A new technology, recombinant DNA, has been created by biologists since 1972. It has the potential to allow them to create new plants and animals, and to genetically alter the human species. The discovery of this powerful biological tool launches us, willingly or unwillingly, into a new age with its own terrors and responsibilities. In just the way that the atomic physicists of the 1940s propelled us into the Nuclear Age, biologists now are ushering us into what has been called the Organic Age.
How does one begin to evaluate a technology which will alter the nature of life itself? Who shall have the authority to develop and produce these altered ‘organisms? Should scientists be allowed to proceed with “pure research,” regardless of its ominous foreseeable applications? Should the American laissez-faire attitude toward business dictate that industry patent and market new life forms unhampered? Should decisions about the research be made solely by scientists and industry, following the dictates of what can be done, and without the insights of the church regarding what should be done?
One can foresee government monitoring and control of corporations and universities doing the new research because of the awesome dangers inherent in the technique. Civil liberties might at some point be secondary to the control of a tool so easily used as a weapon. The church may find itself the caretaker of laboratory mistakes, cast off “cyborgs”--a new addition to the wretched of the earth.
DNA is the spiral molecules of genetic material determining the hereditary characteristics of an organism. Recombinant DNA is a special form of DNA which can be cut and spliced onto another organism’s genetic “message.” In this way, a mosaic of fragments of DNA from different kinds of cells can be made and multiplied, combining the properties of sea urchins with those of yeasts, of rabbits with fruit flies. An enzyme has been discovered which acts as a fine chemical scalpel to cut and separate out a gene, leaving the gene with “sticky ends” which will attach to a different carrier gene. This new, hybrid gene is then inserted into the DNA of a living bacterial cell, which adopts the genetic code as its own. Bacteria reproduce themselves so fast that inserting a new linked gene into a bacteria “factory” gives one a few billion xerox copies of the gene overnight.
The new technique is heralded as an invaluable study tool by scientists, who until now have been frustrated by the immensely complex task of mapping thousands of genes to their specific functions. Using recombinant DNA, they could separate and identify one out of a jungle of genes, and replicate it many times for study. They could investigate genes suspected to cause cancer, and those for hereditary diseases like hemophilia and diabetes. Scientists could synthesize insulin, pituitary hormone, the clotting factor for hemophiliacs, vitamins, and create vaccines and antibiotics to combat disease. Paul Berg, a Stanford University scientist prominent in recombinant DNA research, believes plants could be induced to manufacture their own nitrogen fertilizer from the air, thus creating major new food crops.
But critics of the research contend that it is highly dangerous in itself, that the risks are inherent in the technique. They fear that experiments using the standard laboratory testing bacterium, Escherichia coli, a bacterium so common that it is found in the intestine of every creature that has one, could lead to accidents in which the bacteria escaped and spread themselves--and the disease being studied--uncontrollably. One could imagine the creation of a new, highly-resistant plant which would destroy all other vegetation and animal life in its path.
Part of the threat of introducing new life forms is that, once created, they cannot be controlled, or recaptured once they escape. Secondly, the nature of the new cells is unknown until they are created--by which time it may be too late. Voices within the scientific community have warned against upsetting the delicate ecological balance, which we understand only dimly, by irreversibly altering the product of billions of years of evolution.
It was the scientists themselves who voluntarily imposed a moratorium on the most dangerous recombinant research, that with tumor viruses and animal toxins. That was in 1974, in an unprecedented self-policing measure. Since then, the National Institute of Health (NIH), under the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s direction, has established guidelines and safety measures for recombinant research, and lifted the moratorium. Scientists internationally are now rushing to use the new technique.
The guidelines, adopted in June 1976, classify four types of the research according to level of danger, and provide for corresponding physical containment measures, from “P1” (standard laboratory precautions) to “P4” facilities (iodine showers and protective clothing for workers, low air pressure, airlocks, and sterilization of all wastes). The P4 facilities should be isolated to decrease the threat of widespread contamination in case of an accident. In addition, biological containment is urged by using weakened “hot house” strains of E. coli, which theoretically could not survive outside the laboratory. (However, Liebe Cavalieri of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research says that even dying E. co can pass along its genetic material through conjugation with a stronger strain.)
