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Seeing Nature Whole
World Goodwill Seminar: The Will to Good: Dispelling the
Glamours of Our Times, School of Oriental and African Studies, Brunei
Gallery, London October 28, 2000.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
"To-day, we are learning the language that allowed God to create
life." That was how Clinton announced the human genome map on 26 June
2000. The Human Genome Project, (HGP) an international public consortium
of research laboratories led by the United States, and Celera, a private
American company, made the announcement jointly, ending months of
competition to complete the first sequence of the human genome. Craig
Venter, Director of Celera, hailed this "historical day in the
100,000 years of human history" when, for the first time, "the
human species can read the letters of its own text." Not to be
outdone, Francis Collins, head of the public project, referred to the gene
map as "the revelation of the book of life".
Speaking of the Glamours of Our Times, no other fits the bill better
than the Human Genome Project. The media were full of similar hyperboles.
It was a feat comparable to landing on the moon. It will produce cancer
cures. It will enable us to identify all the ‘bad’ genes that
cause diseases as well as the ‘good’ genes that make us
intelligent, beautiful, good at sports, and even prolong our life span.
The bad genes can be eliminated and good ones put in to enhance our
genetic makeup. It will give us personalized medicine and a prescription
of lifestyle based on our genetic makeup.
Ten years ago, when the Human Genome Project was being sold to the
public at the cost of $3 billion to the United States taxpayers alone,
they promised us the blueprint for making a human being when the human
genome is sequenced. Now, dozens of genome sequences later, geneticists
have no clue as to how to make the smallest microbe, nor the simplest
worm, let alone a human being.
In case you have any lingering doubt, up to 95% of the human genome may
consist of what is known as ‘junk DNA’, because geneticists have
no idea what functions it serves. They cannot even agree on how many genes
there are. The estimates range from 30 000 to 100 000. The human genome
map announced in June was only 85% complete in the coding regions only.
In reality, the Human Genome Project is the biggest sellout in the whole
of human history. It is the privatisation of the human genome financed by
the public purse, with many disastrous consequences on the social and
moral fabric of civil society.
What’s happening? Human genes and cell lines are being patented and
owned by corporation; among them are those taken from indigenous peoples
without informed consent, under the pretext of providing medical care.
These same indigenous peoples are being driven to extinction by the
activities of the oil, timber and mining corporations. Their DNA and cell
lines are being advertised and sold openly on the internet.
Human embryos are grown in the laboratory for the purpose of providing
cells and tissues for transplantation. The UK Government has finally bowed
to pressure from scientists and the biotech industry to give approval for
research on human embryonic stem cells using ‘spare embryos’
from in vitro fertilization and aborted foetuses. International
trafficking of human organs is already rife. It can be predicted that cell
lines, eggs and human embryos will be added to the list. A hospital in
South Africa has been contracted by a biotech company to supply frozen
placentas of black people to be shipped to Paris, presumably, to have
cells and DNA extracted from them
Human germline gene therapy is openly advocated, which amounts to
creating genetically modified human beings. Genetic modification is a
hazardous process, as they should know from work done on animals and
plants. My life has been ruined in having to travel the world to counter
Monsanto and those scientific experts who have been telling the public
GMOs are absolutely safe. These are probably the same kinds of experts who
have been assuring us that there is absolutely no risk from eating BSE
beef.
No one has yet been cured with somatic gene therapy, a procedure
that is not supposed to change the germline, but can do so nevertheless.
The death of a healthy teenager who took part in a clinical trial last
year sparked off a major public enquiry. It transpired that between 1998
and 1999, scientists associated with US drug companies failed to disclose
five other deaths and more than 650 adverse events resulting from clinical
trials of gene therapy, on grounds that they were ‘commercially
sensitive’ information.
Two years ago, the first ‘human’ clone was created, by
transferring the genetic material of a human cell into the egg of a cow.
Thankfully, the scientists destroyed the experiment at 14 days, which is
the current legal limit, otherwise, we would have been faced with
Frankenstein. At least the original Dr. Frankenstein did not do it for
money. And that is one of the roots of the problem. When deciding on
whether any application is ethical or beneficial, the bottom line must be,
would it be done if there were no money to be made? And who can benefit
when all the genes, cell lines and reproductive processes are patented for
commercial exploitation?
