by Stefano Vaj
The truth is that all judgments on the validity of a genome is necessarily relative; but the relativity of the judgement in question does not make it any less “true,” given of course the context and the value choice to which it refers.
Conversely, if the diversity and wealth of the biosphere are today under threat, their future maintenance can only be the result of a deliberate, political and entirely artificial choice, such as the conservation in the gene pool of vegetal and animal species, man included, of “ancestral” traits and/or of traits lacking adaptive interest under current environmental conditions, but that it is possible to choose to keep, out of far-sightedness – for the sake of survival in the event of a radical change of these environmental conditions -, or even for aesthetic, emotional and cultural reasons.
The collection, classification and protection of the wild and of local varieties, for their respective genomes, is thus a modern, or rather postmodern, project, in stark contrast with thousand-year old practices aiming on the contrary to the reduction and specialisation, especially of vegetal varieties, in favour of the most “useful” ones, and among these, of those qualitatively and quantitatively preferred by the farmer and his master or clients. In this sense it seems problematic to represent traditional agriculture, praised in this respect for instance by Giovanni Monastra,[270] as “the guardian” of a biological variety that it has, historically, never done anything other than fight and reduce.
Naturally the first manipulation of the biosphere takes place, even before the selection or extermination (or… the deliberate and artificial conservation) of species and races, indirectly, via the alteration of the environment, alteration that constitutes the trademark of the Second Man with respect to the first.
Today this alteration is only reaching its completion: long before industrial revolution, related pollution, large monocultures, greenhouse effects, the planetary panorama was radically transformed by deforestation, by grazing, by sowing, by artificial importation of species outside their native habitat.
If all this has been taking place for millennia in central and south Europe and in the Mediterranean basin, the radical transformation of peripheral areas like Iceland and Australia took place entirely in our era. And all this certainly goes in the direction of a decrease of the biological richness of the Earth. Species and races have always gone extinct, and to protect species destined for extinction is just as “manipulatory” as it is to accelerate this extinction; but if it is true, as some authors maintain, that at the time of the dinosaurs the rate of extinction was about one species every thousand years, and that the beginning of the industrial era the rate has changed to one every decade to reach now the pace of three species an hour,[271] it is legitimate to raise the question, particularly as the conditions and modalities of the (possible) apparition of new species are still uncertain, and it is even put in doubt (and not just by Bible fundamentalists) that the process of speciation is still under way.[272]
The abundance and variety of life on Earth concerns by the way just as much the degree of variance within populations as the degree of variance of populations with respect to one another; and as far as human populations are concerned, it would appear plausible that its defence should first of all focus precisely on the difference of the population concerned, and the struggle against globalisation, that is, against ethno-cultural entropy mechanisms, by which such a difference is inevitably threatened. Entropy that we have seen acts via an increasing elimination of all the factors of segregation (immigration, monoglottism, uprooting, panmixia etc.), and of directional selection (uniformisation of the environment and of cultural models on a planetary scale).
The manipulation of the living accomplished by the Neolithic revolution in any case did not stop with alteration of the environment, domestication and oriented selection. Cloning, grafting, hybridisation, artificial insemination, are also part of the repertoire of traditional tools, albeit applied for long mostly to the vegetal realm. In the nineteenth century powdery mildew, silkworm disease and phylloxera brought silkworm breeding and viticulture on the European continent to their knees in just a few years precisely as a result of the exclusive use for centuries of grapes and silkworms that then revealed themselves vulnerable.[273] As even children know, the mule that accompanied, and sometimes still accompanies, Italian alpine troopers is a sterile hybrid deliberately produced at each generation by the “unnatural” crossing of two different species, to suit the needs of alpine troops themselves.
Nevertheless, the momentous break that faces us today cannot be underestimated, and its consequences are political and existential at all levels. We are confronted not only with a civilisational choice, but choices that will decide of the future hegemony of our planet and of our ability to change, or continue depending on the circumstances, the lifestyle that we have known until now.