Charges of conflict of interest and bitter difference of of opinion rock the scientific world, tainting the claim to pure research for its own sake. The chair man of the subcommittee which the National Institute of Health appointed to draw up the guidelines was David Hogness, a Stanford scientist engaged in “shotgun” recombinant research, a random testing derisively known as genetic roulette. He is known to consider genetic experiments with higher organisms completely harmless. “It’s the first time in history that incendiaries have formed their own fire brigade,” scoffed Erwin Chargaff, retired professor at Columbia University. Jonathan King, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and member of the radical Boston group Science for the People, flatly stated, “NIH protects geneticists, not people. Having Hogness in charge of writing the guidelines is like asking the chairman of General Motors to write the specifications for safety belts.”
The chairman of the National Institute of Health himself, Dr. Donald Frederickson, has been quoted as saying, “It is essential that there be a way the industrial technology of this country can take advantage of this [research]." Besides personal ambition and competition for grant money, the profit motive seems to be a factor even in academia. The University of California at San Fransisco and Stanford University are both seeking patents on their synthesis of an insulin gene in a bacteria factory for widespread commercial application.
The new research’s most outspoken opponents fear the gap between America’s social immaturity and the country’s technological sophistication. Harvard Medical School researcher Jon Beckwith spent 12 years in recombinant work, and got out because he “didn’t want to contribute to a technology harmful to society.” At the March 1977 National Academy of Sciences public forum on recombinant DNA research, Beckwith asked the audience to turn from discussions of lab safety to the more basic question of whether the research should be done at all. Pointing to G.M.’s application for a patent on a microorganism to eat up oil spills rather than working on the causes of the spills, and companies which sponsor research to cure cancer rather than ceasing to pour carcinogens into the air and water, he spoke of the “technical fix” operating in this materialistic, empirically-oriented society. He warned that genetic manipulation was only the first step down the road to genetic engineering and cloning identical “humanoids” from “genetically superior” individuals. Beckwith admonished that a society which dedicated itself to genetic betterment would find natural victims in the poor, the uneducated, and the uncultured.
Sharing his radical perspective at the Washington, D.C. forum was the People’s Business Commission, who turned out with placards, singing, “We shall not be, we shall not be cloned.” The People’s Business Commission was started by Jeremy Rifkin as the People’s Bicentennial Commission in 1971, and now devotes itself to investigating American business corporations’ policies and power. Rifkin distributed copies of his own “alternative agenda” to the forum, asking it to address the moral, political, and theological implications of creating new forms of life, rather than assuming that the research should go on and that the only questions were safety questions. That procedural approach only tended to reinforce the validity of the experiments, he said.
But it seems to be the predominant approach taken by the press. Out of 750,000 articles on the subject received by the People’s Business Commission from newspapers around the country, only three even raised ethical questions as to whether the research ought to be conducted. Such coverage tends to pacify criticism by its adoption of an events-oriented, noncritical stance.
The urgency in the voices of detractors likely derives from the fact that the research is in fact going on, debate or no debate, and speeding up ten times faster than anyone expected. One year ago, scientists were saying that any practical applications of the research were 10 to 20 years away. Now they are saying we will have to wait only three to five years.
The National Institute of Health has its own maximum danger P4 facility, a mobile trailer parked off a side street in Bethesda, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb--hardly as isolated as one would wish such a high-risk research center to be. Critics would like to see it on an outer space station, or, failing that, in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
Which makes NIH’s announcement that it is transforming the old Fort Dietrick, Maryland, biological warfare research site into a three million dollar P4 center even more startling. From 1943 until President Nixon ordered the project to be abandoned in 1972, Fort Dietrick housed the development of weapons using the germs that cause anthrax and plague. Fort Dietrick will be the first national center for recombinant DNA research, to be ready by 1979--it will set a precedent for other such centers to be built in the suburbs.