Gene biotechnology is not just about GM food or GM human beings. It is a
commitment to an existential nightmare, a descent into a self-made hell on
earth. Mary Shelley´s brilliant novel was not just a parable of the
arrogant scientist playing God; in the present context, it is about
mechanistic science out of control, in the service of the corporate
empire. Ultimately, it is the failure to see nature whole.
The mechanistic paradigm of western science has dominated world politics
and the policy of nations for centuries since the industrial revolution,
not just through destructive technologies, but especially through the way
the world is perceived and shaped. It presents nature as isolated atoms
jostling and competing against one another in the Darwinian struggle for
survival of the fittest. Organisms, including human beings are regarded as
machines, and there is no limit to what can be manipulated and exploited
for corporate profit. It is all of a piece with the neo-liberal economic
theory that is promoting globalisation – the removal of all barriers
to trade, investment and finance – so as to enable corporations to
better exploit human beings and destroy the earth. The result is a social,
economic and ecological crisis on a global scale. That was why 50 000 took
to the streets of Seattle last November in peaceful demonstrations against
the World Trade Organisation.
The mechanistic paradigm has failed the reality test in life. What is
not generally known is that it has also failed the reality test within
western science itself. Contemporary western science across the
disciplines is revealing how nature is organic, dynamic and
interconnected. There are no linear causal chains linking genes to the
characteristics of organisms, let alone the human condition. Yet, the
discredited paradigm of genetic determinism is still being perpetrated by
the scientific establishment, in exactly the same way that neo-liberal
economics still dominates the political mainstream. Not only is the old
paradigm good for promoting gene biotechnology, it also makes unethical
uses seem compelling.
Study after study continues to show that there are no simplistic
explanations for diseases in terms of single genes. The top human
geneticists are all saying that there is no such thing as a single gene
disease, simply because the action of each gene is modified and affected
by many, many other genes. For example, cystic fibrosis among Northern
Europeans is strongly associated with a mutation in a certain gene, but
the severity of symptoms varies over a wide range, depending on the
background of other genes. Moreover, among the Yemans, the same mutation
is associated with a different condition; while cystic fibrosis is linked
to another gene altogether.
The connection between genes and disease becomes more and more tenuous
when it comes to conditions such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and
further down the list, schizophrenia, intelligence, alcohol abuse,
homosexual and criminal behaviour, where environmental and social factors
increasingly predominate.
There are up to 100 000 genes in the genome, with hundreds of variants
in each gene. Each person is genetically unique, except for identical
twins at the beginning of development, before they can accumulate genetic
mutations independently. It is impossible, in principle, to give the
prognosis for any disease for an individual, let alone predict his or her
lifestyle, based on the person’s genetic makeup. As a matter of
interest, identical twins have very different brains because brain
development is strongly dependent on individual experience.
The overwhelming causes of ill health are environmental and social.
So-called single gene diseases account for less than 2% of all diseases,
and as mentioned earlier, even for these, the severity of syndromes tend
to vary very widely in most cases. For many conditions in which ‘predisposing
genes’ are identified, environmental influences swamp even large
genetic differences. For example, breast cancer is known to be relatively
rare among women in non-industrial countries in Asia, while the incidence
among European women in the industrial countries is five times as high.
However, among Asian women who have emigrated to Northern Europe and the
United States, the incidence of breast cancer jumps to that of the
European women within a single generation.
The World Health Organisation International Agency for Research on
Cancer has concluded that at least 80 percent of all cancer is
attributable to environmental influences. Hundreds of potential and actual
carcinogens have been identified among the 70 000 industrial chemicals
that pollute our air, water and soil. Rising epidemics of childhood
cancers are linked to mutations caused by radioactive wastes seeping from
processing plants, or dumped into the sea and washed up on our beaches.
Meanwhile, practically all that the cancer research establishment is doing
on cancer prevention is to identify the genes associated with cancer.
The focus on genes is entirely misplaced. It is diverting attention and
resources away from the real causes of ill health, allowing the culprits
to continue to pollute our life support system with impunity, and at the
same time profiting from the huge health market created by the rising tide
of ill health. A headline in the financial pages of The Guardian
(Wednesday August 2, 2000) says it all: "Gene hunters say patients
are a bankable asset". Worse yet, the ‘genetic mantle’
placed on diseases and other human conditions end up blaming the victims,
contributing to the re-emergence of genetic discrimination and eugenics
that have blighted the history of much of the last century.
