolidations and mergers
going on in telecommunication, software and the entertainment industry. What are seeing a
handful of life science companies around the world beginning to control all of the genetic
blueprints upon which our survival is based, from seeds for growing food to fiber and
building materials to human medicine, all in the hands of a few companies. In the next 8
years, virtually all 60,000 or so genes that make up the blueprints for the human race
will be identified. Virtually every one of those genes will become a patented property of
a life science company. As companies locate these genes, they claim them as their
inventions, like the breast cancer gene, the cystic fibrosis gene, the Huntington’s
chorea gene. So in less than 10 years, a handful of life science companies like Monsanto
and Novartis and SmithKline Beecham and Hoechst Chemical, will actually own the genetic
blueprints of the human race, giving them unprecedented commercial power to dictate the
terms upon which we live our daily lives, and perhaps even to dictate the terms of the
future evolution of the human race. In addition, these same companies are bio-prospecting
in the southern countries because that is where the rare genetic resources are. The
bio-diversity of the planet, the rich genetic resources, are in the developing countries.
So these companies go down there, they bio-prospect, they locate where genes are that may
be commercially valuable and then they patent them for microbes in plants and animals and
even indigenous human populations. The southern countries are crying out bio-piracy. They
are saying, "These are our resources", like oil is to the Middle East. We should
be commercially compensated." My position, and the position I take in The Biotech
Century book, is that the gene pool should remain open. It is part of the shared
legacy of evolution. It should not be reduced to the political property of governments or
the commercial-intellectual property of corporations. If we reduce the gene pool to
private property that can be commercially exploited, we will have gene wars in the next
century, just as we had wars over oil and rare metals and minerals in the industrial
century. So we need an international agreement to keep this common pool open. Antarctica
is a good model. The last continent, you know, is kept open. By treaty we can
scientifically explore it, but we cannot commercially exploit it or own it. We need a
similar international agreement to keep the genetic pool open, so that it can be a
scientifically explored but shared legacy for future generations.
I want to add one more thing. Every parent needs to ask this question:
will you children be better served or ill-served if they grow up in a world where they
begin to think of all of life, the blueprints, the genes, the chromosomes, the cells, the
organs, as simply intellectual property, as commercial utility, as patented inventions
owned by giant companies. It seems to me that we have a great battle with patents. Does
life have intrinsic value or simply commercial and utility value? I believe we are going
to see a great movement, a counter-reaction to patenting life by corporations as more and
more people begin to assert their right to maintain the genes as a commons for the
protection of future generations.
Question 7
What do you mean by 'genetic pollution'?
Answer
This is a term we are going to hear a lot about in the next 2 or 3 years. Genetic
pollution is going to be as serious an issue in the next generation as petrochemical and
nuclear pollution was in the last generation. These giant life-science companies are
introducing scores of new laboratory-conceived genetically-engineered organisms into our
environment. In the next few years they hope to put hundreds, then thousands of
genetically engineered organisms all over the world onto our lands, our water, in our air,
to create new crops, new sources of energy, a whole range of activities. We are on the
cusp of the most radical and daring experiment on nature every conceived by human beings.
Reseeding the earth with an artificial second genesis. The problem here is this: when we
begin to introduce hundreds and then thousands of genetically engineered organisms into
environments they were never designed for, some of them are likely to become pests, to
stay in the environment and create long-term destabilization. I’ll give you examples.
In the next 3 years, Monsanto, an American company, wants to introduce a plant all over
the world on millions of acres of land that grows plastic, and you harvest it like cotton.
