by Stefano Vaj
Of course, knowing the genetic code of an organism does not yet mean understanding everything about that organism, and, as Dawkins remarks, there are three further steps to go. The first, difficult but now fully resolved, is to determine the sequence of the aminoacids in the protein produced by the gene from the sequence of the nucleotides of the latter. The second is to determine the three-dimensional form of the proteins from the sequence of amino acids that compose it. The third is to calculate which embryo the gene is meant to produce, taking into account its “environment” (consisting in both the other co-present genes, and the so-called epigenetic information)[292]. The idea is that already in 2050 it will be possible to feed the genetic code of a mammal to a computer, and have it calculate the type of embryo that this code is destined to produce – even though it is also possible that, owing to the irreducibility of the necessary calculations, the most efficient program and hardware for effectuating such a calculation, will remain, as we will see, …the gene itself and a uterus.[293]
In its turn, the calculation of the differences between the genome of different species, for example humans and chimps, allows one to pinpoint the distinctive features and maybe reconstruct different and extinct species that are related to both.[294] Another matter of relevance is the prospective introduction of important alterations in higher animals: “Bioethicists frequently discuss the potential challenges of enhanced human intelligence without fully acknowledging that such possibilities will necessarily be preceded by animal enhancements, since no other good way exists to develop and test interventions of the sort. Doubling the lifespan of a mouse may not threaten our notions of human identity, but substantively increasing a mouse’s intelligence might. And significantly enhancing or modifying the intellect and behaviour of monkeys or dogs would raise even more questions, especially if their intelligence approached our own.”[295]
As Faye wrote in 1998:
One of the central theses of the notion of archeofuturism that I am trying to promote is this one: in a paradoxical way, 21st century technoscience is cornering modernity. It rehabilitates inegalitarian and archaic conceptions. A simple example taken from genetics: the mapping of the human genome, the study of hereditary illnesses, the development of gene therapies, the research on the chemistry of the brain, on AIDS and on viral diseases, etc., already begin to reveal concretely, in its determining factors, human inequality. The scientific community finds itself between a rock and a hard place: how, at the same time, obey the censorship of the politically correct, give way to the intellectual terrorism of egalitarianism, and proclaim scientific truths that might be shown to have therapeutic use?[296] There will be conflicts, and they will be serious. Geneticists, sexologists, virologists, already find it harder and harder to conceal that one of the canonical mythemes of the Human Rights’ religion, that is, the postulate of the “fundamental” genetic equality of different human groups and that of the genetic individualisation of human beings is scientifically untenable.[297]
And he added:
On the other hand, it is clear that the biotechnologies (assisted procreation, biotronic implants, artificial and additional organs, cloning, gene therapy, manipulation of the genome, all the technologies that, although they dare not pronounce the word, answer to a logic of eugenics), will not be accessible to all, nor will they be paid for by the National Health Service, nor applicable elsewhere than in major industrial nations. A de facto eugenism, offered to a minority whose life expectation will be additionally strengthened: the summit of inequality is about to slink like a virus right into the heart of modern egalitarian society. Another annoying problem: how will our humanists react when chimaeras and clones (animal-human hybrids) will be produced to create the organ and blood banks, improve sperm, test medicine? They will try to prohibit it? They will not succeed. To stand the global shock of the genetics of the future, one will need an archaic mindset.
A non-humanist mindset, which shall be up to guiding, legitimising and integrating man’s new power over himself within the frame of building a collective destiny of races and species, and which today appears the necessary alternative to the dehumanisation that the paralysis and the capitulation of the prevailing ideology risks to involve.
In fact, throughout the period examined and until today, the accumulation at increasing speed of new data and the development of new methods to isolate and identify the genes have always run side by side with the discovery of a complex series of techniques of manipulation and transformation of the genes themselves.
One of the most noteworthy of these methods is that of recombinant DNA. In 1973 it was accomplished by two Stanford biologists, Paul Berg and Maxine Singer, an undertaking that, as Rifkin remarks, “according to some experts in biotechnology, is in the world of organic matter, comparable to the discovery of fire.”[298] The two researchers explained that they had taken two unrelated organisms, that is, that do not mate in nature, isolated a fragment of DNA from each of them, and then recombined the two fragments of genetic material.[299]
If for over ten thousand years man has manipulated the biology of the animal and vegetal world, and more or less indirectly his own, the new technologies represent an obvious qualitative leap. Already in 1976, the austere and conservative Encyclopedia Britannica wrote that: “as in the past we manipulated plastic and metals, so we are now building living materials.”[300] Actually, the traditional techniques of hybridisation possible between the different species encounter severe limits in the vegetal field, and even more so in the animal field, where such limits are only minimally pushed further by artificial insemination. Genetic engineering on the contrary radically overcomes the constrictions imposed by the species boundaries.