Six major pharmaceutical companies and another major corporation (see inset) have started or plan experiments using recombinant DNA techniques; nine companies involved in drugs, chemicals, and agricultural products are investigating potential applications for the research. They are: Cetus Corporation, CIBA-Geigy Corporation, Dupont, Dow Chemical, W.R. Grace and Company, Monsanto, Smithkline and French Laboratories, Wyeth Laboratories, and Searle Laboratories. Mr. Rifkin pointed out that six of the nine financial supporters of the National Academy of Sciences forum were pharmaceutical companies involved in the research. Here one has to assume that we have gone out of the area of pure research into the area of practical application.
Aside from scientists’ voluntary compliance with the National Institute of Health, the major funder of recombinant research in this country, there is no regulative agency restraining the experiments. In any case, the NIH guidelines apply only to those seeking grants, not to private corporations doing the same experiments. And the National Institute of Health has no ability to enforce its standards.
A governmental Interagency Committee was set up in the fall of 1976 to review federal policy on research involving the creation of new forms of life. It is headed by the National Institute of Health and reports to HEW, who between them have given the go signal to the construction of the Fort Dietrick P4 facility.
There are bills before Congress which ask for the registration of all research. Politicians, sensitive to powerful industrial lobbying to discuss intricate ethical questions and easy to make unpopular statements. It is easier to reduce the problem to a matter of relative costs, benefits to the community housing a new scientific facility, and the “obligation” to pursue possible benefits to medicine and agriculture. The scientific community tends to speak to the issues it can quantify and analyze, avoiding discussions of quality, treating ethical and moral questions as peripheral.
Junior researchers, subject to the in-house mentality of graduate academic departments, fearful of losing research grants and alienating thesis advisers, and under pressure to produce palpable results for their money, find it expedient to use the speedier DNA technique instead of slower, more traditional methods, and not to get into the controversy.
Therefore, in the words of Dr. Gerald L. Klerman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, “the contract between the biomedical community and the public has broken down and we are trying to repair it.” Congress has dengenerated to a debate between technicians and Luddites charging that the research is evil and should stop. The public is consistently intimidated and defeated by the mysteries of what technology can do, decision making powers bought off by the knowledge that profit making forces will prevail in the end. Members of local citizens’ com missions have been quoted as saying that since they considered the research inevitable, they sought only that it be done as protectedly as possible.
Rifkin’s group has appealed to the religious community to let themselves be heard. Although the People’s Business Commission has in mind more dynamite than salt and light, I too see it as Christians’ responsibility to provide ethical insight and leadership in this conflict. To date, the church’s response to the raging bioethical debate has been confined to the religion departments of universities. Articles articulating a Christian response appear either in academic journals or in Christian magazines reaching an already-convinced audience. Voices pleading that the theological discipline’s insight not be dismissed as primitive by the National Academy of Sciences forum were coolly heard as ill-informed and alarmist. Specialists speaking in terms of moral and ethical imperatives could hardly be heard by specialists who go to such conferences mainly to pick up new tools, operating out of a technological imperative.
It is essential that both sides bring their presuppositions to the surface and articulate them, rather than letting them remain buried either in denunciatory rhetoric or in objectifying scientific labels. Which values are absolute and which are relative? Is the human goal survival, or survival with attention to the means employed to achieve it?
Non-scientists, and those who are not quieted by the reassurances of safety being offered, are startled at the scientific hubris evident, although it is really nothing new. Only now it is being applied to making new forms of life. Rollin D. Hotchkiss, genetic researcher, says, “We are in danger of a piecemeal, unheralded, but ultimately decisive takeover by insanely optimistic geneticists.”
There is no basis for a naive faith in technical progress, yet the United States embraces it wholeheartedly. How can scientists, or government, or business handle the intricate questions surrounding the creation of new life forms any better than they handled those of creating nuclear weapons and their plaguingly present wastes? The techniques of “pure science” were co-opted then, in the bombing of the 1940s, and again in the biological warfare of the Vietnamese and Cambodian wars. Isn’t it naive to assume that food production techniques will not be used for political genetic manipulation, years hence?
