Microcosm_ E. Coli and the New Science of Life - Carl Zimmer [94]
Many critics were appalled that scientists would presume to judge how to handle the risks of genetic engineering on their own. “It was never the intention of those who might be called the Molecular Biology Establishment to take this issue to the general public to decide,” James Watson wrote frankly in 1981. The critics argued that the public had a right to decide how to manage the risk of genetic engineering because the public would have to cope with any harm that might come of it. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts complained that “scientists alone decided to impose a moratorium, and scientists alone decided to lift it.”
Some critics also questioned whether scientists could be objective about genetic engineering. It was in their interest to keep regulations as lax as possible because they would be able to get more research done in less time. “The lure of the Nobel Prize is a strong force motivating scientists in the field,” Cavalieri warned. Along with scientific glory came the prospect of riches. Corporations and investors were beginning to court molecular biologists, hoping to find commercial applications for genetic engineering. Financial interests might lead some to oversell the promise of genetic engineering and downplay its risks. Cetus Corporation, a company that recruited molecular biologists to serve on its board, made this astonishing prediction: “By the year 2000 virtually all the major human diseases will regularly succumb to treatment by disease-specific artificial proteins produced by specialized hybrid micro-organisms.”
Instead of a miracle, critics saw in genetic engineering the illusion of a quick fix. In 1977, the National Academy of Sciences held a public forum on the risks and benefits of the new technology. Picketers tried to shut down the meeting, calling genetic engineers Nazis. Amid the chaos, Irving Johnson, the vice president of research at Eli Lilly, talked about how genetic engineering could be used to treat diabetes. Eli Lilly, the country’s biggest provider of insulin, got the hormone from the pancreases of pigs. That supply was vulnerable, Johnson said, to a slump in the pork business or to an increase in the population of diabetics. Genetically engineering a microbe to make human insulin might provide a vast, cheap supply. “This is truly ‘science for the people,’” Johnson said.
Ruth Hubbard, a Harvard biologist and a leading critic of genetic engineering, testified against this sunny view. She pointed out that insulin does not prevent diabetes or even cure it. It merely counteracts some of the symptoms of the disease. “Before we jump at technological gimmicks to cure complicated diseases,” she warned, “we first have to know what causes the diseases, we have to know how the therapy that we are being told is needed works, we have to know what fraction of people really need it…. But what we don’t need right now is a new, potentially hazardous technology for producing insulin that will profit only the people who are producing it.”
While genetic engineering was distracting society from real solutions, critics warned, it could also put the world at risk. What made it particularly risky was its utter dependence on E. coli. “From the point of public health,” Cavalieri declared, “this bacterium is the worst of all possible choices. It is a normal inhabitant of the human digestive tract and can easily enter the body through the mouth or nose. Once there, it can multiply and remain permanently. Thus every laboratory working with E. coli recombinants is staffed by potential carriers who could spread a dangerous recombinant to the rest of the world.”
Even if scientists used a weakened strain of E. coli for genetic engineering, the microbes might survive long enough outside a lab to pass their engineered genes to more rugged strains. Critics warned of cancer epidemics caused by E. coli casually poured down a drain. E. coli might churn out insulin inside diabetics, sending them into comas. Genetically engineered