The very concept of species as an entity that is recognisable, unique and stable by virtue of its nature becomes an anachronism when genetic traits begin to be recombined by overriding the boundaries of “natural or nearly-natural” inter-fecundity.
Rifkin mentions in this respect three of the very first examples of results achieved in practice:
In 1983, Ralph Brinster of the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School inserted human growth hormone genes into mouse embryos. The mice expressed the human genes and grew twice as fast and nearly twice as big as other mice. These “super mice,” as the press dubbed them, then passed on the human growth hormone onto their offspring. A strain of mice now exists that continues to express human growth genes, generation after generation. The human genes have been permanently incorporated into the genetic makeup of these animals. Early in 1984, a comparable feat was accomplished in England. Scientists worked on embryo cells from a goat and from a sheep, and placed the resulting hybrid embryo into a surrogate animal who gave birth to a sheep-goat chimera, the first such example of the “blending” of two completely unrelated animals species in human history. In 1986, scientists took the gene whose product emits light in a firefly and inserted it into the genetic code of a tobacco plant. The tobacco leaves glow![301]
These initial results, even though useless or vaguely horrid, could by no means be achievable through the traditional techniques of reproduction or hybridisation. In today’s laboratories the possibilities of recombination are on the contrary virtually unlimited. The new technologies allow one to combine genetic material of any provenance, to achieve any goal. The genetic characteristics of living organisms are therefore going to become increasingly the result of choices and of explicit preferences.
It should also be emphasised that such a radical change in our relationship to nature is not produced by the application of the technologies concerned, but by the very possibility of applying them. It is perfectly possible to shoot a gun while covering the eyes with one hand, and allow things “to follow their intended course,” but from the moment that I see it or can see if I so wish, the responsibility of where the bullet goes is anyhow mine, as is also mine that of planting less productive vegetal varieties, or not remedying the genetic defect of an embryo. While conserving ancient spe
cies unchanged, or even resurrecting extinct ones,[302] remains amongst available options, all this is from now on just the result of (possible) tastes or interests or choices to this effect, exactly as will be that of allowing the birth of a child with a genetic defect.
The declension of the first uses of the above achievements, in the current cultural climate and in want of a historical and political inspiration whatsoever, is obviously mercantilistic, in the framework of a dialectic limited to the contradiction between frightened moralism and “the market.” The balance of powers, however, in the global financial landscape and in the relations between individual countries, is already strongly affected.
Hundreds of bio-engineering companies compete for a position in the market and over brains, patents, venture capital (especially in the stock exchange known as the “New Markets,” and after the burst of the speculative bubble of the New Economy at the end of the nineties), with names like Amgen, Organogenesis, Genzyme, Calgene, Mycogen; but position wars also involve almost all the multinational chemical, food and drug companies, including Novartis, DuPont, Monsanto, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Dow Chemical, Ciba-Geigy, Pharmacia, etc.[303] The applications are practically boundless, and will progressively affect resources and the independence and economic weight of the countries involved.
In the mining industry, researchers are developing new microorganisms capable of replacing the miners and their machines in the extraction of metals. Microorganisms that feed on metals like cobalt, iron, nickel and manganese were tested already in the early eighties. One company has reported the successful introduction of a microbe “into low-grade copper ores, where [it] produced an enzyme that eats away salt in the ore, leaving behind an almost pure form of copper.”[304] For low-concentration metals, difficult to extract with traditional methods, it will be microorganisms than will provide the tools needed for the extraction and the processing. Similar applications are already used to degrade minerals in which there is metallic gold, before its chemical extraction, so as to increase the yield. Rifkin states: “In the future, the mining industry is expected to turn increasingly to bioleaching with microorganisms as the more economical way to utilize low-grade ores and mineral spoils that might ordinarily be discarded.”[305]
Among the applications aimed at reducing man’s harmful impact on the environment, and the perils inherent in some of the processes, the design should also be mentioned of microorganisms that consume methane gas that may exists in mines, one of the major causes of accidents because of its tendency to explode.[306] Biotechnologies are increasingly regarded as promising tools for improving the environment, particularly to replace toxics with useful or at least innocuous substances operated by suitably modified fungi, algae and microbes.[307] Morevover the Institute for Genomic Research has sequenced the genome of a microbe with a strong ability to absorb radiation, and intends to use this knowledge to create novel ways to manage radioactive waste.
In fact, depending on the case, the capacity to increase is as interesting as the capacity to decrease the absorption of chemical or radioactive waste by a given vegetal species, as of any other element. While it should be imagined that a species grown for the purpose of draining will have to stock as much as possible of the undesirable elements, the opposite is true for a species bred for nutrition, perhaps on the same polluted land, where if anything the intake of trace elements improving its nutritional value shall on the contrary be increased, and in particular their location in the edible part of the plant (for instance the fruit or the leaf).