With respect of what he defines as the biolithic revolution, Kempf remarks:
Humankind has completed the enterprise of asserting its mastery over nature established by the Neolithic revolution; it is now engaging in an enterprise to assert its mastery over individual biological organisms and to transfer biological properties to inert matter.[274] The effect of the powerful techniques that begin being used to manipulate the living and to animate the artificial render it crucial for our generation to once more ask ourselves what is human and what is life. We are not changing our world, we are changing our being.[275]
And he goes on:
My hypothesis is that current research programmes manifest, beyond their immediate concerns and their methods, a global coherence. Their coming has nothing of a disorderly surge, but is the product of a common will to act on the living from within, transform the biological organism, animate mineral or logical constructs, or bring these two technologies together. Such a will seems ancient enough to allow us to find its traces in various myths. But it has never taken so blatant an expression as it has today. By offering the means of its implementation, the new technologies forge a change in the relation of man to the world that is so profound as to come close to a rupture, a rupture with few equivalents in human history.[276]
The paradigmatic example is the one we have already discussed:
A few thousand years ago, human societies had begun to transit from a mode of subsistence based on hunting and gathering to an economy founded on agriculture and livestock – in short, from pillage to exploitation. The building up of food reserves enabled the liberation from immediate ecological constrictions. These mutations, that definitely changed the organisation of human society, were named the Neolithic revolution by the archeologist Gordon Childe in the thirties. If archeology has described this phenomenon in detail a process extended over many centuries and millennia, and occurring in about six main geographical breeding grounds – it has conserved the general idea. The entry into the Neolithic age marked a radical change in man’s relation to nature. First, he had too submit himself to an incommensurable power that arbitrarily dispensed the food necessary for survival; soon it became possible to harness these menacing and mysterious forces in order to subjugate them to the satisfaction of human needs. […] Today, fortified with novel powers derived from scientific knowledge, the Neolithic civilisation has completed its enterprise: there is no more “wild” nature. As the review Science observes, “there are no more places on earth that are not in the shade of humans.” Today mankind influences the whole of the biosphere, through direct transformations or through modifications of its biochemical equilibriums. Not that humankind masters these processes, but there no longer exists any part thereof that are immune to his influence. […] Why, exactly as our ancestors entered a new age when they began the conquest of wild nature, in the same way, transforming the living and attempting to project its characteristics on inert matter, we are entering a new era, dominated by the techniques that marry the living (βίος, bios) to the mineral (λύθος, lithos) and that it is therefore appropriate to call biolithic.[277]
Even thoug
h it suffers from an American economistic mentality, what the many times quoted Jeremy Rifkin writes with respect to this revolution is interesting: “Great economic changes in history occur when a number of technological and social forces come together to create a new ‘operating matrix’. There are seven strands that make up the operational matrix of the Biotech Century.”
These seven elements according to the author are:
First, the ability to isolate, identify and recombine genes is making the gene pool available, for the first time, as the primary raw resource for future economic activity. Recombinant DNA techniques and other biotechnologies allow scientists and biotech companies to locate, manipulate, and exploit genetic resources for specific economic ends. Second, the awarding of patents on genes, cell lines, genetically engineered tissue, organs, and organisms, as well as the processes used to alter them, is giving the marketplace the commercial incentive to exploit the new resources. Third, the globalisation of commerce and trade make possible the wholesale reseeding of the Earth’s biosphere with a laboratory-conceived second Genesis, an artificially produced bioindustrial nature designed to replace nature’s own evolutionary scheme. A global life-science industry is already beginning to wield unprecedented power over the vast biological resources of the planet. Life-science fields ranging from agriculture to medicine are being consolidated under the umbrella of giant ‘life’ companies in the emerging biotech marketplace. Fourth, the mapping of the approximately 100,000 genes that comprise the human genome, new breakthroughs in genetic screening, including DNA chips, somatic gene therapy, and the imminent prospect of genetic engineering of human eggs, sperm and embryonic cells, is paving the way for the wholesale alteration of the human species and the birth of a commercially driven eugenics civilisation. Fifth, a spate of new scientific studies on the genetic basis of human behaviour and the new sociobiology that favours nature over nurture are providing the context for the widespread acceptance of the new biotechnologies. Sixth, the computer is providing the communication and organisational medium to manage the genetic information that makes up the biotech economy. All over the world, researchers are using computers to decipher, download, catalogue, and organize genetic information, creating a new store of genetic capital for the use of the bioindustrial age. Computational technologies and genetic technologies are fusing together into a powerful new technological reality.[278] Seventh, a new cosmological narrative about evolution is beginning to challenge the neo-Darwinian citadel with a view of nature that is compatible with the operating assumptions of the new technologies and the new global economy.[279]
Part of what Rifkin describes, and denounces, is a “nightmare” only for those who adhere to the neoLuddite and humanist ideological biases of the author; to others they could on the contrary contain the elements of a dream on a previously unthinkable scale. For the rest, that is, for the part which may appear “pessimistic” in a more general sense, the hypothetic scenario is perfectly possible, but it is only one of the alternatives that open up to the “biotech century”; and it cannot be avoided by attitudes of primary luddism, improbable prohibitionism, or denunciations of this kind, but only by a tragic will of a political and cultural nature, which, accepting the challenge of postmodernity, will transform the crisis that is impending into an opportunity for a refounding and a rebirth of man’s historical destiny. As Hölderlin teaches, “Where there is danger, The rescue grows as well.”[280]
10. The biotech century
The century that Jeremy Rifkin calls “the biotech century” is the one that began only a few years ago, but in reality it took its first steps towards the middle of the 20th century, even though in fact Hermann Müller had provoked the first artificial mutations in an animal already in 1914, when he submitted fruit flies to X-rays. “For the first time, an artificial force, an X-ray machine, had changed the basic structure of an animal. This was a very tangible, practical impact, not a trick, not a change created by old-style breeding. […] The media took up the Müller experiment and said that someday, maybe soon, scientists would create designer people.”[281] But at the time no one had any idea what exactly was the biological basis of the genes.