We must bear in mind the government’s past performance when we consider trusting the state to adequately regulate the research. The Washington Post recently reported the U.S. Army’s admission that it periodically released microorganisms in Washington’s National Airport and the Greyhound Bus Terminal over the last 20 years, to see what would happen if an enemy attacked this country with biological weapons. The Post also carried the story of Frank Olson, who in 1953, along with a group of fellow scientists, unknowingly swallowed LSD put in his drink by CIA agents testing the effects of the drug. Subsequently Olson went into a severe depression and jumped to his death from a tenth floor New York City hotel room, where he had been taken by the CIA to see a “politically reliable” psychiatrist.
As one graduate student at the National Academy of Sciences forum said, when we advocate a technology for human benefit, we have to remember that our track record isn’t that good. The fact of American society is that technology is always put where it leads to the most profit.
The political and social implications of the long-range uses of this tool force us to take stock of our values and goals now, before the technological imperative, the unwritten law that says, “whatever can be done will be done,” propels us into future shock.
The People’s Business Commission is calling for a four-year moratorium on recombinant DNA research to allow national debate. Once a year during the period, experts on both sides would be given a week-long bloc of prime time on television, analogous to the Roots series, to present their cases. A national citizens’ commission, a country-wide version of the lay Cambridge Review Board which voted on that community’s university research, would investigate the ethical issues and present their findings. Then the American public would vote on the future of the research in a national referendum at the presidential polls of 1978.
The Christian’s view is that real life is not determined by its freedom from disease or hunger, although those goods must be sought. But the essence of human life is love, which is found in union with God and service to other people. The Christian will always be highly sensitive to the means of altering or improving life, and must object if those means imply a casual attitude toward an easily rearranged set of genes and chromosomes--the reduction of life to matter alone. With past political ulterior motives firmly in mind (the gas chambers at Auschwitz started as an experiment in eugenics), and present evidence of very human influences (the allure of a Nobel Prize could sway one’s scruples), Christians should avoid embracing this society’s technological faith by merely regulating recombinant research. The Christian goal is not simply to improve nature. We worship as our absolute a God who, while he is revealed in nature, transcends it. It is this difference in our starting points that leads the Christian to question the “good” scientists would seek, first in genetic manipulation, eventually in eugenics (“good genes”), to improve our lot. Does good mean more passive? More productive? More predictable?
We acknowledge a transcendent dimension in human life as well, “the soul addressed by God.” The doctrine of the resurrection of the body tells us that this transcendent dimension is always expressed in matter--which motivates the Christian to feed and clothe the poor) and also to insist that the means to “progress” respect the intrinsic, subjective worth of each person. Humans must not be reduced to objects of scientific experimentation. Humans are formers and shapers by nature. They consciously choose their own identity and mold themselves. God respects the finality of that self-choice, either to identify with him and mold oneself in his likeness, or to spurn relationship to God and form the world in one’s own likeness. The reality of sin is expressed in this domination, the wield ing of power for self-interest.
We now face the possibility of shaping nature in an unprecedented way. Jonathan King asserts that modifying living organisms is not a freedom of experimentation that should be permitted. King’s statement forces the Christian to ask whether this doctoring falls within the bounds of God’s command to rule the earth. Can we impose our image and aspirations on life itself? Are we wise enough to be our own creators?
Liebe Cavalieri said in New Strains of Life--or Death,
In the development of the atom bomb during the war there seemed to be a compelling rationale for its urgency, even though scientists now bemoan the actions they themselves favored at the time. There is no such compelling reason to rush into recombinant DNA research. I believe we should do everything possible to halt its current frenzied pace.
Perhaps, as one person has remarked, when we lack sufficient wisdom to do, wisdom consists in not doing.
Nancy L. McCann was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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