In Our Time - Genetic Engineering

Episode Date: January 14, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the implications of the developments in genetic engineering. Out of the city of Cambridge in the mid century came DNA and out of Edinburgh at the end of the century came the cloning of Dolly the sheep. These two facts might well do more to change the world literally, and our view of the world, than anything else that has happened at any time. Genetics have become the conversation of our day and with the Human Genome Project lumbering towards completion, its power grows. But are the consequences likely to be destructive and will what we think of as a human being, a personality, or even a person, change uncomfortably and irredeemably? With Grahame Bulfield, geneticist, honorary professor, Edinburgh University and Director of the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh; Bryan Appleyard, features writer for The Sunday Times and author of Brave New Worlds: Genetics and the Human Experience.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, today I'm joined by the geneticist, Professor Graham Bullfield and the writer Brian Appleyard to discuss the impact of the new genetics,

one of the most important advances in scientific knowledge in the modern age. Are such advances as the cloning of Dolly the Sheep, more for the benefit of scientists, than for humanity, is scientific knowledge intrinsically morally corrupt or pure. Graham Bullfield is a geneticist, honorary professor at Edinburgh University, and the director of the Roslyn Institute in that same city, where Dolly the Sheep was created using adult cells. He says, quote,

my job as a scientist is to put as much information out into the public domain so that the public and government can judge it. What we try to do with Dolly was to get a debate going, unquote. Brian Appliad is a feature writer for the Sunday Times, and an author known to his occasional withering attacks on science. For example, his 1992 book, Understanding the Present, Science and the Soul of Modern Man. His in the past decried the 20th century as being dominated by, quote, a supine technological determinism, which is being employed as a bracing antidote to culture and civilization, unquote.

His latest book, Brave New World's, Genetics and the Human Experience, published X Monday, is no less uncompromising. Brian Appleyard, Genetic Science has been heralded. as one of the great 19th and 20th century. You yourself consider the discovery of DNA to be one of the greatest scientific events

in history. And yet you say that genetics must be, quote, contained and humbled in brave new worlds. Why? Well, I think precisely because genetics is such a radical

science, because it is so fundamental, it asks very fundamental questions about us. human cloning, which is very much in the news, would be obviously a pretty radical transformation in what we understand in the nature of human reproduction. Genetics also raises questions about the identity of an individual,

what an individual is. It gives quite radical redefinition of an individual, for example, as a trans emanation from the gene pool. And it's questionable whether it's erroneous. the question of whether that understanding of what an individual is, is different, fundamentally different from our previous understanding of what an individual was. And I think these are matters so basic that unless the discussion has to be much wider than it has been so far, and it cannot simply be left to a series of sort of, well, now we've got the technology, we can do it. This seems to me to be wholly unacceptable.

Well, just before I come to Graham, Warfield, I'm still coming back to your own words, contained and humbled. are contained and why humbled. I'm still worried about the use of these words. Well, Humbold. You're a man who uses words very careful. Humboldt is very precise word, because I think the problem at the moment is we have an enormous wave of highly scientific publishing saying that we are on the verge of explaining everything.

Now, science has always said this. It's always said it in one form or another for the last two and a half thousand years. We are on the verge of a theory of everything. the saying of it now is particularly effective because the science is particularly intimate, the science of biology, and particularly dangerous, I think. Contained, I think, is people always ask, well, what would you do? I don't think it's necessarily a question of doing something.

I think it's a question of changing people's imaginations, persuading them that they have to make decisions of very fundamental moral importance here. They're not simply issues to be. they're not simply issues to be left to whatever technology comes along next. Grant Bullfield, what's your reaction to this? Well, I mean, I see modern genetics as just beginning to be the start of our understanding of biology. Once we have the gene, as geneticists, we're always impressed by how far we are from the end of the story. The gene is just simply the beginning.

It has to interact with other genes. It has to interact with the environment. It changes its action in different places. and at different times. So I think in many ways, biology is in the same position that chemistry was at the end of the 19th century, when they were putting together the periodic table of some hundred or so elements.

