WRITERS of popular books on genetic engineering have adopted an upbeat tone
recently. Titles such as Remaking Eden and Improving Nature?
seem almost utopian in their views, and it would be easy to conclude from their
accounts that this new array of technology deserves public support. Yet many
people outside the science community remain deeply anxious about genetic
engineering.

The story of Britain’s BSE epidemic, where common sense was abandoned in
favour of what now seems to have been recklessness, casts a long shadow over the
biotechnology industry. Genetic Engineering aims to put the potential
risks of gene technologies under a new spotlight. Polemical and often
controversial, Mae-Wan Ho calls for the whole of what she calls “bad science” to
be rejected, as the public generally opposed atomic energy because of the risk
of accidents and the problem of disposing of radioactive waste.

Forty years ago, nuclear technology was in a analogous position to that of
genetic engineering today. Little was known about its risks in peacetime use and
most scientists were confident that its power could be safely tamed for the
benefit of humanity. Today, gene experts now confidently predict that the
release of hundreds of species of genetically modified crops during the next
decade will pose no significant risk.

Using the Cold War imagery of a nuclear winter, Ho predicts that if
biotechnology continues along its present course, a “critical genetic meltdown”
will occur, bringing about “the end of humanity as we know it”. This is an
extreme view, but less apocalyptic objections to biotechnology have been
widely publicised during the past few years. Until recently, corporations such
as Monsanto have believed that their vision for the future could be made reality
by the stealthy infusion of genetically engineered tomatoes and soya beans into
our diet. But public opposition has forced firms to reassess their aggressive
promotion of genetically modified foods. Last month, for example, a major
British supermarket chain decided to respond to public fears about genetically
engineered food by banning it from the shelves. And regulatory bodies have
criticised the research conditions of genetically engineered crops
(see This Week, 4 April, p 4).

Ambitious and wide-ranging in her scope, Ho presents her case against genetic
engineering in a disjointed collection of essays. Although she describes a range
of worrying genetic techniques, such as those that led to Dolly the sheep, Ho
stops short of providing much detailed analysis. The exception is her treatment
of genetic engineering in agriculture. She draws three striking conclusions.

First, Ho believes that genetic changes intended to increase crop yields are
fundamentally incompatible with sustainable development. She suggests that
developments such as herbicide-resistant soya and potatoes that produce a
bacterial insecticide encourage the expansion of the monocultures characteristic
of intensive farming. Such practices are both ecologically and socially
damaging. She accuses transnational corporations of using genetic engineering to
maintain their chemicals sales while promoting a form of agriculture ever more
destructive of local ecosystems.

Ho dismisses the biotechnology industry’s claims that genetic engineering is
the only way to feed the world’s growing population. Her examples from the
developing world suggest that they offer the only model for agriculture that
remains viable for hundreds of years, rather than tens.

Her second criticism of genetic engineering in agriculture is that it is
reckless. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s probably know as little about the risks of genetic
engineering as they did about the risks of radiation in the 1950s. Unlike
radioactivity, once genetic pollution has been released into the environment, it
could, says Ho, spread by itself among living organisms like a viral infection.
Such ideas may seem fanciful, but they certainly raise questions about the
biotech industry’s opposition to new precautionary steps that might delay a
product reaching the market.

Although she refers repeatedly to agricultural genetics as “scientifically
flawed” (her third criticism), Ho does not explain why and how it is flawed. She
condemns the reductionism inherent in genetic engineering, but she cannot yet
draw on a comprehensive alternative framework with which to view biological
systems.

But such new thinking is developing on the fringes of mainstream biology.

One important contribution is A Question of Genes(Floris Books,
ÂŁ9.99, ISBN 0863152392), which sketches the implications of using what
Craig Holdredge calls “contextual thinking” for our way of thinking about living
things. Traditionally, “object thinking” has been characteristic of biology,
suggests Holdredge: biologists study clearly defined entities such as genes,
organs and character traits. Contextual or fluid thinking, by contrast, looks at
transformations, and at the relations between objects. There are no isolated
objects in biology, he says. The meanings of biological entities comes as much
from their relationships with other entities as from the objects themselves.

Holdredge illustrates the use of contextual thinking using studies of plant
structure. While every species has a characteristic structure that enables us to
tell one species from another, each also has elements of plasticity that tell us
about the environment in which the plant has grown. The shape and arrangement of
a plant’s leaves and roots can reveal its health and the characteristics of the
soil in which it grew. Combining such fluid perspectives with more traditional
thinking could, he suggests, produce a much richer understanding of biological
systems.

