Posted on 11/22/2004, 5:22:39 PM by .cnI redruM
An e-friend breezed by the other day — a person, I mean, whom I had previously known only through his website and some e-mail exchanges on topics of common interest. He didn't stay long. I was at home with my son. My wife and daughter were out (shopping, ballet practice). My son was in his room playing a computer game. The guest impressed Danny tremendously by greeting him with: "Word!" Then, leaving the boy to his game, we went downstairs and chatted over a drink. The guest showed me some interesting websites. My wife came home and was introduced. I took my guest out to dinner (or rather, he me — he paid, I mean). We came home and chatted some more, looked at some more websites. The guest left. I sat thinking for a while — thinking quite hard, as my thinking goes.
This guest was a young man, mid-20s I would guess, very energetic and fast-talking, very smart. He is a researcher at a famous university, in a field that is new: computational genomics. I'll talk about that in a minute. I can't give you his name, because he doesn't want it given. He keeps his identity well hidden, in fact. Even his website offers no clues, though there are usually ways to find out the ownership of a website. He: "I can't afford to be known. There are people out there trying to find out who I am — people who mean me no good, people who could wreck my career. I'm not going to let that happen."
Because I can't give the guy's name, I'll refer to him by a word that I thought I had coined in an NRODT review last year, but which in fact had been used as a company name well before that: "datanaut." (This person is not Charles Murray, who would be very flattered to be described as being in his mid-20s.)
"Datanaut" follows from my friend's specialty, computational genomics. Genomics is the study of genomes, those tremendously long strings of quite simple chemicals (there are just four of these chemicals, known familiarly as A, G, C, and T) found in the nuclei of living cells, which encode the inherited physical properties of whatever organism — a bacterium, a tree, a fish, a human being — the cells belong to. We now know what the actual patterns of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts are in the genomes of several kinds of living things, including human beings. This, unfortunately, is like knowing the sequence of brush strokes in all the Chinese characters that make up the Analects of Confucius: not really very informative unless you know what the characters — and their combinations and sequences — actually mean.
The human genome has about three billion "base pairs" of these fundamental chemicals. (An example of a base pair would be GT. The G lives on one side of the "double helix" you have heard about, the T on the other, connected by one of the bonds that hold the helix together.) Even a humble bacterium has about four million or so base pairs. That is a lot of data. To get any sense out of it, in fact, you need to engage in a newish discipline called "data mining." That is what my house guest, the datanaut, is involved in. He is a data miner, and the database he works with is the human genome.
Of course, it is slightly inaccurate to speak of "the" human genome. My genome is not identical to yours. If it were, we should be physically indistinguishable. The genome of human being A is slightly different from the genome of human being B. If A and B are siblings, chances are the differences are slight. If they are more distantly related, chances are the differences are larger, though not as large as if they were not related at all. Furthermore, if A and B both come from a population that has been breeding mostly among themselves for a few hundred years, while C comes from a different, remote population, it is very highly probable that you could discover this situation just by examining the three genomes. And now you know why the datanaut keeps his identity secret. He, or more precisely his website, has already been denounced as "bigoted" by one of those people who find their fulfillment in life by denouncing other people as "bigoted."
The science here is deep, and not to be trifled with. The datanaut uses some heavy-duty math in his work: stochastic processes, Lie algebras, control matrices, ODEs and PDEs. That, at least, I could follow without effort; though it is impressive to hear such terms bandied about by a researcher whose line of inquiry belongs, insofar as it belongs to any traditional scientific category, to biology. (The old-fashioned sort of biology — dissecting frogs, twiddling with microscopes — was referred to by the datanaut as "benchtop" or "wet" biology. This was not said disparagingly; indeed, he spoke affectionately of his own benchtop work, and seemed proud of his practical skills in this area. Like the rest of us, though, he now spends most of his working day staring at a monitor.)
Where he lost me was with the genetics. Phenotypes and haplotypes, polymorphous and heterozygous, alleles and demes, founder effect and bottleneck, lysosomes and sphingolipids... I'm not a total idiot about this stuff. I try to keep up with science, and know the meaning of all those terms; but I know them as you know the vocabulary of a language in which you are far from fluent, because you only need to use it once in a long while. When I hear those terms in the flow of speech, I have to translate. I have to stop and think: "What does that mean? Oh, yes...," by which time, of course, the speaker is four sentences ahead of me and I have lost the thread of his argument. If you are as incompetent in foreign languages as I am, you know the feeling.
I got the main drift, though. There is a huge swelling wave of knowledge building up — knowledge about human variation, human inheritance, human nature. Things have gone much further than I realized. Genes controlling intelligence? "We've got a few nailed down, and more are showing up..."
I spent much of my working life wading through masses of data. I never did disciplined "data mining" of the kind my guest engages in, but I know how patterns and significance gradually emerge out of a vast mass of undifferentiated bits and bytes. That's what is happening with genomics. It's not just happening from this one end, either. As in physics, where the cosmologist who deals with clusters of galaxies and the shape of the universe needs to understand the subatomic physics of quarks and leptons, so here too the very large meets the very small. As my friend is toiling away with his nucleic acid molecules, at the other end of the scale population geneticists such as Luigi Cavalli-Sforza are mapping disease frequencies and patterns of inheritance across entire nations and continents. The work of each reinforces the other.
