The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
November 21 1988
The mighty Du Pont corporation, purveyors of chemicals to the world, last week formally announced the launch of their newest product. It is a mouse. But not the sort of mouse that sells for a dollar or two in pet shops. This is the world’s first one hundred dollar mouse.
Du Pont’s mouse has a special value becaue it is dying in an interesting way: the company’s researchers have succeeded in engineering its genes so that its body naturally develops its own cancers. So it is not really a mouse any more. It is Du Pont’s version of a mouse, permanently remodelled to meet a demand from students of cancer. The company plans to sell hundreds of thousands of them.
Du Pont’s mouse has already caused a bit of a stir in the Spring when the company took out a patent on it. This caused some comment on the rights and wrongs of patenting something that could actually turn round and look you in the eye. The act of creation, it was said, was being handed over to the private sector. But last week’s announcement that the mouse was hitting the market threw a bright new spotlight on the whole area of bio-technology, revealing some tricky questions and also some very strange goings-on.
A lot of the questions concern the politics of science. Who is supposed to control scientists? Should it be companies like Du Pont, buying up research time and effectively shaping science to fit their commercial interests? Or should it be Congress, laying out ethical limits? Or should scientists be left alone in their labs with no more public scrutiny than Dr Frankenstein endured? Past experience with nuclear energy, pesticides, tranquilisers and even leeches and bleeding are called into evidence.
Other questions are philosophical: whether it is simply wrong to usurp God and Darwin; whether societies can ever reach a point where they should turn their backs on knowledge; whether animals should be limitlessly subservient to human demands; whether it might be desirable to programme pregnant women to secure healthier and more effective progeny. The questions become more complicated as the debate uncovers more examples of the new technology.
There is, for example, the work of Dr Robert White, a neurosurgeon in Cleveland, who has pulled off a trick that comes straight out of a Roald Dahl story: he severed the head from a Rhesus monkey and hooked it up to a tangle of tubes which eventually connected it to the headless torso of a second monkey. The monkey (or `monkeys’, depending on your point of view) stayed alive for 36 hours, eyes blinking in the lonely head and following Dr White’s movements, even attempting – perhaps understandably – to bite off his finger when he presented the opportunity
This is only the first stage of Dr White’s work. He predicts that in the next century doctors will transplant human heads as they now transplant hearts. This raises all kinds of questions of personal identity. Would the head still own its property? If so, would it also own the torso’s property? If so, would the head also take on the torso’s marriage partner? Or its debts? And just what kind of psychological effects would that kind of experience produce? And what about socially? Would you want to have dinner with one?
An attorney from St Louis, Chet Fleming, has become so alarmed at the failure to explore and answer these questions that he has slipped in and patented the as yet unbuilt machinery which is necessary to keep a severed head alive. His sole purpose in doing this, he says, is to try and slow down the research to give public debate a chance to catch up with scientific advance. Meanwhile, however, the scientists have already been busy.
In California, a 43-year-old soft drinks salesman, John Moore, has just won a landmark law suit against doctors who were treating him for cancer of the spleen and spotted the fact that his blood was uniquely resistant to leukaemia. Without a word to him, they engineered a cell line from his blood and sold it to a Boston bio-technology firm for a reported $3 million. Mr Moore found out and demanded a cut of the profits. The doctors resisted, claiming it was their work and not his blood which was important. The courts have now come down on his side.
Also in California, one of America’s leading bio-technology companies, Advanced Genetic Sciences, has been caught out breaking the rules in their efforts to develop an artificial bacteria which can be sprayed on crops to prevent frost forming and causing damage. Even as they assured their neighbours that all their experiments were being conducted behind closed and sealed doors, one of their scientists blew the whistle and revealed that they had been spraying their mutant bacteria all over trees that grew in their grounds. The company has been fined $13,000 by the Environmental Protection Agency.
In Maryland, they have produced monster carps by pumping their eggs full of trout genes. On the West Coast, they have created “geeps” – goats full of sheep genes. In Texas, they have started cloning bulls by sharing cells from a single embryo among different cows, a process which can be endlessly repeated until they have whole herds of identical animals. A Massachusetts researcher has produced square sweet corn which will not roll off the plate. In Washington, they are poised for the first time to treat human patients by transplanting foreign genes into their cells. In military laboratories, they have reproduced the most deadly bacteria and poisons, creating so-called `designer plagues’ for their enemies.
A New Jersey company, American Cyanamid, has been conducting a particularly interesting series of field trials with dairy cows. The company has manufactured bacteria containing a gene which stimulates the production of milk. Farmers who have been injecting the bacteria into their cattle report that milk yield rapidly rises by at least 20% with some cows producing as many as 12 gallons of milk a day.
At first sight, the product seems to be agriculturual gold dust. On closer examination, however, farmers are starting to oppose it because they already have vast surpluses of milk which have to be bought up by the Government, because they fear the new product would make milk so cheap that many small farmers would be unable to stay in business, and because cows using the bacteria have to burn up so much energy to produce the extra flow of milk that they are soon reduced to wasted skeletons. In the meantime, the milk is already being sold on the basis of assurances that it contains such tiny quantities of the bacteria that consumers could not possibly be harmed.
Fears and opposition are growing. The Humane Society of America, which campaigns for animal rights, is trying to persuade Conress to ban the issuing of patents for animals. A vocal Washington pressure group, the Foundation on Economic Trends, has made a speciality out of trying to curb the spread of bio-technology.
In reply, the scientists are beginning to sound desperate. They argue that bio-technology is inherently safer and more reliable than older technologies. They say, for example, that whereas pesiticides have contaminated the water in no less than 40 states, the kind of bacteria which they are engineering can protect crops from pests and frost without any such side effect. They say they fear that uninformed anixety will stifle the growth of a potential Golden Age.
The nearest thing there has been to a concerted effort to understand and regulate the new technology is a study by Congress which was released in May. It supported the scientists and said that work should continue. However, it acknowledged that it had addressed only a few of the issues and couched its conclusion in such cautious terms that it fell far short of a clear endorsement.
In the meantime, some 25 new animals, each with its own man-made genetic structure, have been submitted to the Patent and Trademark Office for registration and Du Pont’s mice are on their way to market.
