Backroom Boys

by Francis Spufford

  When he reached his desk, the press release was waiting in his email. He called it up on screen and considered it.

  It would be safe to say that the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 was not much of an influence on John Sulston’s thinking. Although his closest intellectual collaborator was an American, and his daughter was married to an American, and he and his wife frequently holidayed by taking wilderness hikes in American national parks, and he loved many things about America, he found the American culture of reverence for entrepreneurs almost completely alien. He looked at the world and he didn’t see anything like the view from the business-class lounge. Nor did he share the assumption, heard even among scientists in 1998, that projects run for profit must necessarily be leaner, smarter and better than anything in the dull old public sector. (‘Typical government work,’ Steve McKnight of the University of Texas called the public genome project. ‘No cohesion, no focus, no game plan.’) That didn’t chime with Sulston at all. In fact, his experience flatly contradicted it. In his experience, it was in private companies that you found monstrous committees, stupid hierarchies and obstacles in the way of a scientist’s ability to decide what needed to be done next. It was in the publicly funded realm that you got freedom, informality, common sense – the good things science required in order to flourish. Of course, he had been lucky. Until he moved into genome sequencing, he had spent virtually his entire scientific career at the Lab of Molecular Biology, and the LMB was an exceptional place, an elite scientific institution which treated its staff with exceptional respect. But what he had experienced there was just a particularly intense local version of the rules which governed all scientific endeavour till things started changing over the last few decades – a change which Sulston couldn’t help seeing as a corruption. He arrived at the LMB in 1969, a junior researcher as hairy as a member of Hawkwind. He left in 1992, greying, beard and hair trimmed, the acknowledged co-leader of the international investigation into the genetics of the ‘sample organism’ C. elegans, a nematode worm about a millimetre long. In between, he had inhabited a kind of spartan freedom from scarcity. They gave him a glorified broom cupboard to work in, crammed with metal shelves and equipment racks. No perks at all. On the other hand, when he said he needed something, if they could afford it, they just gave it to him. He never had to write a grant application. (When he wrote his first one in 1989, asking the Medical Research Council for a million pounds to buy two gene sequencers, the answer arrived as a half-page handwritten fax. It said yes.) They knew that they could trust him not to waste money because they knew that money was not a factor in what interested him, any more than money was the incentive that kept him, and all his colleagues, working phenomenally long hours. Money was not the currency inside the LMB.

  In there – as once was true in every science department in every university – a different economy ruled. It was a little island outpost of what anthropologists call the ‘gift economy’. In a gift economy, status is not determined by what you have, but by what you give away. The more generous you are, the more you are respected; and in turn your generosity lays an obligation on other people to behave generously themselves, to try to match your generosity and so claim equal or greater status. In the exchange of gifts, everyone ends up getting pretty much enough. When Amazonian forest-dwellers or Polynesian islanders practise the gift economy, the things they give to each other are fibre ropes and earrings and ebony axe-handles with mother-of-pearl detailing. When scientists practise it, the gift they give away is information. They share their expertise, they disclose their latest results, they point out parallels, they make suggestions, all within a code of conventions that says you don’t muscle in on someone else’s research area. You’re welcome to use whatever you learn to help your own research, but if someone has bagged a topic, it’s theirs, until they give up on it, or demonstrate an incompetence everyone can see, or maybe reach a sticking point that causes them to throw their hands in the air in defeat and invite other people to have a go. The gift economy of science is formalised in the rules of scientific publication. Articles in science journals are the big, polished gifts that scientists give to the community in return for respect. But the exchange of gifts also goes on all the time informally, in the shape of a never-ending conversation.

  At the LMB, that happened in the coffee room. John Sulston spent eighteen months, at one point, gazing through his microscope at the larvae of C. elegans, tracking by eye the transformation of the one cell of the worm’s egg into the 550 cells of its adult body, until he knew the exact lineage of splits and sub-splits that produced every single one of those 550. His concentration was famously intense. There was a fire alarm once, and the building filled with smoke: through the smoke, John Sulston was spotted, still imperturbably glued to the eyepiece, his right hand still sketching worm cells in his notebook. But whenever he stopped, there was the constant river of talk in the coffee room, waiting for him to dive back into it. Everyone passed through, debating, comparing, chatting, asking advice, pouncing on what looked like logical flaws. Anyone could challenge anyone about anything, that was the rule, no matter how junior the challenger or how senior the challengee – though woe betide you if you made a fool of yourself.