But the concept can be pushed still a little further. For instance in Purdue University in Indiana research is being performed on the alterations in vegetal uptake of heavy metals, not only for purposes of drainage, but also for recycling of the metals themselves[308]. Some species of trees, in particular genetically modified poplars, are by themselves able to pump through their root system, concentrate and biodegrade dangerous organic compounds, replacing a whole drainage industry.[309] Forest companies are furthermore examining the possibility of isolating genes that be inserted in the trees to make them grow more rapidly, in this case not just for reforestation, but for the production of wood and paper. In the nineties, Calgen isolated the gene of the enzyme that controls the production of cellulose in plants, aiming to obtain more efficient plants for the cellulose pulp industry and paper mills.
Other, and industrially even more important, experiments are taking place in the energy sector, especially in relation to the recurrent proposal to replace fossil fuels with ethanol, the normal alcohol present in beverages and disinfectants, for instance as fuel for vehicles, or for the production of electrical energy.
To such ends, experiments to increase the specific productivity of vegetal resources such as sugar cane are underway. A bacterium of the class Escherichia coli has been made able to break down agricultural residuals, the waste generated by the food industry, urban garbage, and convert these directly into ethanol. Again in view of oil-replacement solutions, a British firm called ICI has allegedly developed microbes able to produce plastics with various properties, while in 1993 Chris Sommerville, of the Botanic Centre of the Carnegie Institute in Washington, inserted a gene into a mustard plant that renders it as well capable of producing plastic substances, which Monsanto plans to use industrially.
The said Monsanto, one of the biggest international conglomerates active in the chemical sector, liquidated its entire division of traditional chemistry in 1997, and has anchored all its research, development and marketing programs to biotechnology.
Thus Rifkin says:
In agriculture, bioengineering is being looked to as a partial substitute for petrochemical farming. Scientists are busy at work engineering new food crops that can take in nitrogen directly from the air, rather than having to rely on the more costly petro-chemical fertilizers currently in use. There are also experiments under way to transfer desirable genetic characteristics from one species to another in order to improve the nutritional value of the plants and increase their yield and performance. […] The first commercially grown gene-spliced food crops were planted in 1996. In 1997 farmers planted genetically engineered soy on more than 8 million acres and genetically engineered corn on more than 3.5 million acres in the United States. In 1998 we reached 28 million hectares worldwide.[310]
Microbes and plants are certainly not the only organisms used.
The first genetically engineered insect, a predator mite, was released in Florida in 1996. Researchers at the University of Florida hope it will eat other mites that damage strawberries and other crops. Scientists at the University of California at Riverside are inserting a lethal gene into the pink bollworm, a caterpillar that causes millions of dollars of damage to the nation’s cotton fields each year. The killer gene becomes activated in the offspring, killing young caterpillars before they can damage the cotton, mate and reproduce. Researchers Thomas Miller and John Peloquin hope to raise millions of the genetically engineered bollworms to adulthood and then release them into the environment to mate with wild bollworm moths. The offspring will contain a lethal gene and die en masse in this new form of pest management.[311]
If sooner or later the revolution of the Second Man always comes to see a characteristic ingredient in the advent of agriculture, it should not be taken for granted that this scenario will remain unchanged, unless politics decides that agriculture is to be conserved as it is for social or other reasons. If science fiction has long foretold the advent of hydroponic cultures, there are those who think that shortly it will be possible to manufacture most agricultural products indoors and industrially.
Already at the end of the eighties, Escagenics announced that it had successfully produced vanilla in their laboratories. Vanilla is the most widespread flavour in America, and is contained in one third of all ice cream sold, not to mention other uses in confectionery, perfume industry and cosmetics, but its cost of production is high because it requires manual pollination and care must be taken when harvesting it. T
he technology offered by Escagenics, based on gene splicing, ought to make it possible to obtain vanilla from bacterial cultures modified with the gene of the plant itself, inside large reservoirs, eliminating in a single stroke the need for the seed, the plant, the land to grow it, fertilisation, harvesting and the farmer. Likewise, vesicles of oranges and lemons have been made to grow out of tissue cultures, anticipating the moment when juices will be made to “grow” inside large basins, with no need whatsoever to plant citrus fruit[312].
Similarly, according to an article in the Washington Post,[313] the US Department of Agriculture has tricked cotton cells to reproduce in reservoirs full of nutrients; since this environment is devoid of germs, the plan is to initially adopt the procedure to generate sterile gauze, before moving on to scale economies generating yields that will be price-competitive also for the general textile industry.
In 1994, two biologists from the same department, who at the time were in charge of administering research activity, gave an interview[314] in which they predicted that field cultivation would be exclusively devoted to perennial biomasses, with no other goal than that of intercepting solar energy via photosynthesis. The produce could then be converted using enzymes in a sugar solution, to be used as nutrient for the industrial production of cellulose pulp obtained from tissue culture, that in its turn could be reconstituted and worked into various forms and consistencies to mimic the ones associated with cultures “grown on the land,” in highly automatised environments and with a minimum use of manpower.