I finished reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book from 2016, “The Gene: An Intimate History”, a dense, engaging book, written in a prose style, conversational, thorough, accessible and personal, exceedingly rare qualities to find in a book covering such technical topic. Mukherjee, trained and worked as an oncologist, won the Pulitzer Prize for his earlier book on cancer, “The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”. He is currently an associate professor of medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University. Understood to be the ‘best’, or most complete and thorough history of genetics, our understanding of it and the ethical questions of its increasingly influential applications in medicine, society and evolution. Of such broad scope in the changing landscape of medicine and its science, it has expectedly, become subject to an array of criticisms. The practice of science is not perfect. Our understanding is forever evolving and as much as promoters might insist that theirs is solid and fixed, our knowledge will always be imperfect. We circle around a topic, defining it closer and closer, but never quite understanding it fully, questions leading us to more questions, our knowledge shaped by what we already ‘know’, and very occasionally propose entirely new ways of explaining, new theories, that dislodge previous established theory.
I am not a doctor of anything, not an expert dedicated to his science. I’m a horticulturist, a practitioner of the art and science of growing plants, fascinated by life, willing to dive into almost any topic to better my understanding and thereby my practice. I read books and papers on evolution, ecology, botany, cell biology, microbiology, biochemistry, on hormones and enzymes, the regulation, signaling and switching of metabolic processes, sensing and responding to the particularities of one’s environment, quantum effects within the organism, its thermodynamics, embryogenesis and death. At a rudimentary level, I understand the processes involved. When Mukherjee discusses the genetics and their function in our growth and development I understand when he says that our DNA is not a set of plans which if followed produces our unique selves, but is rather, a ‘recipe’, of a complex process, linked at every stage, non-linearly, every action effecting every other, not a pattern of first this and then that, but more of a quantum type process of both/and, of simultaneity, everything happening when and as it should.
Mukherjee cautions the reader regularly, warning us of our tendency toward hubris. As ‘simple’ as the four letter genetic code appears, its ‘application’ within the living cell and organism is anything but. In complex systems of any type as that complexity increases it becomes vastly more difficult to predict outcomes. In manipulating the genome of any organism, ourselves perhaps most of all, we cannot begin to really understand the outcome. Manipulating one particular gene, because of the complex unfolding relationships of growth and development it is virtually impossible to understand how ‘far’ the waves created by our ‘interference’ will extend across the ‘pond’ and how those will effect others in the continuing processes of an individual’s life and the ramifications that could have across the species and living communities over time.
Purposeful interference, however well intended, and history repeatedly demonstrates that our ‘interference’ is very often far from well intended, is outside the realm of random mutation and natural selection. Nature does not pick and choose in this way. The health, the viability of any given species is a product of the evolutionary processes that brought us to today. Good, healthy, normal are not fixed qualities. They are human abstractions. Creations of statistics. These qualities are dependent on what we ‘value’, on what we measure and how, pursued to the exclusion of other qualities, might just as well result in catastrophe. Mukherjee writes of this, about how all living things do so across a range, a spectrum, if you will, outside of which they die. There is no singular set of positive or good genes. Traits and characteristics are expressions of particular genes, or combinations of genes, in combination with environmental conditions. coming together in the individual, and its unfolding process.. We cannot simply excise all of the ‘bad’ genes and replace them with ‘good’ genes. In many cases those ‘bad’ genes were once healthy and have degraded over time having earlier performed essential functions, now switched off and unavailable or left on enabling unregulated growth. Genetic tinkering is not the same as tinkering with built, machines.
In physics they often speak of the ‘3 body problem’. In classical or Newtonian physics, when one object strikes another, there is a predictable reaction and it can be predicted with great accuracy. Add a third ‘body’ and the outcome quickly becomes unknowable. Probabilities become so slight as to be meaningless. With 20,000 genes it is impossible. Over time, with the mixing of genes through sexual reproduction and it becomes impossible squared. Mukherjee places.a giant warning sign where the ‘road’ to the manipulation of the genome begins because once begun, altering the genetics of our germ cells, those egg and sperm cells which lead to new individuals, now carry those coded changes, become a part of us, are passed on to our children potentially moving risk move from theoretically acceptable to a species ending in a flash. This ‘doubt’ is exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of a chromosome separates its encoded genes with comparatively vast stretches of material that specify neither amino acids, their proteins, nor the regulators which control the expression of protein coding genes. What functions these seemingly nonfunctional regions dividing genes from one another may perform, are unknown. Can we safely assume that only the coded stretches of DNA we can identify are the only one’s necessary, that everything else, and that ‘else’ is vastly more extensive than those protein coding genes we ‘know’, can be ignored? Once again our tendency to hubris, should serve as a huge warning sign.
Genes, what they are and what they do, is not the whole story here. Mukherjee also emphasizes the role of environment. Growth, development and life are not solely a product of our DNA. Environment defines the conditions in which the relationships and processes defined and regulated by DNA unfold. Environment, in this case, should be understood in its broadest sense. Everything ‘shapes’ us. If our DNA can be viewed as a recipe it is everything in the ‘kitchen’ which will effect what is made. The quality and quantity of ingredients, the precise amounts and proportions, the timing of when they are introduced, what is done and when, for how long and when these ‘steps’ are ‘done’. It doesn’t end there. When finished’, how is it cared for, how is it used. An individual is not fixed. We are dynamic, existing only in the moment, in a state of constant renewal and decline. What we, what any living organism is at any moment, changes. Changing our genetics changes the ‘recipe’, the maintenance manual, the warranty and expected life. Our tendency to view life in a mechanistic way, causes us to simplify our outlook and thus gives us a false confidence, dangerous for the individual, the species and the larger, interlocking relationships that constitute life on this planet.
Read this book. Watch the Ken Burns series Burns produced from this. Science is not a simple act of faith, it is an examination of the unknown that shapes our understanding of the world and, when applied through technology, shapes the world.
GardenRiots 