  It wasn’t a utopian system. On the contrary, it was extremely competitive and it worked well for people with enormous egos, as well as for quiet and modest people like John Sulston. But it directed competition into a different channel from the one it flowed down in the world outside; it made over greed into greed for respect. And once you had got used to the gift economy, to the island world where respect was the true currency, it could make the rewards on offer in the world outside look like poor things indeed. There was an unspoken feeling at the LMB that going off to become a biotechnology millionaire (which some people did) was a bit tacky, a bit second-rate, a bit of a sign that you couldn’t hack it in the real competition for the respect of your peers and needed to take refuge in an excessively upholstered corporate domain where people would defer to you, not because you deserved it, but because you were in charge. John Sulston himself was tempted just once. In 1992, a Californian venture capitalist offered to set him up in a sequencing lab of his own, along with his friend and co-guru in the worm world, Bob Waterston of the University of St Louis. But what tempted him was the prospect of more scope for his worm research, and when it became clear that the investor would also want them to fuss around creating stuff for sale, he and Waterston withdrew. It was an offer exactly parallel to the one Craig Venter accepted when Venter moved sideways from the NIH to TIGR; but unlike Venter, Sulston didn’t want any of the baubles it was in the power of a tycoon to shower upon him. He didn’t want to own a yacht. He didn’t want share options. He didn’t want to be in the newspapers. He just wanted to do his own work. He himself was not really the product of a capitalist society, you see; he came from the island of science, and it made him deeply uneasy to see its traditional economy getting mixed up with the market economy outside. His picture of how science should be done was the LMB. On summer evenings, the worm biologists had sometimes hired a fleet of punts and poled upriver to Grantchester and drunk real ale in the Green Man there and floated back downstream carousing, with stubs of candle stuck to the prows, and the flames guttering and the wax puddling on the polished wood and the voices calling to and fro across the water as the punts drifted home under the overhanging trees in the green, green night.

  So it was inevitable that Sulston would oppose something like Venter’s plan, and resist it if he could. It was inevitable that when Sulston examined what Craig Venter was proposing, a part of him would reject it instinctively as an affront to the ethics of science. As far as he could see, Venter’s ‘gift’ was not a gift at all, but the poisonous opposite of one. It would have been different if Venter had persuaded ABI to put up $200 million of private money out of the goodness of its corporate heart; if he intended to get the human sequence data out super-quickly to all the scientists waiting for it, w
hile expecting nothing in return but the later generosity of the recipients. Then, it would have been time for Sulston to throw his hat in the air and shout hooray, however personally awkward the changed situation was for the scientists who had committed their careers to the public project, himself included. But that was not what was happening. Venter was not going to give the information to the scientific community but to sell it to them. He was planning to sell information; to sell for money what should be freely exchanged. It was a total surrender to the ethics of the marketplace. And somehow it made it worse, on this instinctive level, that the information on sale was going to be the basic data that described all humanity – the flesh of everybody’s flesh, the bone of all our bones. Deep down, John Sulston felt that sequencing the human genome for profit was just plain wrong.

  But that personal reaction was only the background to his thinking now. Since he became director of the Sanger Centre, he had had to become a public person, a public advocate and interpreter for human sequencing in the UK. It was a matter of obligation, as far as he was concerned, not of personal inclination. After all, he wasn’t even a human-genome specialist, primarily. The study of C. elegans was the chosen intellectual task of his life. That was his passion, that was what he would eventually share the Nobel Prize for. ‘The first thing you have to understand about John’, one of his colleagues told me, ‘is that he’s a worm man.’ But the human sequence was too important for him not to defend it, too important for him not to immerse himself fully in the task. And that included learning, for the institution’s sake, how to negotiate the tricky interface between the world of science, as he knew it, and the wider world beyond. He had had to engage with the assumptions that permeated life in Britain after twenty years of Thatcherism. The lady herself had gone, and her grey heir had recently been trounced at the polls, but the settlement of things she’d put in place remained. It was already clear that the new Labour government would only be tinkering with the details. Britain in 1998 was a country which no longer believed as a matter of course that the public sector was a more righteous or dignified place for society to conduct enterprises that affected everybody. There was no pro-public consensus you could appeal to. If you wanted to do something in the public domain, you had to make a specific case for it; you had to offer a specific cost-benefit analysis which showed that, in this particular instance, being public delivered something that being private couldn’t. Sulston took the point. He didn’t like it, he didn’t believe it, he wasn’t at ease with it, but he took the point. He had even been and looked at the standard market-economy explanation of why people did things, out there in the world beyond the island of science – discovering, with a mixture of repulsion and mystification, that economists reduced the human animal to a sort of always-rational automaton. The organism whose hugely complex portrait-by-numbers the genome project was compiling became Homo economicus, a robot whose circuitry you could sketch on a napkin. Economic Man apparently lived to maximise his consumption of his preferred selection of goods. Accordingly, he maximised his income. Economic Man worked in order to go shopping. Ah; that was why you heard people proclaiming that scientists needed incentives, that they would work much harder and discover much more if cash were at stake. It was rubbish, of course. But there it was. You had to deal with it, he saw, if you didn’t want to condemn yourself to irrelevance.

