Reprinted from “New Scientist”, Volume 21, Pages 212-215

 

IHHROUGH its association with medi-
cine, agriculture and conserva-
tion, biological science has been con-
cerned in the most constructive of
material advances in the human con-
dition. The sudden successes of
biology, brought about through system-
atic confluence with the physical
sciences, now demand an understand-
ing of the nature and destiny of man
that must be the principal intellectual
task of the brave new world.

This assessment takes for granted
the filling in of immense detail on the
framework of molecular biology. The
magnitude of present efforts, and their
constant acceleration, make this the
only sensible direction. The applica-
tion of these findings, expecially to
man himself, looms as a larger problem
than quite unpredictable departures in
basic theoretical outlook.

In fact, the main theoretical founda-
tions of biology are simply the concep-
tion of life as a chemical mechanism,
a manifestation of molecular architec-
ture, and the evolutionary elaboration
of this mechanism through random
variation and natural selection. These
skeletal ideas were contributions of a
previous generation — Pasteur and Ber-
nard, Darwin, Mendel and Morgan, the
patriarchal German organic chemists
—and recent biology has contributed
nothing so iconoclastic in basic theory
to match the finesse of its experimental
demonstrations and technical power. If
new theoretical principles are to
emerge — and who can tell? — they
may well arise either from the mathe-
matical study of complex organisation
needed to understand brains, com-
puter programmes, and societies, or
from the generalisation of terrestrial
life, by the observation of planetary
life or intelligent communication with
other living systems or by the contrived
synthesis of new organisms in the
laboratory. Until then, the main dis-
tinction between physics and biology
may continue to be the relative weight
of universal axiom and parochial de-
tail.

Prophecy is a just target for irony,
but planning for the next twenty to
fifty years is a major responsibility of
our political and intellectual leaders.

  

A crisis in evolution
by Professor Joshua Lederberg

Director, Kennedy Laboratories for Molecular Medicine,

Stanford University School of Medicine,

The exigent time scale of the evolu-
tionary crisis still. has not captured
their attention.

For eons, the evolution of this
planet proceeded by random chemistry.
After the spark of life was struck, for
one, perhaps two billion years,
life evolved with ever-increasing com-
plexity, but with few basic changes in
quality. Some hundred thousand
years ago, a species emerged able to
communicate and thus to accumulate
tradition, and generate the explosion of
history. In that brief interval, our
evolution has been principally cultural.
Man, the historical animal, practices
his civilisation with the same biological
instruments as the Neanderthal. Just
in the instant era, our culture is achiev-
ing knowledge and control of its bio-
logical instruments that are capable of
purposefully altering them. At the
same time we are evolving other instru-
ments (informational machinery, or
computers) which share with man the
generation of culture. Should our
planning, even for the next twenty
years, wait till after the event to react
to revolutionary changes in human
nature?

What is new in these remarks? The
success of quantitative methods in
plant and animal breeding soon aroused
a series of eugenic schemes to counter-
act the irrelevance — at best — of
social criteria and reproductive flux.
To varying degrees, these schemes have
evoked worse social evils. Further-
more, our limited knowledge of human
genetics left one certainty: that any
acceptable level of selection could in-
significantly alter the gene pool of any
large community on the time scale of
cultural evolution. The net effect has
been the relegation of many biologists’
thinking on human evolution to an
area of dubious efficacy, and of many
others’ to the view that there was a
comfortably long time during which
not to worry about it; meanwhile we
could all be more happily preoccupied
with the Bomb, with fall-out, with the
population explosion, and with pesti-
cides. And rightly, our colleagues
have not been deeply impressed
with forebodings that molecular
biology would soon give us the capa-

California

bility of directly altering or producing
the human gene string.

However, the debate should not be
allowed to peter out. It should be our
responsibility to assess the future with
at least the more plausible predictions
of biological capability. This is a
tricky and strenuous enterprise, and
deserves both more imagination and
more critical judgment than has been
spent on it so far. In doing so, we
should not let customary scientific con-
servatism blind us from noting how
new advances themselves accelerate the
pace of technical advance, and how far
the orientation of all the Earth’s sub-
cultures, especially in mutual conflict,
towards technical power, accelerates
the practical application of scientific
findings. The last point should also
answer any wistful hopes that science
itself might be muted.

The riskiest elements of this essay
are specific predictions of the technical
problems that are about to be solved
to the augmentation of man’s powers
and his dilemmas. May I enter some
suggestions only to illustrate the genus
of possibilities; they centre on the
modification of development, influenc-
ing the character of single organisms,
in contrast to the populational impact
of eugenic measures. Hence, we may
call them “euphenic.” The reader
should use his own judgment as to the
probable implementation of euphenics
in the actual world, and its significance
for individual man and his culture.

(1) The successful transplantation
of vital organs: heart, liver, limbs.
The technical barriers will be over-
come long before we can reach a
moral concensus on the organisation
of the market for allocation of pre-
cious parts.

(2) Artificial prosthetic organs. Un-
fortunately not yet being developed
with the necessary vigour to over-
take the preceding.

(3) In consequence of these, and
probably other advances in, say, pro-
tein biochemistry, a sudden increase
in the expectation, or prolongability
of life. With a wider range of tech-
nical resources will come a corres-
ponding expansion of the scale of
the useful cost of maintaining a given
personality. Whatever our humani-
tarian predilections, discrepancies in
the availability of these resources
must widen.

(4) More optimistically, the modi-
fication of the developing human
brain through treatment of the foetus
or infant. At least some modifica-
tions (like those used primitively now
in the control of metabolic disease)
can be expected to be constructively
applied to “normal” children, and
might well exceed the present bounds
of genetic and developmental varia-
tion.

(5) “Clonal” reproduction, through
nuclear transplantation. The proto-
type for this suggestion is the trans-
plantation of a nucleus from an adult
tissue cell back into an amphibian
egg from which the natural nucleus
has been removed, with (sometimes)
normal development of this egg. It
should be recalled that vegetative
reproduction, occasionally concealed
under outward trappings of
sexuality, is an important feature of
the plant world, and a few primitive
animals. The experiment has yet to
be attempted in a mammal. Apart
from its place in the narcissistic per-
petuation of a given genotype, the
technique would have an enormous

 

impact on predetermination of sex;
on the avoidance of hereditary
abnormalities, as well as positive
eugenics; on cultural acceleration
through education within a clone; and
on more far-reaching experiments on
the reconstitution of the human
genotype.

Perhaps enough has been said,
though this is far from the end of the
list. I will be accused of demonic
advocacy (and have been) for discussing
such maiters and not pretending that
they are indefinitely far off. But they

are inseparable from the advance of
medicine, expecially as we turn our
attention to such urgent challenges as
mental retardation, the degeneration of
ageing, and mental illness.

The scientific community has little
special qualification to impose institu-
tional remedies or moral criteria for
the problerns of human opportunity. It
has the responsibility to teach these
problems especially in the university,
and to look for imbalances in our tech-
nical capability. For example, the
grievous social stresses that organ
transplantation will engender would be
mitigated by the parallel development
of artificial organs, or the availability
of animal sources. If clonal reproduc-
tion becomes possible, or more simply,
if present suggestions on the hormonal
induction of twinnings are verified,
we will wish we knew much more about
the biology and psychology of twins.

Meanwhile, a deeper understanding
of our present knowledge of human
biology must be part of the insight of
literary, political, social, economic and
moral teaching; it is far too important
to be left only to the biologists. In
this spirit I can think of no better
dedication than to the memory of the
prophetic vision and artistic clarity of
Aldous Huxley.