We're putting together a periodic table in biology of some 70,000 elements. So you think it's humble enough already, you mean? Well, I see we've got so far to go. I see that we're just at the very beginning and we're just scratching the surface. I do think, though, however, it is increasing our knowledge of biology in a somewhat different way,

is bringing more predictive type of biology along. We're beginning to understand how things operate a bit more. We're beginning to see opportunities being offered. It's in many ways it's just a form of information in the same way that the internet is producing information. I think that what is critically important and what has changed over the last 10 years is the willingness and the necessity for scientists

to put that information out into the public domain so there can be a widespread discussion. I mean, I'm very pleased about the way that's happening now compared to say what was happening in the 40s over nuclear energy where there was very little discussion. I'd like to very much concentrate on Brian Appliard's polemic, but before we, some of which is expressed in his opening remarks, before we get to that, could you just give us some note?

of what you see is the most important and encouraging advances in modern genetics now? Well, I think the way that if we begin to understand how different biological processes are controlled, and as I said, I need to repeat, we're only just scratching the surface, we begin to work out rational therapies to treating a number of rather devastating diseases. Give me a classic example. A very early one is the screening in the UK for a devastating genetic disease called phenyl ketanuria, PQAU. Now, all children are now screened for this disease. It's

one in 10,000 live births. An understanding of the biochemistry enables us to treat it. If untreated, the children have a very severe mental impairment. If treated, they live a relatively normal life. They're almost completely cured. Now, that's an example of an understanding,

particularly of the biochemistry of that disease, that has labelled us to have a rational therapy. So you see new genetics again and again working for the good of humanity? It doesn't necessarily work for the good, no. I believe genetics like much of science is amoral. It has a lack of science. Amoral and lack scientific content.

The problem is it's how it's used. Every scientific advance can be used for good or evil. And that's why it's critical that we put the information out into the public domain so that its uses positively or negatively can be assessed. I mean, almost every advance has both a positive and a negative use. and it's important for us to sift those out and understand them. And unless we understand the science,

we can't understand how it can be used and misused. Before we come to our main burden of your argument, Brian Appliad, do you agree that the new genetics can do good, can help improve? Of course. It would be futile to disagree. So how are you able to judge what can do good and what cannot do good? It's extremely difficult. But that is the nature of moral choice.

Well, it might be the nature of scientific choice, mightn't it. It might indeed, yes. But, I mean, I'm delighted to hear Graham Balfield say that make the point that genetics in it is in very early days, because I think to a large extent the publicity suggests otherwise. And I think it is important to put this in a wider context, which is the nature of society as it now is, in a society in which is atomized and lacking consensual belief systems or value systems, it is likely that a force as powerful as science will be elevated to a moral

condition, a moral status, and to a determining force in human affairs. And that is indeed what is happening. Let's take a few of these points, Graham Bulfield. Do you think, first of all, science is making these claims? Do you think it's right to make these claims? And then let's talk about the morality. Well, I don't actually see science as making those claims. I see science as offering opportunities. I have to say it does pose moral dilemmas. What I see of much science in my own work as that of others is an approximation. There is a natural humility in science because everything we do, somebody is going to find out was only an approximation and is often wrong. I mean, our own work is in our lifetime in science, is often overturned, which probably doesn't happen

as fast to philosophers or writers. I mean, we do it ourselves. I mean, our first aim is to overturn or qualify or extend something we've discovered ourselves. So there is something inherently humbling or self-critical about science anyway, or a good scientist will have to be that way, or they'll get caught out. But I do think it does pose moral dilemmas because often the use of it can be simplified, and often scientific advances in human genetics, for example, is put into practice with enthusiasm, without the whole social consequences of it being being seen. I mean, there's an example that Brian Appleyard gives in his book, which I completely

agree with him, which was the discovery of the extra Y chromosome syndrome in man in a small number of individuals who are mentally abnormal and seem to show violent tendencies. It actually turns out that 97% of all people with this syndrome are perfectly normal. So that to label the syndrome from a very small sample as being a syndrome that causes problems, causes some sort of aggression or some sort of pathological behaviour turned out to be wrong. So we have to be very careful to make sure, particularly in

genetic counselling, prenatal diagnosis, that all these things are properly incorporated into a social structure and we work out the implications of what we're doing. A very simple one is that in many ways it's no good prenatal or predictively

diagnosing a disease before the syndrome has developed unless you can do something about it. I mean, that's one of the common common problems we have. It's no good diagnosing somebody before the symptoms that develop that they're going to develop later on in life something if we can't do something. We can't treat them in some way.