Perhaps we could instead posit as its origin Oswald Avery’s discovery of the roles of nucleic acids in heredity. Avery published his discovery in February 1944, in an article in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. “It was not, as a layman might expect, entitled ‘Eureka! Secret of Life on Earth Revealed! Genes are made of DNA!’ The tribal code of science, especially in the 1940s, required researchers to stick strictly to the facts and hope that colleagues could see through the dense lingo and make a fuss. So the paper by Avery, McCarty, and MacLeod was given the impenetrable headline: ‘Studies on the chemical nature of the substance inducing transformation of pneumococcal types. Induction of transformation by a deoxyribonucleic acid fraction isolated form pneumococcus type III.’”[282]
This discovery also represents a first premonition of the foretold marriage between genetics and information science. Of course, already Mendel’s genetics was per se essentially “digital,” in its discrete and binary nature. But the physical basis of the genes was still unknown, and these could still have revealed themselves to be elements with qualities, varieties, incidence, variable in every way and inextricably connected to their phenotypic manifestation. That which was to become the genetics of Crick and Watson is intrinsically digital and discontinuous, all down to its very core, the famous double helix. The dimension of a genome can be exactly measured in gigabases exactly like the capacity of a computer hard drive can be measured in gigabytes. “Today genetics is a pure information technology. It is exactly for this reason that an anti-freeze gene can be copied from an artic fish and inserted into a tomato”[283].
However, the first foundation for practical applications came to light towards the middle of the fifties, when cytologists succeeded in finding methods for the preparation of “carrots,” that is, for the separation of the chromosome from the rest of the cell, in such a way as to allow its examination under the electronic microscope. Thus it was possible for the first time to correlate chromosomal anomalies with genetic diseases, giving birth to “medical genetics, that is, the branch of genetics that embraces the study of genetic illnesses both on the chromosomal level and on the level of the patient.”[284]
Later, in 1968, two Swedish researchers, Torbjörn O. Caspersson and Lore Zech, discovered that every gene has differing quantities of the four nitrogenous bases that make up the nucleotides, that is guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine; they also identified a compound, acridine and quinacrine mustard, which has an affinity for guanine, and which therefore allows to colour dye the chromosomes, revealing the quantity of guanine, making possible for the first time the identification of single human chromosomes. Towards the end of the seventies, aided by other similar staining methods, geneticists were able to link specific genetic traits to known illnesses, so that at the first conference on gene mapping in 1972 was announced the mapping of another fifty genes or so, taking the number to hundred and fifty, and on the way to reaching around a thousand five hundred in 1986.
Thus was launched in 1988 the Human Genome Project, promoted by Watson and Crick,[285] which saw the coordination of all the public research bodies in the United States into a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort aimed at mapping all of human DNA.[286]
Soon after, other governments launched analogous projects, but it would be a commercial company, Celera Genomics, that completed the project in April 2000, about a decade ahead of schedule, working with data already made public and building upon them by making massive use of the resources offered by computer-assisted calculations, and filing some thousand patents in connection with the results obtained.[287] Naturally the mapping of the genetic code is just the beginning in the identification of the role and function of each single gene, but it represents the foundation required to understand the functioning of the entire genome of a given organism. At the present day, there
are also under way similar “Genome Projects” for plants, microorganisms and other animal species, for a combined worldwide investment of billions of dollars.[288]
Richard Dawkins has recently extrapolated the future cost and timeline for genetic mapping, remarking how in 1965 it cost around thousand pounds sterling per “letter” or base pair, to sequence the RNA of some bacteria, that in 1975 sequencing the DNA of the X174 virus cost about ten sterling pounds per base pair; that in 1995 we were already at one sterling pound in the case of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. When the Human Genome project was completed in 2000 the cost was 10 pence (!). Today, assuming that this evolution follows a progression similar to that referred to as Moore’s law[289], the most prudent prediction would seem to indicate that in 2050 at the latest we will be able to sequence the whole genome of any one human (or animal or plant for that reason) in a time and for a price that today are those of a banal blood test[290]. Craig Venter believes instead that in 2008 his Centre for Advancement of Genomics (today the J. Craig Venter Institute) will be able to sequence the entire genome of a person for around a thousand dollars, and others make even more aggressive forecasts.[291]