Activists Flailing at DNA: Why We Are Obsessed with Genetics

It should come as no surprise that every advance in genetics and biotechnology is greeted with a resounding "No!" from the activist community. Since the early years of the IQ/heredity debate (@ 1961-1970), concerned scholars and activists alike have rejected the premature and wholesale misuse of genetics to define human attributes. The roots of this concern go back to the days of the Russian Revolution and the corresponding European fascination with things genetic. It was not an accident that the first sullies into the applied genetics occurred even before we even had a genetics. Since Plato's time, we have populated our imaginary worlds, like his Republic, with images of people delimited by their biological makeup. In the 1870s, Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton proclaimed the urgent need to apply genetics to permit the "more rapid" ascendancy of the genetically well endowed over the more impoverished races.

In Russia, the reaction to the "nature red in tooth and claw" form of British social Darwinism was swift and unrelenting. According to Communist dogma, genetic differences did not exist, and even if they did, a higher social duty of mutual aid surpassed the requirement to segregate society based on genes. The Mutual Aid movement of Prince Kropotkin argued for the moral duty to provide succor to the weak among us. Kropotkin's view was based on a particularly Russian reading of ecology, which stipulated that groups who provided for each other's welfare did as well or better than those who selfishly perpetuated their own genes.

The dominance of this kind of thinking led to the terrible losses of Russian agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s. With the rise of Lysenko, those who believed that stressed plants would produce seed that would do well under similar stressful conditions the next growing season were found to be woefully wrong. Acquired characteristics cannot be inherited." (a form of inheritance of acquired characteristics). True geneticists like Vavilov and Lerner, who believed in natural selection, were either assassinated or fled to the United States where their ideas could have a more comfortable hearing.

But with each generation, commencing with the emergence of the Eugenics Institute at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island in the 1920s and the proliferation of forced sterilizations in the United States through the 1950s, we have provided cannon fodder anew for those who have argued that genetic models are pernicious and ultimately damaging to social institutions.

Indeed, with the Nazi travesties of World War II, we were left with a squalid history of misuses. The moral rejection of the strain of genetic determinism that underlay all of the German atrocities has inculcated an abreaction to the word "genetics". Just as Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's head of the Gestapo allegedly declared, "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun", anti-biotechnology activists today (myself included) have had a knee jerk reaction to the word "genetic". Such a reaction is understandable if still indefensible. Today, we are being told genetics can fix anything wrong. And if we are just patient enough, a genetic explanation of human illness, affinities and attributes, will provide the answers to age-old human social problems of disease, disability and degeneration.

We remind our contemporaries that newborn mass genetic screening programs were initially instituted in the 1960s without regard to their potential discriminatory effects. As for the use of genetic testing for pre-employment and worker screening programs in the 1970s, our cries of "Don't do it" were met with equally fervent pleas that "We must do it". African Americans carrying the sickle cell gene were denied insurance coverage, kept from lucrative jobs in the airlines industry and barred from the Air Force Academy. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, researchers claimed to have identified the genes behind homosexuality and the racial "difference" in IQ scores. Once again genetics was misused and a whole generation of bona fide genetic research was tarred with the brush of potential abuse.

Then in the 1980s and 1990s, when genes were expropriated from plant tissues and injected into new hosts, we activists warned industry not to proceed so precipitously. Industrial giants like Monsanto who might have known better, proceeded anyway, giving us a generation of genetically modified food crops that have now swamped cultivated natural varieties with engineered pseudotypes. Because of an apparent rush to market, enormous, evolutionary-scale mistakes were made. Genetically engineered food crops are now pervasive, creating a new genetic reality on the ground. Today, a whole industry of organic corn is threatened by cross-contamination with pollen carrying genes from "Star Link" and other engineered varieties, and many foreign markets have closed their doors to U.S. corn exports.

On the domestic front, genes are being used to develop new tests for cancer susceptibility and vulnerability to chemical insult. The reaction from the left is predictable: we see the prospect for misuse exceeding the benefits from enlightened use. Indeed, women told of their breast cancer gene susceptibility are often psychologically traumatized. And once again, the shibboleth of occupational misuse has risen with the revelation that Burlington Northern Railroad required workers to take a "genetic test" for susceptibility to a repetitive motion disorder (carpal tunnel syndrome) before their claims for workmen's compensation would be honored.

