A time for change

Cancer: is it due to spontaneous genetic mutations or to karyotype and tissue disorganization? Inborn genetic factors or external environmental factors?

AIDS: a new disease resulting from HIV infection, or a collection of old diseases caused by drugs and malnutrition?

Heart disease: is it really caused by high cholesterol, or could it be a consequence of the replacement of traditional foods by processed foods?

Mad cow & Creutzfeld-Jacob disease: due to hyper-infectious prions or metallotoxins?


In each of these examples, the minority dissenters from the scientific mainstream make a very convincing case, but the scientific mainstream is an extremely powerful force, backed by industrial profits, political will, scientific reputations, as well as the hopes and expectations of the general public.

I see two main problems here. One is the failure of genetic reductionism as an approach to human biology. We need to return to studying multiple levels of organization, from the genes of a single cell, to tissues, to organ systems, to individuals, to societies, to our external environment. The other problem is how quickly and extensively non-scientific factors come to entangle issues that should be decided for their own merit based on careful experimentation and observation.

We are conceivably spending trillions of dollars, representing the majority of our healthcare spending and research investment over years or decades, on chasing elusive genetic causes for what are clearly environmental diseases. How many more decades of 'war on cancer' genetic research will we fund while the incidence of, and mortality from, cancer continues to skyrocket? How many more millions of impoverished people will die of AIDS before we decide to spend the money on basic nutrition and sanitation instead of on toxic patented antiviral drugs?

The community of physicists was forced to face the greater social implications of their work once nuclear war became a reality. Perhaps it is time for the community of molecular biologists to face the current social reality, to admit that our work has also been corrupted by corporate and political factors, and actively promote the chanelling of our collective energy towards more productive humanitarian aims.

21st century alchemy

A colleague asked me the other day what I thought was the raison d'etre of molecular biology. Though it had never occurred to me before, one possible answer was immediately clear: immortality.

The acknowledged goals of molecular biology are to cure disease, to live healthy into our old age, giving all members of our society an equal chance at a productive life, no matter what their genetic makeup; to engineer our food sources to provide what we naively think we need to improve our health. But what are the unspoken, and perhaps even unconscious driving forces? Is all this technology really an altruistic act on the part of we scientists to help those less fortunate?

Our scientific ancestors were the alchemists, whose ostensible pursuit was the transformation of materials, the quest for gold. But buried between the lines of alchemical texts, one finds the true underlying motivation: the transformation of the soul, the quest for eternal life.

Technology now in the hands of modern scientists is vastly more complex than that of our alchemical forefathers, but have our human desires really evolved in parallel with our means of investigation? Is this hugely complex undertaking we call molecular biology, now racing towards the generation of a human clone, simply the age-old pursuit of eternal life in a 21st century disguise?