From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Mar 17 2002 - 20:01:35 MST
>From the Weekend Australian newspaper. Warning! This review contains
sentiments distinctly politically incorrect for the extropian list:
===================
The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome
By John Sulston and Georgina Ferry
Bantam/Random House Australia, 310pp, $A55.00
Reviewed by Damien Broderick
Nearly two years ago, US President Bill Clinton stood proudly at a podium
to announce that the human genome draft was complete. Actually, this map
of our common genetic recipe was still badly gappy. Clinton called it `a
day for the ages'. He was flanked at his left by Dr Francis Collins, devout
Christian leader of the painstaking public American end of the global
Human Genome Project (HGP). At his right stood Dr Craig Venter, the
carpetbagger who'd roared into Dodge fixing to finish off the genome by the
`shotgun' method, beating those slow-poke bureaucrats even though they'd
drawn first--and, if his Celera Genomics company could get away with it,
patenting the spoils.
The fabled DNA helix, one thread of this book's title, was unravelled in
Britain
in 1953 by an Englishman and a visiting American. Nearly half a century
later, a key strand of the HGP's thread in this vast common project was
largely overlooked. Prime Minister Tony Blair seized photo ops, but not
many people knew that a major player in this epochal search was a genial
expert in nematode worms, John (now Sir John) Sulston. Yet in 1989 Sulston
had helped start the sequencing project, with DNA helix co-discoverer Jim
Watson and another American worm specialist, Bob Waterson, and ran the UK
end, the Sanger Centre, until late in 2000.
The speed of their successful efforts has been genuinely breathtaking. As
recently as mid-1996, the effort was gearing up after vast preparation for its
major push, massively and crucially funded by the philanthropic Wellcome
Trust. Only a few percent of the three billion genetic letters had yet
been read. In May, 1998, with the aid of venture capitalists, Craig Venter
entered the arena, ready to complete the human sequence within three
years--four or five years earlier than the public project's goal--and without
a cent of taxpayers' money.
Journalists were agog. Here was the brash American way at its best:
audacious, putting its money where its mouth was in expectation of
prodigious rewards, perhaps even a bit unprincipled. The race hotted up
with incredible speed. To everyone's astonishment, a little over a year ago
private and public wings released their data simultaneously to the
scientific press--Sulston's team (although by then he had resigned) through
the British journal Nature, Celera's via the American journal Science. The
human genome had been decoded in barely more than a decade, we were told, a
triumph comparable to placing men on the Moon, with unfathomable future
consequences.
The trouble with this story, like the one about asylum seekers throwing
their children overboard, is that it's wrong, and politically motivated.
Sulston's brilliantly enthralling tale blends his amused, amusing and slightly
bumbling persona (as captured by science journalist Ferry, who adds meaty
chunks from her interviews with other major players) with the increasingly
furious, indignant tones of a prophet scorned. Those publications in
February, 2001, were not at all the glorious consummation trumpeted in the
press. Indeed, the human genome still isn't finished, although some 90
percent is now in the bag. Possibly it will not be complete until the
original HGP target date, 2003.
What's more, Sulston explains, Venter's spectacular coup in starting from
scratch years after the public program had allegedly plodded along, roaring
to a neck-and-neck finish, is at best spin and at worst flat untruth.
Celera's celerity depended on late generation sequencing machines developed
originally with funding from the public purse. Worse still, Venter's
`shotgun' method of sequencing chunks of code, then patching them together
like a jigsaw puzzle, only worked--to the extent that it did--because he
could appropriate maps generated by Sulston and others who strove to keep
the genome code in the public domain.
Despite promises, Venter's own data was rarely posted openly; indeed,
researchers were obliged to sign non-disclosure documents. This is not how
science has been done, as Sulston furiously points out, nor should it be.
Perhaps old-world gentlemanly openness just doesn't cut the mustard any
longer, does not produce either the scientific nor commercial goods? But
market exploitation, Sulston replies, simply has not achieved what it claims.
Celera, he argues, did science and won prizes by press release. Bizarrely,
the HGP and Venter's team shared an award for mapping the `landscape of the
genome' at a time when the public project's data was posted daily for all
to see, yet Celera's was not. None of it. `Had this ever happened before?
That an internationally reputable society would give an award for research
that was unpublished and unseen?' Easy to sympathise with Sulston's wrath,
although the press seems largely to have treated it as pique.
Does it matter, though, finally? Sulston shows how the public side of the
race was muffled or even effectively silenced in the USA by politics, for
nobody could speak out against market interests without upsetting Congress,
risking the sack or loss of government funds. Well, isn't this in turn just
another ideological spin? Sulston is clearly and unashamedly an old leftie
humanist who inveighs against `the power of the rich countries and of the
transnational corporations... used in a bullying and inequitable fashion.'
Economic libertarians will shrug off his rhetoric, noting that everyone
benefits from the swiftest possible unpacking of this genetic treasure
trove. That might be true in part; then again, private interests have tried
to patent not just partly mapped gene sequences (built by evolution, of
course, rather than human ingenuity), but also any future medical
applications of proteins the genes encode. It is like patenting air, then
levying a charge on breathing, inflated tyres, and the atmosphere of
Jupiter. You want to laugh out loud, but we dare not treat it so lightly.
I expect Sir John will have a Nobel Prize soon, and stand gritting his
teeth as Craig Venter shares it. Or maybe the Sanger Centre et al will be
written out of history. Let nobody be tempted to allow this, he urges us.
`The struggle over the human genome was necessary, and things would not be
the same today had not the public project stood firm.' Luckily, his book is
at once modest and a rattling good read. It might make a dynamite movie,
but Russell Crowe is probably way too intense to play the lead.
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