|
|
 |
|
 |
|
| UNRAVELING THE GENOME | |
 March 21, 2000 
|
|||
|
|
The completion of the Human Genome Project will represent a groundbreaking scientific and technical achievement. It will also represent a profound ethical challenge. Matt Ridley, author of Genome: The Autobiography Of A Species In 23 Chapters, answers your questions. |
|
|
Charles
Lupo of Cleveland, TN, asks: Just what happened recently to give scientist the ability to decipher the sequence? Matt
Ridley responds: First came the discovery of DNA's structure in 1953, then in the 1960s an understanding of the genetic code written on that DNA, then gradually better and better techniques for reading DNA. By the late 1980s it was possible to dream about reading the entire human genome, but at $10 a base pair, and with 3 billion bases, it was still only a dream. The technology finally got fast enough and cheap enough to do the job in 1999. Thinh
Nguyen of Cupertino, CA, asks: In a time when states like Kansas have opted to stop teaching evolution and other schools system fail to teach even basic sciences out of sheer negligence, what is your view of our society's capacity to produce informed citizens who can understand and debate intelligently what is at stake? And if the average citizen cannot grasp the essential implications of this technology, where should this debate take place and who should make the rules? Matt
Ridley responds: I hope and believe that children are still learning good, basic science at school, despite the power of the creationists to veto evolution. I'm more happy about the US in this regard than the UK, where there has been a real backlash against science based on ignorance. But I believe the essentials of genetics are simple enough for anybody to understand, even without a grounding in science --and that was one of the points of writing my book. It is vital that we do not leave this debate to experts. We must ensure that anybody can take an informed decision. When a family has a certain disease gene, they often get themselves very well educated on that particular subject through specialist support groups, so even quite erudite ideas can be understood by those who need to understand them. Don
Andrews of Ogallala, NE, asks: It seems perfectly reasonable for companies to make money on the genome by providing value-added services like fast searches and custom analysis, much like Meade and West make money on public trial records. Publicly funded research should be publicly available for free, though. Would something like the software Open Source movement that brought us Linux be applicable, say something like an Open Genome movement? Matt
Ridley responds: I agree: and there is something like an open genome movement happening. It is the Human Genome Project itself and its attitude to information sharing. It will ensure that its basic human sequence (the reference sequence) is available free to all. Already there are databases like OMIM, which are free and which provide background on many genes already known. Sure, there will be private databases, too, and secrecy about them, but I'm convinced that thanks to the HGP we've got this one right at least at this stage. Jeff
Spagat of Boston, MA, asks: What might be the long-term impact on the process of evolution if the primary force controlling our genetic fitness turns from the complex interactions with our natural environment to the preferences of our social, political and economic institutions? Put more bluntly, might we be precipitating our own extinction? I ask only because I am a graduate student in a molecular genetics program, and although we study evolution at the genetic level, the question of the impact of our work on evolution is never addressed. Matt
Ridley responds: I guess it is never addressed because nobody knows the answer! I think we are continually changing the evolutionary pressures on our species, but changing them so continually that they rarely stay the same for long enough to result in consistent change. Incompetence at the use of contraceptives is clearly being selected for, as Richard Dawkins has argued. But it's hard to see any consistent evolutionary direction for mankind even if we start selecting genes on a wide scale--there will be different preferences in different people. Perhaps I'm wrong there, but it will take centuries before you will be able to prove it!
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||
 | |||||
| |||||
|
|
| |||
| |||||
| |||||
| Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. | |||||