Holdredge also uses his contextual approach to criticise some applications of
gene technologies to humans. When prenatal diagnosis reveals a genetic defect,
the parents’ wealth of expectations about their new baby is destroyed, he
suggests. They are encouraged to picture a child doomed to be a burden to
society. Instead of the baby being part of a network of thoughts and feelings,
it has been transformed into an object.

The most striking aspect of the new biotechnologies is how little opportunity
ordinary citizens have had to debate and direct them. Whether their application
produces genetically engineered food or terminated pregnancies, funding for
research is allocated by expert committees and the results are applied with only
cursory attempts at democratic participation. With the British government about
to launch a public consultation on new developments in biology, these two books
show that there are many useful contributions to the gene debate from outside
the mainstream. There is more than one possible future for biotechnology.

Degrees of Freedom: Living in Dynamic Boundaries by Alan Rayner,
ÂŁ27, Imperial College Press, ISBN 1 86094 037 4

LOOKING back at the past twenty years of popular biology, a newcomer might be
forgiven for thinking that it is only the selfish genes which have made an
impact on evolution. During the 1970s, neo-Darwinists, such as Richard Dawkins
and E. O. Wilson, became evangelical advocates of what is known as the selfish
gene theory. This asserts that all living things are a product of competition
between genetically distinct individuals, a view of nature red in tooth and claw
rammed home by a hundred safari documentaries.

Yet throughout this period there have been signs that this mechanism alone
cannot explain the extraordinary diversity of ecologies and behaviours found
among organisms. During the past few years, the limitations of purely
individualistic genetic explanations have become increasingly apparent. Slowly,
a new genre of writing is emerging that recognises both partnership and
competition as crucial to understanding evolution.

Degrees of Freedom is a fascinating new addition to this debate.
Alan Rayner, professor of biology at the University of Bath, spent years trying
to fit the interactions of fungi into a neat deterministic model of individual
costs and benefits. But he discovered that the most striking thing about these
underground entities is their lack of determinacy and individuality. Unlike
humans and insects, they have no fixed boundaries. And they are potentially
immortal.

Like many bacteria, fungi challenge the whole notion of the individual as the
sole unit of evolution, argues Rayner, not least because it is unclear where one
individual ends and another begins. Among his examples is the mammoth fungus
spread across 15 hectares of virgin forest in Montana. This single genetic unit
is thought to be more than a thousand years old and weighs more than 100 tonnes.
Such diffuse individuals may, suggests Rayner, be more the rule than the
exception in much of nature.

In this new bottom-up view of evolution, microbes take centre stage. Rather
than being discrete, bounded entities, they have the dynamic characteristics of
a network, analogous to the Internet. So what looks like an individual toadstool
in your local wood is, in fact, the tip of a huge biological iceberg consisting
of a cotton-wool mass of constantly branching fungal tubes. In contrast to the
ecologist’s classic concept of a niche, fungi survive by drawing on a diverse
network of expertise among their microbial partners, rather than by excelling at
any particular activity.

So, like the World Wide Web, a fungal network is decentralised. There is no
central region capable of exerting control over the rest of the network.
Rayner’s own work suggests that the growth patterns of fungal filaments are
forged as much by the environment that they encounter as by their genes. He
believes that epigenetics, the process whereby opportunities in an organism’s
surroundings dictate which genes are expressed, is the norm in microorganisms.
Genetic determinism is thus turned on its head.

Since fungi have twice the total biomass of all animals on Earth, we should
be careful not to underestimate their significance, warns Rayner. Unable to
resist the temptation of extending his indeterminacy thesis to human affairs, he
ends his book by suggesting that his findings challenge notions of individuality
elsewhere.

Rayner has elegantly shown that, in much of the microbial world at least, DNA
takes a back seat to environmental context. He wants to apply these same
principles to the behaviour of more familiar communities such as ant colonies
and plant roots and even, more contentiously, to ourselves. Already his ideas,
which have been dubbed “eco-Darwinism”, have intrigued evolutionists. Now this
accessible book brings his challenging perspective into the public arena.