Sometimes it is because sometimes people do want to know what their future is going to be, but often that's a major problem. So we do have to make very sure that these scientific advances are put in the correct social context and we have to think them through. And that often is not a job for the scientists because they're narrowly thinking just at the excitement

to the science and it can cause problems. But isn't Brian Appley are right in that sense that newspapers are full, very full nowadays of people saying we can change human personality, we can identify this gene, pluck it out, modify it and so and so forth. But all the cautions don't sell a story, you know yourself. I mean, there's no point in saying, well, this is an interesting science advanced, but, but, but.

I mean, and we've experienced this ourselves. All the buts we put in on the Dolly story don't get published. It's the scientific advance. I mean, you end up buried on page 14 if you put all the butts in, you don't get it to page 1. So it's a natural nature of the way scientific journalists have to get their articles on page 1 as much as any other journalist does. And there's a problem there that the black and whiteness of it gets taken. But that's partly our job.

We have to stick with the story longer. We have to make sure that we don't just announce it and let other people take it off into these flights of fancies. We have some sort of obligation to say, hey, just a minute you can't do this. this with it, or there are problems about the use of the technology in that way. And that's, I think, more and more what scientists are doing. Should scientists themselves draw the line at a certain point? Should they enter into the moral debate rather more than they do? You yourself, or your institute, Donald Sheeper, said that you can't see much interest in taking this on to clone human beings. You've drawn the line, haven't you? So why did you draw the line? And

do you think drawing the line is important? And A, do you think if you draw the line, does it matter a down? because somebody else in the States or in the University of Bristol will just go over the line. Well, you've asked me three really quite complicated questions there. I try very hard not to give my personal view when I'm having these discussions because I don't think that's my job as my knowledge is as a scientist and not as an ethicist.

The second point is about the Institute. What we've tried to do as an Institute is point out many of the technical difficulties that would be involved. We also have said, gone to a point where we said, cannot see any clinical reasons why you would want to clone humans from adult humans. That's humans reproductive cloning. And then finally, you're also correct that the genie was let out of the bottle by Pasteur in the 1850s.

And if we hadn't to have carried on with Dolly, once we realized we could do it, within a year, somebody else would have done it. I mean, science is going on in a broad way all over the world gradually. One scientist deciding to opt out doesn't actually help the issue. I think in many ways it's important to stay in there. there so that you can inform about what's going on. I'd like to tell to Brian Appley adds one of his major concerns, which you say, Brian, the genetics encourages the notion of sameness and normality.

And briefly, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, obviously, is when women are diagnosed things might be wrong with the children they are about to have. The overwhelming tendencies to prevent this happening and to bring them back to the norm because we all want normal children. And this could have an impoverished. effect? Yes, I mean, it's not simple. There are two points.

One is the practical effect that people will actually do it, and the other is the sort of imaginative effect it has on people. I think the problem, I mean, this is, I'm not original in this, many people have addressed this issue. The problem with the offering of more and more reproductive choice to people in terms of what they can do with their children is that the tendency will be to normalize the population according to prevailing norms at the time

will be to reduce people to prevailing norms at the time. I mean, the obvious case is if you found a gene for homosexuality, which in spite of the publicity has not actually been found. Gedes are only predisposed. You much keep saying it's predispositions they are and they don't automatically result in this, do they? No, they don't automatically result in this, but if you remove the predisposition, you certainly remove the thing.

Sure, I'm just trying to crack that. If you offer people, well, your child has a 75% chance of being homosexual or in other terms of 75% of a chance of having a heart attack by the age of 40, this raises new questions. Is that child in advance of having a heart attack ill or is he in advance of being a homosexual gay? And what choice would you make? I mean, to me, it would not be a choice because I would not regard it as being ill to be gay. but on the whole I think people would I think people want grandchildren for example and they worry about the difficulties of growing up homosexual

and there are many many behavioural aspects of genetics which are coming out at the moment almost weekly there's a story about finding the gene for alcoholism risk taking whatever some of which claims are later withdrawn and these ask questions about what we think about people and what they are for now it seems to be obvious they ask those questions. You can't avoid asking