We should never forget the devastation of indigenous peoples world wide
(which is still happening), the persecution of the Jews, apartheid in
South Africa, all of which were justified on grounds that some peoples
were racially inferior. Within European countries like Germany and Sweden,
and the United States, eugenic programmes led to tens of thousands of
their own citizens, considered physically handicapped and mentally
defective either being put to death or forcefully sterilised, right up to
the 1970s and beyond.
The only concrete offers from the human genome project thus far are
genetic tests, some 740 already in the market. In cases where the use of
such tests can help diagnosis and treatment of patients, exorbitant
licence fees have prevented their use. On the other hand, healthy people
testing positive have been denied employment and health insurance. There
are moves to make it compulsory for individuals to reveal the results of
genetic tests to insurance companies within the UK. Thank God we still
have National Health here.
Prenatal diagnosis on the unborn, and pre-implantation diagnosis on
human embryos have resulted in the elimination of foetuses and embryos
with genes that are said to pre-dispose them to cancer as adults. And
James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA, the
genetic material, even suggested that parents might want to eliminate the
unborn carrying homosexuality genes. There are no such genes, by the way.
Meanwhile, a prominent band of scientists and ‘bioethicists’
are openly declaring that the creation of a gene-rich class of human
beings is inevitable, as those who could afford to, will pay for genetic
enhancement of their offspring. There will be a genetic underclass –
children of those who cannot afford to pay - that might become a separate,
inferior species. Those projections, like the promise of individually
customised medicine, are genetic determinist fantasies. But they are far
from harmless, for they are giving rein to the worst eugenic tendencies in
our societies.
Another trend is the erosion of privacy and civil rights. Governments
are creating large DNA databases of suspects, if not the entire population
of a nation, so as to better apprehend criminals. Governments including
the UK, along with biotech companies, are also encouraging ordinary people
to donate their DNA to create national databases that can help identify
susceptibility to diseases. That’s what the Guardian article I
mentioned was all about.
The DNA database of an entire nation, Iceland, has been sold to a
private company, and negotiations are taking place between another private
company and the Swedish Government for the ‘ethical’ take over
of the Swedish population database.
These trends have persuaded the Council for Responsible Genetics, a
non-government organisation in the United States, to draft a Genetic Bill
of Rights to protect "human rights and integrity" and the "biological
integrity of the earth" (<www.gene-watch.org>). There is also a
call for a World Ethics Council consisting of independent scientists and
representatives of a cross-section of civil society, to deal with the
violations of human rights, privacy and dignity.
But no regulation can be effective unless there is a ‘will-to-good’
that values the integrity and purpose of every being for its own sake. It
arises from seeing nature whole. And because nature is whole, this
‘will-to-good’ is the most universal ideal of human societies
everywhere.
There is an organic revolution within western science. I have alluded to
the genetic determinist mindset that has ruled biology and the popular
culture at large before genetic engineering got underway 25 years ago. It
offers a simplistic description of organisms. It has no concept of the
organism as a whole, nor of societies or ecosystems. Instead, it sees only
selfish individuals, each competing against all, and all at war against
nature. The organism is presented as little more than a collection of ‘traits’
tied to specific genes that are supposed to pass on unchanged to the next
generation. If that were the case, genetic engineering would be as precise
and effective as is claimed: identify the gene that determines the desired
trait, isolate it, and transfer it to another organism to create a GMO
with the desired trait, once and for all.
This view became increasingly untenable as researchers began to reveal
what turned out to be an immense amount of cross talk between genes. Genes
function in complex, entangled networks. They are nothing if not dynamic,
sensitive and responsive, to other genes, to the cell or organism in which
they find themselves and to the external environment. Genes are active, or
not, depending on the environment. Furthermore, they can mutate, multiply,
rearrange and jump around. Genes from one organism can even jump into the
genome of another. The genetic material is so flexible and mutable that by
the 1980s, geneticists were inspired to coin the descriptive phrase, "the
fluid genome".
Genetics has indeed changed out of all recognition. Genes have an
extended ecology comprising all other genes in the genome, the
physiological milieu of the organism and the ecological
environment. For genes and genomes to maintain dynamic constancy, there
must be a balanced ecology. The new genetics is radically
ecological, organic and holistic, it is diametrically opposed to the
mechanical conception of nature that has dominated the world for hundreds
of years. The transition between classical genetics and the new genetics
is analogous of the transition between classical and quantum physics. That
is why genetic engineering, at least in its current form, can never
succeed. It is based on misconceptions that organisms are machines, and on
a denial of the complexity and flexibility of the organic whole.
