One year ago, a sheep called Dolly made front page news. Her so-called creator , Dr Ian Wilmut, became a genetic superstar overnight.
He and his team had taken DNA the blueprint of a future life from an unfertilised sheep egg, replaced it with a cell from the udder of a six-year-old ewe, fused them with a volt of electricity, and surgically implanted another ewe with this reconstructed egg which subsequently became a lamb. As Dr Wilmut explains in a jocular aside, when I spoke to him at the Genetics and Society conference in Dublin recently, the lamb was named Dolly after Dolly Parton because she came from a mammary cell.
Dolly is a clone of the six-year-old ewe whose mammary cell provided her DNA, and is the first mammal to be cloned from an adult animal. It took 277 attempts at the above procedure before the scientists managed to get a normal animal, and even then Dolly was a third above the normal weight of a lamb. This high level of very expensive failure adds impetus to a fundamental question concerning animal cloning: What, in fuck s name, is the point?
If you were trying to put genetic engineering into one aim, it would be a very sweeping one to be a benefit to mankind, says Dr Wilmut, who seems less than completely comfortable under the spotlight. That might be by making products for the treatment of human disease, it might be by understanding genetic disease, it might be by changing animals so that they re more useful in agricultural production. I would say that the motivation of people who work in these areas is first of all to have the understanding of what goes on in animals and plants but then to have a way of using it for one of these other purposes.
There is a sense here of putting the cart before the horse of doing something quite drastic and then, afterwards, trying to find a reason for doing it. Or, as Dr. Wilmut puts it: The benefits cannot be predicted.
Looked at in another light, this kind of research almost entirely funded by pharmaceutical and agri-chemical corporations is a form of economic speculation. Companies invest huge amounts of money to find a way of producing animals with identical, homogenised qualities, that have been predetermined through genetic manipulation in the labs. From these genetically engineered animals, the corporations hope to make profits by finding ways that the clones and their associated products can be patented and then sold.
headless froGS
The real driving force behind this process, is the desire for profit. And as usual with biotech issues, the reasons and methods of this attempt are complex but important to understand, because they have ramifications that directly impact upon nature, and will do so increasingly as the genetic engineering industry one of the fastest growing in the world continues to push its way into more and more areas of our lives.
Apart from making money for the corporations that are funding their research, what benefits to society do the cloning scientists hope to achieve by their rather frequently grisly experiments? Well, animal clones could be engineered to produce more meat, wool, eggs and milk though it might be argued that this will only benefit the companies selling them.
Potential medical benefits are, however, what genetic engineers stress most. They say, for example, that clones could be engineered to become sick with genetic diseases to enable research that might throw light on similar genetic diseases in humans (for several years, scientists have been inserting human genes into pigs, trying to make them genetically closer to us for this very reason).
Xenotransplantation is another area of genetic study and experimentation. Here, scientists are attempting to genetically manipulate animals so that their organs hearts, livers, kidneys etc. can be transplanted into human patients. Also in the field of spare-part surgery, scientists are assessing the manufacture of organs, whereby embryos that are engineered to develop perhaps simply a heart, respiratory system, the desired organ and surrounding skin could be implanted into surrogate animal mothers, and then used in humans after they have been born . As a step along this road, scientists have already created wait for it headless frogs.
Molecular pharming engineering animals to produce pharmaceuticals in their blood and milk is another goal. PPL Therapeutics, the corporation that funds Dr Wilmut s research, was set up specifically as a molecular pharm specialising in the production of human blood-clotting factor IX (for the treatment of haemophilia) and a substance called AAT, a deficiency of which can lead to emphysema.
In 1990, PPL guaranteed itself a foothold in a $100 million market by creating Tracey, a sheep which produced large quantities of AAT in her milk. And here we come to the real reason for Dolly. The technology used to clone her was developed to produce multiple copies of highly valuable animals like Tracey, rather than risking dilution of her genetic make-up through traditional breeding.
Scientists are also trying to engineer nutriceuticals by transferring human genes to cattle, in order to produce cows which secrete human proteins so that their milk will be more agreeable to babies.
In some ways, some of this may sound worthy, but what are the drawbacks? Do they outweigh the possible benefits? And if so, are there alternatives that we should be researching?
butchers shops
Non-industry affiliated scientists are trying to get another story across. Human transplant patients run a great risk that their own immune systems will reject organ transplants. Immuno-suppressants must be used on people when they have a transplant, which in itself involves a risk of infection. And as Dr Wilmut admits, at present, transfer between species is very dramatically worse than that.
Nature has designed all sorts of barriers to prevent species from collapsing into each other, and scientists in effect use a kind of force to overcome these.
Another very grave risk associated with transferring animal organs to humans is the spread of epidemic diseases to humanity, no idle worry when we learn that because influenza crossed over from pigs to humans earlier this century, 20 million people died. Dr Richard Nicholson, editor of the British Bulletin of Medical Ethics, has calculated that, Even if we begin using xenotransplants to their likely fullest extent, life expectancy will only increase by about 0.02 per cent a matter of days.