those questions if that knowledge is in the world. And it is very important to address the idea of what we think, what we value in human beings as part of that process. Yeah, it raises all sorts of questions, as you say. I mean, if there was a, if it had been discovered, there was a gene for Gainesis, and the

mother of Michelangelo had found that out, and the gene for madness, and the mother of Nietzsche had found it out, and you can go through a great number of people, or indeed, mother of Newton, in his in his depressions. But I'd like to talk about two things here. One is, the first is your own, it seems to me that one of the motors of your book

is your relationship with your niece, your late niece, Alas, Fiona, who lived to the age of 30, despite the fact that she had muscular strefew, which is very rare for a woman to her. And you describe it as the most extraordinary person I've known, and it would seem to me that the book is driven by one thing to try the book is, look, this person had she been abortions? would obviously not have lived a life, and the most extraordinary person I've known would not have existed. Can you just develop that?

Well, there is no... I don't come to any easy answers about, Fiona. I'm fully aware that if you were told that your child is about to have musco the difficulty, the temptation to have an abortion would be overpowering, probably. Was your brother told, or was your brother's wife? No, it was pre-the-possibility of such diagnosis. Well, there was no risk factor involved, so it wouldn't have arisen. The, it raised, Fiona raised fundamental questions for me about what we value in human beings and what, of what human life consists. These are ancient questions. They were addressed by Pascal, among others, about what the worth of human life is.

Now, it seems to me that unless you're prepared to address those questions, unless we're prepared to think about those questions, then the genetics debate will simply pass by by default. I want to know what it is about human beings that we value I want to know where that value comes from I want to know at what point we can say human beings are individuals all valuable now I think it is all too easy to take an utterly mechanistic view based almost certainly on ignorance

because genetics is in its infancy a mechanistic view of what an individual is I don't accept that and I find it it doesn't accord with my own experience and that is why she's at the centre of the book. Graham Bullfield, do you think that there is a danger? Do you agree with Brian? There is a danger that such genetic knowledge means that we will cease to celebrate difference

or allow there to be the sort of variations that he's been discussing? No, I don't think so. I think we have to decide as a society where to draw lines. Let me give you a contrary example. cancer is caused by a large number of genes and environmental factors all interacting and therefore if you had a predictive system for cancer it would be quite a complicated one and would try to indicate a number of lifestyle changes that could reduce your risk of getting it now generally speaking people don't change their lifestyles in response to that sort of prediction

however among cancer there are some subcategories which behave as single genes running in families which it is possible to do early diagnosis and for identify the members of those families that are at a risk and to catch the cancer before it's had time to develop. Now that's an example of the sort of complexities that occur and in some circumstances where predictive screening can be useful because it gives you a potential therapy and catches the disease before it's had time to take root. Now in the case of muscular dystrophy is an interesting one because A third of the cases are new mutations, therefore you can't predict they're going to occur. But where people have had one child with muscular dystrophy, and they've been offered prenatal screening

and therefore potential termination for other children, they generally refuse that prenatal diagnosis off of 90% of them. They just change their lifestyle. They don't have any more children. So, you know, you are offering them the opportunity, and in a way you have to then balance between, the individual's requirements and what society believes is right or wrong and there's always a balance. I mean, another example of that is in xenotransplantation,

giving kidneys from pigs to humans, where there's a risk of maybe passing over pig viruses to humans. Now, in the case of somebody who is dying and requires kidney transplant, which is a very large number in the UK, it's not a choice for them. They'll take the pig's kidney and take a risk, but it's a choice for the rest of us because it's possibility of introducing a virus into the population.

So always there is balances between whether you can find a cure through doing early prediction, the balance between what the individual or the family requires, and also then the balance between that and what society requires. So it's all a matter of drawing lines and taking things on a case-by-case basis, so there's no simple answers. From the way Graham Bawfield has been talking, and the way he's described, the way he approaches this thing, Brian, it does seem slightly to be against your, not claim, your alarm, your worry that the new genetic can be compared with two other quasi-scientific systems of this century, Nazism and communism in its totalitarian enforcement of a particular point of view.