WHY are so few young people in Britain choosing a career in science? It’s a
sobering thought for the many scientists, engineers and technologists who are
hard at work preparing for the nation’s fourth National Week of Science,
Engineering and Technology (SET97), which begins on Friday, 14 March.

Last year, the BSE crisis rather overshadowed the event. This time, Dolly the
cloned sheep threatens to steal the show’s thunder. So, all in all, science’s
spin-doctors will have to redouble their efforts to woo a public uneasy about
science and their downright suspicious offspring.

What’s on offer and how will it all work? Once more, the British Association
for the Advancement of Science is coordinating what should be a national
celebration of science. Countrywide, shopping malls, universities, church halls,
museums and just about every other public space will be dragooned into providing
the backdrop for hundreds of science, engineering and technology events.

And there is plenty of fun to be had, some amazing spectacles and a range of
serious stuff—in short, with 6000 items to choose from, there should be
something for everybody. You could start with an Easter egg race in Hartlepool,
track dinosaurs in Cardiff, plug into an introduction to the Internet at
Huddersfield before moving onto a hot ice show in Chesterfield or indulging in a
spot of keyhole surgery in Exeter.

On the more serious side, though, those who hold science dear on both sides
of the Atlantic are outraged at the huge popularity of television programmes
such as the X-Files, arguing that producers often confuse fact and
fiction. TV shows, they complain, are conjuring up a mysterious world beyond the
limits of science. So, just what’s going on?

Well, according to sociologist Steve Yearley of the University of York,
belief in the authority of science has declined on a scale similar to that of
royalty or the church. But this breakdown in trust, he contends, does not imply
or reflect public ignorance of science but rather a feeling of science being out
of control. Yearley will be among the contributors to “Has science gone far
enough?”, a public debate which opens the University of East London’s
contribution to SET97. Definitely for those who like a generous helping of
critique served up with their science. Prominent figures from academia,
nongovernmental organisations and the media, including George Monbiot of Green
College, Oxford, science writer Colin Tudge and the Wellcome Trust’s Tom Wilkie,
will gather to explore the changing relations between scientists and
society.

And nowhere is that relationship more severely challenged than over genetics.
SET97 should be able to meet the challenge set by Colin Campbell, head of the
government’s newly formed Human Genetics Advisory Commission and vice-chancellor
of the University of Nottingham—to give nonscientists a voice in
scientific issues of public concern. Specifically, Campbell claims the current
debate on genetic science is “the biggest single issue since the Cold War”.

A team from the University of Glamorgan has assembled a citizen’s jury to
consider the ethical limits of human genetic technologies within healthcare.
“People in Germany and the US have been addressing the lack of public
participation in decision-making matters relating to science,” says Marcus
Longley, the coordinator of the Glamorgan initiative. “It’s high time similar
schemes were begun in Britain.”

At the University of East Anglia, climate researcher Ben Matthews has severe
misgivings about another emerging, potentially planet-saving,
technology—climate engineering. Could pumping iron into the sea really
slow global warming? The stakes are high, with millions of lives at risk
worldwide from rising sea levels. Matthews, whose doctoral research provides
data for climate engineers, will be asking whether, given the uncertainties
inherent in ocean experiments, such techniques should be more widely debated
before they are developed further.

Yet another highly contentious issue is the genetic basis of intelligence,
currently up for grabs as critics question the social and political implications
of searching for genes for IQ. But would moves to curtail research amount to
censorship on a par with the Pope’s infamous attempt to suppress for all time
Galileo’s discoveries in the early 17th century? Wilkie wants to raise in SET97
the question of whether the spectre of public disquiet should curtail certain
areas of research.

Lewis Wolpert, who chairs the Committee on the Public Understanding of
Science (COPUS), is one of the organisers of a seminar “Science, policy and
risk” at the Royal Society. He believes that moral concerns should begin only
outside the laboratory door. Colin Tudge will use SET97 to suggest that bodies
such as COPUS stifle free and open debate by attempting to define what is and
isn’t good science.

Wolpert expects us all to keep a special place for the men in white coats, as
did the zoologist Richard Dawkins in his Amnesty Lecture “The values of science”
at the University of Oxford on 30 January. Yet, surely in the sceptical 1990s,
if a group wants respect, it has to earn it. People must not turn away from
scientific issues, for they permeate our lives whether we like it or not.
Equally, those who promote science ignore the concerns of nonscientists at their
peril. The best hope for SET97 will be to create a consensus between scientists
and nonscientists.