With the Americans with Disabilities Act and related legislation on genetic privacy now extant in many states, the risks of discrimination have gone down‹but the risks of misuse of genetic information remain high. In part, this risk is caused by the polarization of the two camps - the anti-biotech activists and biotech proponents - into groups that insist the core issue is the extent to which genes truly determine human traits of interest, be they health- or job-related. "Ultimately," the argument from the activist side goes, "If you permit genes to be isolated and patented, and then derive drugs or pharmaceuticals from them, you are perpetuating the myth that most or all of human illness arises from within." A typical response from the biotech supporter might well be: "You've got that right. They do!"

So, what's to be done? I can remember talking to my friends at the Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) back in the late 1970s when they were first getting underway. Resistance to genetic explanations were then de rigeur. I asked them, "But what are you going to do when genes do explain certain human proclivities or traits?" The response was less than heartening: "Like the Chinese," one proponent explained, "We can choose to ignore genetic differences. And we'll have a better society for it!"

I'm not so sure this is right thinking about the genetic problem.

What is needed is a reconciliation of these camps. Some compromise is important on two counts: 1) without an appreciation of the ways in which genes do influence wellness, behavior and mental attributes, we will be at a loss to design environments, medicines and diets to maximize human welfare. 2) Conversely, if we allow too much emphasis on gene-based explanations of human traits, we may well be ignoring the very environmental factors that ultimately trigger a disease or illness in the first place. Take the BRCA1 gene "responsible" for about 7% of breast cancer. BRCA1 is a tumor suppressor gene in which two adjoining bases are deleted resulting in a shortened protein. Since the protein product is an enzyme involved in DNA repair, its loss makes the cell vulnerable to genetic damage. When this enzyme is operating normally, it apparently assists DNA repair, especially during cell division. If it is mutated, it leaves a gene sequence at or near a tumor promoter gene unprotected.

But lost in the genetic brouhaha is the fundamental realization that but for environmental insult, no cancer would ensure. In the face of an environmental insult, say radiation or a chemical carcinogen like dimethylbenzanthracene, a BRAC1 unprotected breast cancer gene may be tripped, and a full-blown malignancy may ensue. Without the genetic susceptibility leading to faulty repair of environmentally damaged DNA, there is much less risk, since a considerable portion of the damage can be "cleaned up".

Now, with virtually total access to our inner workings, entrepreneurs are descending like flies on the Nile promising genetic quick fixes to these and related problems. Each promoter is intent in capitalizing on our genetic inheritance to make a personally coded pharmaceutical, or a novel biological product that will return millions. Indeed, some of these inventions, like the drug erythropoietin that stimulates red blood cell production, have done just that.

In the long run, how much unbridled exploitation we should allow of our DNA is complicated by several conflicting ideals. What will a new gene-based world view mean? Will we allow entrepreneurs to capitalize on individual differences, expose them., and develop new products and then provide nothing to the progenitor?

Like the now famous Greenberg parents who filed suit to regain control of the genetic test developed from their child's DNA, we are now faced with a paradox. With so many potentially beneficial uses of genetic material like a predictive test for Canavan's disease, should we continue to fight the battle at the front line, insisting that genes can't really be that important or that they don't describe anything of human value? I do not think so. Perhaps, we should concentrate instead on restoring the protections for control over our own DNA, insisting that at least we be given hegemony over our personal genetic material to ensure its most beneficent use.

At the same time, we need a broader view. As a recent Treaty Initiative to Share the Genetic Commons promulgated by Jeremy Rifkin and colleagues, proclaimed: "The Earth's gene pool, in all of its biological forms and manifestations should be protected and nurtured by all peoples, we further declare that genes will not be allowed to be claimed as commercially negotiable genetic information or intellectual property by governments, commercial enterprises, other institutions or individuals."

Anything less, is to allow genes to once again become the pawns in a vast political game, where the winners are those with the power to exploit and control, and the losers are the masses of people who through no fault of their own, carry a natural genetic heritage that enabled their ancestors to survive this far without conscious intervention. Would we not all feel better with a recognition of the special status of this genetic legacy? We need to leave our genes off-limits for exploitation for the same reason many of us oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: both are irreplaceable resources that deserve protection in perpetuity.