And all this work has to be done while keeping a sort of radio silence, because it is deeply unpopular. I know some of the scientists doing this work — people like the datanaut. They are just like other scientists I have known, driven by a kind of hypertrophied curiosity, by an innocent urge to understand the inner secrets of the world. In other respects, they are just representative human beings, with the normal range of human weaknesses and failings. To the guardians of our public morality, though — the media and political elites, the legal and humanities academics — they are very devils, peering into what should be kept hidden, seeking out things better left alone, working to secret agendas, funded by groups of sinister anti-social plotters — "bigots!"
And the paradox is, that so much good will come out of all this research — is already coming out, in fact. As a result of work like the datanaut's, lives are already being saved — the lives, for example, of some of the tens of thousands of Americans who used to die each year because of adverse reactions to drugs. More marvels are just over the horizon. A couple might soon, for example, be able to pre-determine the attributes of their child before conception by picking the spermatozoon that is to initiate that conception. (Not all of a man's spermatazoa carry the same genetic information — if they did, my children would both be the same sex. To pick the best spermatozoon for the job, you would currently need to take several million of the little devils apart and scrutinize their cargo. However, non-destructive and highly efficient means of doing this are theoretically possible...)
"What about a cure for Alzheimer's?" I ask my guest. My Dad died from Alzheimer's, and it's a thing I worry about. I had read that some genetic research was going on.
The datanaut shook his head. "Tricky. Dangerous. Alzheimer's correlates with IQ, you see. Also has different incidence among different races..." He laughed. "Once researchers know that, they go find something else to work on. The state our science is in right now, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit. No need to go committing professional suicide."
So it goes. This wave of knowledge, this great wave, is building up in laboratories and research institutes all around the world. Sooner or later the wave will come roaring in to crash on our beach. When that happens, a lot of stuff will get swept away — a lot of social dogma, a lot of wishful thinking, a lot of ignorant punditry and self-righteous posturing, and probably some law and tradition and religion and social cohesion as well. There is, however, no stopping the wave. Or rather, we might stop it here in the USA, but then it would just go crashing ashore somewhere else — in China, or Japan, or India — somewhere with a different set of attitudes, a quite different kind of wishful thinking.
Dragged forward by cold science, which doesn't care what we think or wish for, we are headed into some interesting times.
SO assuming we can completely decode the human genome, and assumning we can eventually design and build an entire human being from scratch, is there a moral way to go about doing this?
Seems rather inefficient. I mean humans are one of the most complicated technologies that can be assembled by unskilled labor.
"is there a moral way to go about doing this?"
No.
For you comments.
Yeah and have fun doing it too!
;-)
As long the results have rights and privledges as "humans" and are not considered spare parts or machinery.
This is EXACTLY why I'm copyrighting my body...
So many will want to be JUST LIKE ME, that I will be rich, and able to live a lifestyle to which I'm not yet accustomed.
I'm going with a "no". Some of the moral and philosophical advances humans have made were directly in response to the imperfections individual humans have. Sometimes it's not just what's in us that's important but what been left out.
The AKC tries to eliminate common dog ailments by encouraging breeders to use only animals without that particular trait. Unfortunately, some genes that cause one problem also suppress other problems. We aren't particularly good at predicting long range outcomes in this area.
It bears watching though.
Nope.
Oh man. I'd sure like to hear more about this.
An underappreciated phenomenon, IMHO, is the gradual merging of China and India with the knowledge culture. In the entire postwar period a smallish fraction of the global population - the U.S., Europe and Japan - has done most of the discovering and subsequent applying of what has been discovered. The increasing ability of these two giants to contribute to both scientific and commercial knowledge is going to increase the rate of progress dramatically.
To be sure, they are both still very poor countries where innovation is the exception and poverty the rule. But compared to 10 years ago the differences are already vast in both countries, with most of their advancement still in front of them.
Bump
Insertional mutants in all eight of the Atrboh family members, and various double mutant lines, suggest a variety of hitherto unsuspected roles for active oxygen in plant development, such as in pollen dehiscence and root hair development, in addition to anticipated roles in defense responses.
Works for plants - should not have applied to any other living thing after peapods.
Well, to me as a middle-aged man, one of the most beautiful women I can think of is Michelle Pfeiffer. What makes her beautiful? Among other things, it is that one part of her upper lip is slightly larger than the other part---it is a tiny, but fantastic imperfection.
Think of why the movie camera likes certain people over others: almost all of our "stars" have BIG HEADS (and I don't mean they are conceited, but that their heads are slightly larger in proportion to the average person's head). This was brought out on a special about Clint Eastwood, how his head dominated a scene.
Think of what makes a beautiful baby: the very traits that make an incredibly beautiful baby will USUALLY not result in a particularly beautiful adult, especially as a young adult in our culture. For example, we value (rightly or wrongly) thinness, muscles, sharper faces as opposed to larger (fatter), rounder, and . . . more baby-ish looking adults.
THE SAME GENES CANNOT DO BOTH. You cannot have "recessive" baby genes and "aggressive" adult genes.
In other words, there is something to the old notion of the Chinese that every 'perfect' work of man will have some imperfections.
Let me give one last example. As an old musician, I'm a fan of various styles. Compare Leslie West of Mountain, Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, and Jimi Hendrix. Who'se the best? Well, it totally depends on what you like to hear, but one thing is sure---Hendrix could probably play as fast as Lee, but that would have taken away his signature note-bending style; and Lee could play as slow as West, but he would no longer be Alvin Lee.
No.
Why not?
There is no moral way to go about playing god. This is Frankenstein on a genetic level.
India maybe, but China has no philosophy appropriate to the knowledge culture. Just putting a billion persons online will produce something, but it won't be coherent. They may develop a philosophy and then they may become coherent, but it won't be soon.
Man cannot create life from non-life, no news here, move on ...
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