Parallel discoveries are made in ecology. For too long, academic
ecologists have tried and failed to explain the diversity of ecosystems
solely in terms of competition. In reality, it is the myriad of mutual,
symbiotic relationships among diverse species that enable all
species to prosper, including the human beings that have shaped and
sustained those systems in the course of tens of thousands of years.
Conservation and environmental policies that exclude human beings are
misguided and pernicious. During the 1980s, prominent conservationists in
the United States have argued that the earth can only support 5 million
people. (That may be true if all of them consume the earth’s
resources at the rate of the average person in the United States.)
In general, population arguments are based on the concept of carrying
capacity of the ecosystem, the maximum number of individuals that it can
support. The fallacy is to assume that carrying capacity is a fixed
physical constant, it is not. Evidence is emerging that the more
biodiverse a system, the greater the carrying capacity and hence also the
productivity. Biodiverse systems are also more stable and resilient,
therefore offering greater food security. In short, academic ecologists
have been rediscovering what indigenous farmers all over the world have
known and practised successfully for millennia. Ecological farming systems
have been revived all over the world since the 1980s. Not only have yields
doubled and tripled and continued to increase, they have brought major
social, health and environmental benefits. They offer the only way to
recover and regenerate land degraded by industrial agriculture.
Perhaps the most significant turning point in western science is the
development of relativity theory, and especially of quantum physics at the
beginning of the last century. For it overturned the most fundamental
assumptions of the mechanistic paradigm. Instead of seeing things as
separate and isolated, quantum theory gives us a universe inhabited by
de-localized, mutually entangled entities that change and evolve like
organisms. The separation between observer and observed is thus also
illusory.
The change is so profound that Alfred North Whitehead declared it is
impossible to understanding nature except as an organism that participates
fully in knowing. The knower
and the known are one. How we know determines what we know. The act of
knowing transforms both the knower and the known. That is why we must know
with sensitivity and compassion.
What does it mean to be an organism instead of a machine? To be an
organism is to be possessed of the irrepressible tendency towards being
whole, towards being part of a larger whole. I have outlined a tentative
theory of the organism in the second edition of my book, The Rainbow
and The Worm, The Physics of Organisms, published in 1998.
To get a feeling for the organism, imagine an immense super-orchestra,
with instruments spanning the widest spectrum of dimensions from molecular
piccolos of 10-9 meter up to a bassoon or a bass
viol of a meter or more, performing over a musical range of seventy-two
octaves. Incredible as it may seem, this super-orchestra never ceases to
play out our individual songcycles, with a certain recurring rhythm and
beat, but in endless variations that never repeat exactly. There is always
something new, something made up as it goes along. It can change key,
change tempo, change tune perfectly, as it feels like, or as the situation
demands, spontaneously and without hesitation. What this super-orchestra
plays is the most exquisite jazz, jazz being to classical music
what quantum is to classical physics. One might call it quantum jazz.
There is a certain structure, but the real art is in the endless
improvisations, where each and every player, however small, enjoys
maximum freedom of expression, while maintaining perfectly in step and in
tune with the whole. There is no leader or conductor, and the music
emerges as it is played.
What I have given is an accurate description of the totality of
molecular, cellular and physiological reality of the ideal, healthy
organism, which serves to illustrate the paradoxical nature of the organic
whole. It is thick with activity over all scales, with maximum local
freedom and global cohesion. This is inconceivable within the
mechanistic paradigm, but is precisely captured by the concept of quantum
coherence. In the organic whole, global and local, part and whole, are
mutually implicated and mutually entangled. Intercommunication is the key.
Each is as much in control as it is sensitive and responsive.
The coherence of organisms is quintessentially pluralistic and inclusive
at every level. It takes tens of thousands of different macromolecules to
make a cell and many kinds of cells to make different tissues and organs
in the body. For the same reasons, we need a profusion of species in a
thriving ecosystem, and a kaleidoscopic diversity of cultures to fulfill
the creative human potential.
When we extend the mutual entanglement of part and whole in the organism
to societies, ecosystems and ultimately to all of nature, we begin to
recover the profoundly holistic ecological traditions of indigenous
cultures worldwide. We begin to realize how each of us is an embodiment of
all that exists and how it is that we cannot do harm to any other without
harming ourselves. Therein lies the basis of our will-to-good, why it is
that we feel impelled to celebrate and nurture individual diversity and
freedom with universal love.
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