No, I didn't say that. I said that... You do compare it with Nazi. No, I don't. I suggest that we may indulge in a form of totalitarianism. militarism brought about by consumerism, that genetics on its own can't do that. Of course, it's the way we use it. My concern is that you'll get a form of free market eugenics arising from genetics, which I compare with a great danger. I mean, I do think that at the end of the 20th century, in years to come, the scientific literature, which is so prevalent now, in years to come, will be seen as the most horrifically misguided stuff to be writing this stuff at the end of the 20th century in which two

major and very scientifically influenced belief systems have caused such catastrophe. Can you compare the sort of complete pseudoscience which was spread on top of communism and fascism with the careful signs of genetics and the other sciences which has been described an outline though in brief. It's still described in detail by Graham Bulfill. I don't see any comparison. It's very difficult to know when pseudoscience becomes other than science. I mean, a lot of the biology in Mind Kampf was actually rather okay at the time. It was okay at the time. It was subsequently found to be wrong elements of it. Some of it still stands up, actually. But if it is, it is, the arrogance of the contemporary is to assume that your knowledge is enough

to do something. We must always be careful about that because people have always assumed that in the past. Communism was based on what was thought to be a scientific analysis of economic history. It wasn't seen to be wrong scientifically at the time. How do you react to these?

Well, I've said already that as a scientist, one's own science is overturned in one's lifetime and secondly, I've also said that the knowledge itself has to be seen in a social context and that of course is where where Mindcamp went wrong from our point of view.

And I've already stressed that so far that that's essential that we do see everything in a social context and we work out the ramifications of applying particular genetic knowledge. But could I come back to a more upbeat point and say we are in the middle of a scientific revolution, when we do know the sequence of all the genes in humans, modern biology will begin to start.

I think it is a dramatic change for biology to have the sequence and the knowledge of all the genes. and it will produce the rational therapies to a large number of diseases where we have no therapies for at the moment, some of which are devastating. So the advantages of being able to apply this knowledge are so dramatic that we do have to be very careful. We don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We have to put the right regulations in place.

And I think in the UK we do have the right regulations in place to deal with some of the downside of some of this technology. We haven't much time now, Brian Napoli. I'd like to very briefly come to the last thing, because underlying, you talk about signs being wrong, which Graham Bulfield has admitted, in the sense that theories have changed, we've talked about Hitler and so on and so forth.

But underneath your book, it seems to me, inside your book, is a feeling, a sense that there's a spirituality, there's a sense of something to do with Roman Catholicism, something to do with a spiritual view of life, which is a constant. Now, morality changes, too, artificial insemination was thought to be terribly wrong at the time it came in,

now it happens all over the place. Cloning human beings, which people have grave doubts about, or some people have graved out about it at a moment, might in ten years' time be the way life goes? I don't know, but morality can shift as swiftly as science, can't it? Morality tends to shift as swiftly as science. I don't think the underlying nature of morality shifts that much. I think we know, I don't have a functional view of morality,

as many people do. I have a sort of transcendent view of morality. I think there are fundamental moral impulses to which we must, you know, to which we must subject ourselves. Now, understanding those... Does that mean that there must be, for example, absolutely no abortion under any circumstances? Is that a fundamental thing? No, that would be a... I mean, it refers to fundamental issues.

I don't... Oh, that's pretty fundamental. No, you would have to say, what are the considerations involved in abortion? I mean, and I think that there are considerations which the Roman Catholic Church is absolutely right about. But on the other hand, I understand that it's very difficult to take that simple an issue. But what I'm most concerned about is, I mean, it's very easy to get bogged down with particular issues, and many of which I admit I haven't made up my mind about, and I can't answer simply. But what I'm concerned about is pointing people to a form of language that would make these things co-hand.

to themselves. I mean, I think it's very difficult when you're deluge with news stories and particular ethical debates to make sense of these things, because people find it very difficult to refer to any sort of basis of morality or an ethical sense of the human being. I'm trying to point out that there are such ethical senses that indeed our society is built on such ethical senses. One is the Christian view, and another is the Enlightenment view of the absolute nature of the individual as an end or a means. And these are absolutely basic. And I people need to address those. Last word, Graham Bulfield? Yeah, I'm impressed by, as time goes on, about how much more the public is beginning to understand of scientific issues.

The questions I'm getting asked now are very much more sophisticated, and I was asked even only two or three years ago. And therefore, I think that that proves that we've got to get out there and communicate to people. Well, thank you very much to Brian Appleyard and Graham Bulfield, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.