In his new book, science historian Jan Sapp charts the development of ideas about symbiosis, the living together of dissimilar organisms, to provide a richly woven mixture of science, historical context and social intrigue. The young Potter had a passion for lichens, which she was convinced were made up of two very different organisms. But the Linnaean Society of 1897, scandalised both by her gender and her symbiotic views, would not let her inside its doors, let alone lecture to its members. Thirty years before, a German botanist named Simon Schwendener had caused great controversy when he also proposed that lichens were a “dual entity” composed of a plant and a fungus.

By the time of Potter, “Schwendenerist” had become a fashionable term of abuse for someone who was always in two minds. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew made Potter and her ridiculous ideas so unwelcome that she gave up her career as a biologist. Without the misogyny and dogmatism of her fellow scientists, Potter, the world’s most famous Schwendenerist, might be known more for her brilliant and beautifully illustrated studies of lichen symbiosis rather than bedtime storybooks.

Potter’s intellectual martyrdom was only the first of many trials the concept of symbiosis would endure. Sapp shows how before the outbreak of the First World War, biologists, who were becoming increasingly ecologically minded, had overcome their reservations and considered symbiosis to be one of the most exciting areas in biology. By 1925, however, a popular textbook by E. B. Wilson spoke for many in a subject keen to establish its scientific credentials when he described symbiosis as “too fantastic for present mention in polite biological society”. While biologists grudgingly acknowledged that lichens were not just strange plants, but rather the partnership between a fungus and an alga, most refused to accept that a process involving the internalisation of symbionts might explain the origins of all plants, animals and fungi.

Sapp describes how early proponents of the symbiotic origin of modern cells left themselves open to ridicule by over-enthusiastic claims to have cultivated organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts outside the cell, both in Europe and the US. These claims provided further ammunition to those who saw aggression and selfish individuals as laws of nature. It took the combination of an enthusiastic student, new genetic techniques, and the support of a Nobel prizewinning mentor, suggests Sapp, to allow symbiosis research to break out of its spiral of decline during the 1960s and 1970s.

As a graduate student Lynn Margulis synthesised previous work on the origin of cell, encouraged by insights from that giant of postwar genetics, Joshua Lederberg. By the mid-1960s she was convinced that mitochondria and chloroplasts had originally been bacteria, living symbiotically within the cells of the ancestors of plants, animals, fungi and protists. During the next twenty years, so much evidence was built up in support of the “endosymbiont hypothesis” that even the most conservative biology textbooks now state the symbiotic origin of the eukaryotic cell as fact.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the acceptance of symbiosis was its confusion with mutualism, a term which became popular among biologists influenced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s mutuellisme. Proudhon, one of the founders of both socialist and anarchist theory, said that the breakdown of capitalism would be heralded by networks of workers’ cooperatives associating by mutual aid and equal exchange. By contrast, symbiosis was an umbrella term designed by biologists to include both mutualism, parasitism and all other economic outcomes of prolonged physical associations between organisms. Despite this clear distinction, symbiosis was often seen as standing in opposition to the forces of Darwinian evolution, which had been characterised by popularisers such as Tennyson as “red in tooth and claw”. Sapp has noted that many biologists now grudgingly accept symbiosis happened at one point in the history of life, with the evolution of the cell, but most assume that the subsequent two billion years of biology belongs to nothing but selfish genes.

One hundred years after Potter’s suppression, not only is the symbiotic origin of the cell undisputed, but an increasing proportion of evolution seems to be pervaded by symbiogenic processes. Abyssal fish that see in the dark, cattle and insects that can digest tough plant tissue, plant roots that draw nitrogen from the atmosphere – all these seem to have arisen by symbiogenesis, the evolutionary consequences of certain protracted symbioses, usually involving microorganisms. The gene-eyed view of evolution is being supplemented with a microbe-eyed perspective.

Sapp uses symbiosis as an illustration of the dangers of the trend towards narrow specialism in science. Unless evolutionary biologists take a more ecological approach that encompasses such intimate relationships between diverse communities of animals, plants, and especially microbes, our progress towards a fuller understanding of Darwinian evolution is bound to be slow.

Many popular studies in the history of science describe events that have either been completed or are past their peak. Sapp’s book is not only a scholarly account of one of the most important, yet neglected, areas of 20th-century biology, but it may also be pointing the way to a major element of biology in the next millennium.