The production of pharmaceuticals in animals milk and blood, begs the question: is this the most appropriate way to deal with these health issues? Hardly.
Many of the diseases and predispositions which the drug companies are citing as genetically curable are actually caused by environmental and social circumstances that can be cured by other methods, Green MEP Nuala Ahern comments. In principle, many of the key compounds desired by the genetic engineers are already in plants. Plant extraction, however, would not be as lucrative for the industry.
Insulin, which is frequently held up as a miracle cure certainly provides many patients with relief, yet the incidence of diabetes continues to rise.
Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist who is campaigning against what she sees as the premature commercial application of biotechnology, has suggested a link between the dramatic rise of infectious diseases and widespread antibiotic resistance with the rise of the genetic engineering industry, whose time-scale of fifteen years these phenomena share. Many scientists believe that genetic transfer, manipulation and cloning are, separately and together, causing dangerous genetic pollution, thereby creating disease; similarly, many non-scientists have a gut feeling that as with BSE (caused by the feeding of dead animals to vegetarian animals, something that nature would never allow), unforeseen disease must be the outcome of such an unnatural practice.
If Dr Wilmut cannot predict the benefits of animal genetic engineering, how can he predict the dangers? According to Mary-Anne Bartlett of Compassion in World Farming, In reality, animal genetic engineering is a hit and miss affair. Of the 50,00 to 100,00 genes which make up a farm animal, the function of only about 2 per cent is known. Adding new genes from other animals is like playing with a chemistry set that has all the labels removed.
And what of the gross inefficiency of this biotechnology for example, the 277 failures that it took to make Dolly? This implies a massive waste of animal life, and a rapidly increasing level of cruelty to animals.
In Texas, the Granada Cloning Corporation tried to create 1,000 genetically engineered cows, but had to stop the test because it was an alarming failure. Many of the creatures were twice as large as normal calves; many had diabetes, enlarged hearts, and, not surprisingly, a tendency to die young.
The industry also involves a wholesale sacrifice of the foster mothers of genetically engineered embryos. These animals are operated upon, killed or impelled to give birth to baby animals that are far too big. Yet when asked whether he has any worries over future confrontations with animals rights organisations, Dr Wilmut, after a long pause, says, I think the answer to that is no, provided that what is arranged is a framework in which these things can be discussed openly.
Drawing attention to a potentially gruesome side of this kind of experimentation, Dr Mae-Wan Ho has warned people to be vigilant, to ensure that animals used for xenotransplanting and other genetically engineered animal carcasses don t end up on sale in butchers shops.
war science
So who will regulate the cowboy science of genetic engineering? It should be society which makes the decisions, asserts Dr Wilmut, it s not for the scientists or the big corporations.
Yet the very corporations which pay Dr Wilmut and his biotech colleagues are currently manoeuvring themselves into positions, economically and politically, where they are the ones who do the controlling. For example, it has been proved that there is a revolving door policy between the agri-chemical corporation Monsanto and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, with the same scientists moving between these two organisations, thus seriously jeopardising the USEPA s ability to make decisions that the corporations wouldn t like.
Is scientific integrity being compromised by the vested interests of big business? I ask Dr Wilmut would he rather be funded by a public interest group, from whom there wouldn t be pressure to get commercial returns on investment.
To a large extent the answer to that is yes. Government funding has been reduced so yes, we are dependent on commercial money. The advantage of being involved in companies is that there will be a faster through-put of new ideas. The drawbacks are that there will then be pressure to put things through, so that people who are being paid by companies may be less objective in their presentation of results.
There are going to be pressures on people, he adds, And society has to make its own mind up. Personally I would prefer a mixture of government and business, but with rather more government involvement than there is at the present time.
Dr Wilmut s repeated insistence that it s up to society to regulate the activities and products of labs that are being funded by undemocratic commercial corporations seems fraught with contradiction; it also reflects one of the greatest myths of modern times: that scientific knowledge is neutral and objective.
Knowledge is a neutral thing, says Dr Wilmut, what s critical is how you use it.
But how neutral? A glance at war science in which scientists research ever-more inventive ways of killing people, including, these days, by using genetically engineered biological weapons quickly dispels the idea that scientists merely come up with neutral inventions, which only become negative in their method of application. (In fact war science makes up more than 50 per cent of the world s current scientific research.)
Dr Frank Barnes, one of the scientists involved in the Texas cattle clone fiasco, recently reflected just how out of kilter the scientific view of the world can become. We were so delighted, he said that we could manually tear an embryo apart and then manually rip the nucleus from an egg and then put the two together with electricity and come up with something that was alive!
His words convey the implicit violence of a reductionist world-view that sees nature as a machine, instead of a living organism full of complexity, interconnectedness, and a great deal that we humans will never know.
The key question has to be: is it too late to stop now? And is Dolly the Sheep, like John the Baptist, a portent of terrible things to come? n