  So his own instinctive distaste for Venter’s plan was almost beside the point. As he told me when I interviewed him in a conference room at the Wellcome Trust building on Euston Road, late in 2002, ‘You can have a philosophical preference, but that’s a side issue.’ It was the pragmatic objections that jostled for his attention when he studied the boosterist prose of the press release. There were a lot of them. For you really didn’t have to believe in the gift economy of science to see that Craig Venter’s ‘gift’ was seriously problematic. In fact, you just had to not share the blissed-out bubble-era belief that the market provided perfect answers to absolutely everything. The moment you got out from under that temporary romantic delusion, the instant that conceptual bubble popped in your head, you could see that there was a perfectly good, highly specific case against the proposal, founded not on any purist objection to profit-making, but on observation of the real behaviour of markets.

  From this point of view, the worst aspect of the proposal was not that the new company was going to charge for genome information; not as such, anyway. It was what charging implied about how the new company would have to handle the information. Data you want to sell has to be locked up, in a box from which people can only release it by buying. It has to be kept artificially scarce to stop its price from falling to zero. It seemed to follow that there was no way that the new private organisation could share its data; certainly, it couldn’t post swathes of freshly discovered sequence on the NIH’s GenBank website, the way everybody else did. It was going to be forced to set up that exclusive database of its own, with access for paying subscribers only. No wonder that the press release said the company meant to be the definitive source for the human genome, and no wonder that Venter seemed to be pushing hard for the public project to fold up and go away. It was the logic of the venture. To make the business work, the company virtually had to achieve a monopoly.

  Imagine if it got one. Once again, you could leave aside any reflexive reactions you might have to the prospect of the entire human species’ specifications becoming the sole property of an outfit on an industrial estate in suburban Maryland. Orthodox economics was quite chilling enough. The company would be free to do what all rational monopolists do in the business textbooks and raise its access fees to the level that maximised its income. In fact, it would have to do that because of its duty to its shareholders to get the best possible return on their investment. The result would be to lock out every scientist whose lab or science department couldn’t afford the subscription, in effect excluding from research into the genome the whole segment of the scientific world whose resources fell beneath the arbitrary line imposed by the price. Maybe most institutions in the wealthy world would stump up the money, but researchers in India and Brazil and Kenya and Indonesia and China would not be able to get in to investigate (for example) the genetics of diseases that were locally important to them, but uninteresting to Harvard Medical School. The people who most needed to do malaria research or bilharzia research wouldn’t be able to. This arbitrary restraint on activity is one of the classical consequences of monopoly. But the bad consequences for science didn’t stop there. It wouldn’t just be a question of choking back the volume of science being done. In order to protect the data, the company would have to impose stringent conditions on how it could be used, even by subscribers.

  John Sulston demonstrated the point to me with the plate of complementary biscuits the Wellcome Trust had provided for us. ‘If you have your private database’, he said, ‘and you have a researcher here, whom you supply access to’ – placing a custard cream on the table top about six inches out from the plate – ‘and another researcher here’ – putting down a jammie dodger – ‘you have to forbid either of these two to talk about the data to somebody else. Or at least to talk in a sense that transfers data. But in bio-informatics, the data and its interpretation cannot be separated, so really they cannot talk about it at all. And you must do that, because if you do allow these people to chat, then in no time at all the database is dispersed, everybody has it, and there’s no proprietary source of revenue any more.’ He drew with his finger the two pathetic lines of communication that would be permitted, plate to custard cream, plate to jammie dodger. ‘There should be arrows everywhere,’ he said, gesturing at a notional galaxy of biscuits beyond which should be included in the scientific conversation and wasn’t. ‘It’s inherent in the notion of a proprietary database that you stop scientific communication …’ So then, as well as reducing the amount of genome research, the monopolised private genome would also sever the links between different bits of research. In any area of science, that wou
ld be damaging; but it was in the nature of the genome, as an evolved expanse of information without a top-down design, whose active regions were entwined with huge quantities of seemingly random nonsense, that the answer to a question about one small piece of it would quite often be found thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of chemical bases away, in a piece somebody else was studying in a university on the other side of the world. Coherent research on the genome required everyone to be able to talk to each other. Venter’s plan threatened to break a necessarily organic global collaboration into splinters.