Other companies are right now looking at introducing plants that serve as chemical
factories and secrete pharmaceutical products and chemical products and vaccines. Now,
imagine millions of acres of land around the world with plants producing plastic and
chemicals and pharmaceuticals and vaccines. What happens to foraging birds and insects and
microorganisms and animals when they come into contact with plants that are producing
plastics and chemicals and pharmaceutical products? We don’t have any precedent for
this kind of tremendous change in our ecosystems. Right now, the big companies are
introducing genetically engineered food crops. There is a debate here in Italy and around
the world about these crops. These crops are potentially very dangerous. These crops
contain genes that make the plants resistant to herbicides and genes that make the plants
resistant to pests or viruses. The problem is this, we now have studies that show that
these special genes can jump during pollination, and so you can have a herbicide or a
pest-resistant gene jumping during pollination and fixing the genetic code of weeds, and
weeds then would be resistant to herbicides, weeds would be resistant to insects. Weeds of
course reproduce, they proliferate, they migrate. Imagine the problem over extended acres
of land with weeds that have genes resistant to viruses and pests like insects and
herbicides. What the Italian public needs to know, and especially your elected
representatives in parliament, is that there is no long-term catastrophic insurance
against potential losses if any of these organisms were to become pests. There is only
short-term crop damage insurance and negligence insurance. The reason is that the
insurance industry won’t insure any of this against long-term losses, because they
say there is no science to judge the risk of what might happen. So my question is this,
isn’t it irresponsible for any government to allow the introduction of any
genetically engineered organism into the environment? If there is no liability in place to
insure against long-term losses, who is going to be liable? These companies could never
pay the losses. If one organism became a pest, the damage could run into hundreds of
millions of dollars, maybe billions. Will the Italian farmers have to take the losses? Or
homeowners, or taxpayers? Will the Italian government have to absorb millions of dollars
of losses over generations because they will have to be responsible for the fundamental
tragedy? I believe we need to learn a lesson from the petrochemical and nuclear
revolution. Ask the tough questions up front. Make sure that we don’t introduce
anything into this biosphere that may undermine the interests of present and future
generations. Put a moratorium, a strict moratorium on any releases into the environment,
until the issue of a risk assessment science and liability questions are resolved by
parliament.
Question 8
How will we have to use biotechnology in the future?
Answer
The issue here is not the science. We are moving into the biotech century. The science is
valuable if it is used in a non-reductionist fashion. We are learning about genes, how
they turn on and off, what they do, how they relate to their environment. This is very
good science. The issue is not the science. The issue is what kind of commercial
technologies and social technologies will we use to apply this new science in the biotech
century. There is a hard-path and a soft-path way to technologically apply this new
science. They both have very different frames of reference, very different values.. I will
give you an example. Genetic foods is a hard-path way to use this science. Create
genetically engineered crops that are resistant to local ecosystems, that are powerful and
re-engineered. There is a soft-path way to use this same science in agriculture, however.
Organic agriculture. We could use this new science to develop a very sophisticated
organic-based, sustainable approach to agricultural production for the next century.
Instead of engineering our crops in isolation from the ecosystems, we could find ways to
understand how our traditional plant varieties interact with local ecosystems, so we can
better integrate millions of years of evolutionary wisdom and create organic, sustainable
approaches to making our plants compatible with local ecosystem dynamics. So the first
approach, the hard path, is playing God, be an architect, an engineer of a second genesis.
The soft path, organic agriculture, be a partner and a steward. Don’t manipulate and
re-engineer, but rather find ways to finesse and integrate traditional evolutionary wisdom
with local ecosystems. The same in health. The hard-path approach to heath is to wait
until someone becomes sick and them pump genes into them to make them well, or more
radical still, change the genetic instructions in sperm and egg, so that you eliminate the
potential diseases, but then we risk creating our own second genesis and a eugenics
culture. There is a soft-path way to use the same science in medicine, and that is
preventive medicine: to understand better how genes interact with environments to keep
people healthy. You know, with most of our major diseases, like heart attacks and breast
and colon and prostate cancer and diabetes and strokes, there is an environmental element.
Each person has a different genetic predisposition for these diseases, but the environment
we create can trigger them. If you are a heavy smoker, you drink a lot of alcohol, you
don’t exercise, you eat fatty meats and you live in pollution, chances are you are
going to get these diseases. We can prevent this with the new science of preventive
health. We are going to be able to screen a newborn baby in 10 years from now and know
their whole genetic makeup and which diseases they are predisposed towards throughout
their life. We are also mapping the genetic makeup of all the foods that we eat. So we
will be able to tailor specific foods that have properties that keep people from having
specific diseases. So we will be able to match each individual human being, when they are
born, with a special dietary regime throughout their life, so that their genes do not
mutate into diseases. This is a much more sophisticated, elegant, intelligent way - a
soft-path way - to use the new science. It does not involve playing God, in engineering
life, but on the contrary it is involved with creating partnership and understanding how
better to integrate our sense of well-being into the evolutionary wisdom of millions of
years.
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