Beware of politicians who announce that "we are learning the language in which God created life". Treat a claim that life expectancy has just gone up by 25 years with the same scepticism as you would treat any other unverifiable assertion about, say, rising government spending, better education or faster economic growth. Regard newspaper headlines about "history's biggest triumph" as . . . well, just newspaper headlines. Politicians, journalists and many captains of industry understand almost nothing about science; most couldn't reliably distinguish Mendel from Mengele or DNA from C&A. Scientists, who depend on large-scale funding from big corporations and big government, ruthlessly exploit this ignorance. Hence, the completion of the "first draft" of the human genome is compared with the works of Shakespeare, the pictures of Rembrandt, the landing on the moon, the invention of the wheel; we are told that the industrial revolution now looks like "a minor blip" while Tony Blair says that the gene revolution will "far surpass" the discovery of antibiotics. The Sunday Times, with its sure instinct for a story falsifiable only in the remote future, announces that we shall live to be 1,200 years old. With a press like that, scientists should have no difficulty in at least quadrupling the £2bn or so already spent on the genome project.
Yes, this is a remarkable achievement. But to know the sequence of the human genome is not the same as understanding it or finding the cure for cancer. Men can map the moon in some detail, but they cannot live there; Mr Blair could be given the exact materials used by Rembrandt, but he could not then paint a Rembrandt, even with the help of Alastair Campbell. The idea that there are genes "for" particular diseases, and all we have to do is to turn them "off", is naive. Worse still is the belief - because it has such dangerous social implications - that there are genes for homosexuality, criminality, intelligence, heroin addiction and so on. It takes whole groups of interacting genes to produce particular effects; the same genes, under different environmental conditions, will act differently and produce different effects. The widely publicised breast cancer genes account for less than 10 per cent of all cases of breast cancer, and those who carry one of the dreaded genes actually have less than a 50 per cent chance of contracting the disease.
The human genome project creates two great dangers. First, genetic diagnosis will run ahead of therapy. We can expect a plethora of genetic tests for various diseases to emerge in the next few years; but drugs and treatment (no genetic therapy has yet been successful) could be decades down the line. The easier identification of genetic predispositions could lead to new forms of discrimination, both from employers and insurance companies. The 10 per cent of American blacks who are born with at least one copy of the sickle-cell gene have suffered such discrimination since the late 1970s, even though only one in 500 develops sickle-cell anaemia. Scientists have understood the exact genetic basis of the condition for more than 30 years, but they still cannot treat it effectively and still don't understand why some children carrying the gene become seriously ill, but not others. The dangers are made greater by what has been dubbed the "genetic land grab": the drive by companies to patent genes. Far from speeding progress towards better treatment, the land grab is likely to slow it, since researchers will have to negotiate multiple licences with different rights-holders. Intellectual property rights granted on two genes implicated in breast cancer have already stifled work on that disease.
The second danger is more subtle. It is that politicians and other opinion-formers, with their weak grasp of science, come to believe that social and economic problems can be wholly cured by new medical treatments. Is there crime, alcoholism, chronic ill-health, low educational achievement? Let us find genes for such things, and all will be well. But the reduction of inequality and poverty and the improvement of the environment will do more to eradicate them than any amount of gene sequencing, just as clean water, adequate sewerage, dry housing and good diet have done more to raise life expectancy than anything done in hospitals. The 21st century will no doubt bring unprecedented scientific advances. So did the 20th. At the end of it, average life expectancy in parts of Africa - to say nothing of the black neighbourhoods in the world's richest country - remained many years lower than in most of the affluent west. Do not let the politicians pass the buck.
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