Subject: Re: Genetic Engineering (fwd)

From: Victor Guest <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 04:40:04 WST

To: [email-masked]
From: Dick Richardson <[email-masked]>
At 12:46 PM 11/27/98 -0700, Rio de la Vista wrote:
>Dear Jim and all who are thinking about this topic,
>
>There was quite an interesting article on genetic engineering in the New
>York TImes Sunday Magazine Ocotber 25 issue,  titled "Playing God in the
>Garden" by Michael Pollan.  Indeed there may be times when genetic
>engineering will be a tool of choice,  but I feel an eery internal
>distrubance about it similar to the feeling of playing with atom splitting
>and such.  I don't sense that our wisdom has evolved equally to our
>technological capabilities and we are messing around with vast unknown
>consequences-- of course that is true in so many aspects these days, who
>knows which will be the change that will cause the whole to shift?

Jim and Rio both raised some interesting points. I'd like to add some from
the position of having been involved in genetics research many years, some
of it at a molecular level, and currently teaching a course in genetics.

First, the field of genetics has advanced so rapidly in the past decade
that now we are discussing fundamental questions of "what, really, IS a
gene". Sewall Wright maybe 60+ years ago defined a gene "as the
hypothetical unit necessary to make sense out of breeding experiments." It
STILL IS a hypothetical unit, and what we now have are regions of DNA that
regulate molecular activities, some of which are involved in the process of
making proteins. Genes no longer are discrete units with a beginning and an
end that are separate from beginnings and ends of other genes.
Functionally, a gene may overlap another gene, yet in the region of
overlaping code, code entirely different amino acids so that the two
proteins would not be recognizable in the area where their genes
overlapped. Sometimes two genes may share a beginning and have different
ends, and sometimes they may share common ends and have different
beginnings. The part of a particular gene may code for several proteins,
depending on which tissue or organ where the gene is active. A gene for an
antibody protein may code for 100's of thousands of different proteins,
with permanent changes that eventually code for one in one cell lineage,
and another in another lineage, etc. for all the antibodies we ever will
make. Soooo, the stuff in the newspaper, and the things that are patented
by companies, are to a large extent hypothetical, although they do work to
code something consistent in test conditions. Nevertheless, we don't know
what they'll do when the diverse conditions of the living organism are
involved, much less what the diverse conditions among organisms will
create. As Rio suggested, genetic engineering is very much analogous to the
early days of nuclear energy when we thought we had a wonderful tool to do
all sorts of things. Our enthusiasm today for genetic engineering is, I
believe, a measure of our ignorance combined with wishful thinking in most
cases. In some cases, I think the enthusiasm is justified. How do we tell
the different situations apart??

On a related level, the "working environment" of genes in an organism is
very much like an ecosystem, and actually the organism is created with an
interplay beween the genes and the ecosystem. A cell is a "holon" (or
"whole" within another "whole") and a tissue is another holon, and an
organism is another, and so forth until we get to the universe. (Maybe
beyond the Universe there are others, but so far we don't have any
scientific models for "way out there"! When a gene is treated as a "cure"
it is done so like we treat symptoms in holistic management. Cure one
symptom and create problems, we all know from holistic management. We
haven't had time to track many of the steps in a cascade of "new diseases"
generated from the "cure" of the ones addressed by finding "the gene" for
disease X. Just as there is no gene for "eye color" but a gene affecting
some biochemical processes, we require other genes to have eyes for there
to be a possible expression of a "gene for eye color". Even without eyes,
the "eye color gene" will continue to function, and produce the product(s)
it produces in the biochemical system, which also makes hormones, pigments,
etc.

Now, putting together the two paragraphs above ... what IS a gene, really,
and what DOES a gene DO, really ... and you have some idea of the
complexity of the genetic system. Yes, we can now move genes around among
vastly different species -- microbes to humans, humans to plants, etc. --
but the gene moved into an organism may NEVER have been "tested" in this
new ecosystem of genes. There are certainly large time delays before some
of the effects appear, which may take days, or generations. We are, indeed,
tampering with mixing holons never before mixed in millions of years of
biological testing. Rio's "eery internal disturbance" in my opinion is well
founded. What we do with this new very powerful tool first and formost, I
believe, is be VERRRRRRRY careful! Monsanto and other companies, I think,
are being VERRRRRRRRY reckless! We all will share the results, good or bad.

Dick

R. H. (Dick) Richardson                     (512) 471-4128 office
School of Biol. Sci./Integrative Biol. Sect.      471-9651 FAX
Patterson Lab
University of Texas                              =20
Austin, TX 78712
=09
"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." -- Ana=EFs Nin