Further Thoughts on the Biological Revolution

Donald Fleming’s article impresses me as a valid statement of the views of a strident biological minority, which would, if it could, impose a social and evolutionary disaster on man. The article ignores the early and needed applications of genetic engineering in (a) the alteration of micro-organisms as biological controls of pests and as more effective biochemical transformers— for example, of sewage into edible proteins; and (b) the modification of plants for desired properties.
Professor Fleming exaggerates the extent of today’s genetic knowledge, especially with reference to metazoan species. Certainly, many genetic components are common throughout life, but it is equally clear that the aggregate quantity and organization of genetic information is vastly different in bacteria and man. This applies especially to the still obscure process of cellular differentiation (for example, why one cell becomes part of an eye rather than part of an intestine), and to polygenic traits (such as stature or components of intelligence), which are governed by the interactions of many gene loci.
More important, Fleming confuses the possibility of controlling specific traits with the maintenance of entire “desirable” types. The independent assortment of genes in sexual reproduction constantly introduces changes. The perfect replication of Superman is not possible; however, a “clone” of Superwomen might, in theory, be maintained through the asexual activation of eggs.
In general, Fleming’s sources appear innocent of population genetics or modern evolutionary theory, as developed by Mayr, Dobzhansky, Hirsh, and others. In evolutionary perspective, man has been successful over a half-million years and through enormous change because of his variability and constant hybridization. Variability also has reduced conflict and promoted cooperation within the species—a fact well known for the basic variants: male and female. Characteristically, many of man’s traits are at once “good” and “bad”; such worldwide diseases as juvenile diabetes and schizophrenia probably have highly desirable complements linked with energy mobilization and abstracting capacity. Moreover, man, as an old, successful species, carries a heavy burden of deleterious recessive genes which would be maintained by the close inbreeding needed to maintain specific traits. (Old frozen sperm, by the way, produces an increasing proportion of defective offspring.) All this means that genetic tinkering could produce many culls —how are they to be handled?
In any case, the introduction of tailormade man on any significant scale could only be done by the elimination of virtually all of today’s social institutions and values. The development of the latter is, however, far more likely to achieve viable solutions to man’s problems of survival and emotional satisfaction. Thus my prospective view for the year 2000 A.D. is not a Biological Dictatorship, but either a cultural collapse in the wake of nuclear war or a tamed biology ruled by more sophisticated Social Man.
DEMITRI B. SHIMKIN
Professor of Anthropology
and Geography
University of Illinois
Urbana, Illinois

My own specialty is gerontology, and I am surprised Professor Fleming places as much stress as he does on organ transplant and says so little about the biochemical control of the aging process. I think that such control is implicit in modern molecular biology if understood and considered desirable.
Fleming’s paper fails to make what I consider an important distinction. Extension of life-span past the age of frequent conception has a limited effect on the total population. While the extension of mature life-span is occurring, the proportion and number of older individuals do increase. However, the population is mainly determined by the rate of breeding and infant mortality. The population of the world is more dependent on the number of surviving great-grandchildren we produce than the length of our own lives. The world could well afford to have people live longer, as long as they were productive and provided that they did not contribute extra offspring.
Growing larger cerebral cortexes is not as sensational as suggested by Professor Fleming. We have discussed the matter a number of times in our own laboratory, and I am sure that somewhere experiments are under way. The questions are technical—what agents should be used, would they cross the placenta, how would they affect uterine blood flow, and what other effects would there be on the developing embryo?
I believe Professor Fleming misses one point, and that is that before genetic tampering becomes commonplace, there is going to be a period where people will have a good deal of latitude in determining the causes of their death and the risk they will run with particular diseases. Many situations will arise where a course of action might result in less probability of cardiovascular disease and more probability of cancer. The person who receives a transplant runs more risk from infectious disease. I am sure that there will be a risk concerned with gene manipulation of the type that is being discussed in this article. Efforts to introduce more perfect genetic information will always run a risk of damaging other genetic information. The patient, instead of making no decisions, may lace the problem of making a good many more. I don’t really believe that the biological revolution is a threat to the individual. I would hope that he could aspire to a more creative, better life and that he would have more time for his education, a successful career, and the enjoyable use of his leisure time.
F. MAROTT SINEX Chairman, Department of Biochemistry
Boston University School of Medicine
Boston, Massachusetts

Most of the promises of the New Biology enumerated by Professor Fleming will doubtless be fulfilled sooner or later. But these promises are really of two quite different categories. Some will alleviate human suffering without endeavoring to change the basic nature of human beings; others purport to create new kinds of beings by altering their genetic composition.
The biologists, unfortunately, are generally so preoccupied with the geneticalh determined instinctive characteristics of man as an animal that they tend to ignore the role of cultural activities in human affairs. Culture, not inheritance, sets the values of different societies. Generally speaking, changes within the societies of Homo sapiens will be accomplished with varying degrees of difficulty, and social science analysis can predict the acceptability of such changes within limits. Genetic alteration of Homo sapiens into another species, however, involves problems of qualitative transformations, which leads into the unknown.
The late Hermann Muller, Nobel laureate in genetics, whom Professor Fleming cites with approval, proposed a sperm bank to select people who are genetically more healthy. intelligent, and cooperative. Professor Fleming seems to believe that someday gene manipulation can remove the “aggressive instincts of the human animal" and increase “his lamentably low average intelligence for coping with increasingly complicated problems.”Others have discussed man’s instinct for territoriality and his aggressiveness in defense of his habitat, and some primatologists attempt to trace the roots of human society to vague instincts shared with primate ancestors and the whole animal kingdom.
The most elementary knowledge of the history of culture and of its varieties should make it clear to anyone that man is cooperative or aggressive, territorial or nonterritorial, warring or peaceful according to cultural circumstances, and that only the emotional components of these varieties of behavior arise from the basic qualities of all human beings. At present, therefore, it is more realistic to think of how culture can be changed than how man may be altered to respond instinctively to a culture not yet envisaged. The most alarming ethical aspect of the proposed use of the New Biology is that the nature of the genetic transformations shall be stipulated by those of superior intelligence, and that the remainder of the population shall conform to the needs of society, childbearing being licensed. Not only is it unlikely that specific temperaments and forms of behavior that are socially desirable have any genetic basis, but intelligence alone by no means assures an answer to social problems. One has only to think of the intellectual eminence of the Nobel laureates in their own fields as compared with their basic misunderstanding of the implications of the proposals discussed here. No one will object to intelligence per se, but it is by no means a simple Mendelian factor. Moreover, it becomes effective only when trained and applied to specific problems by means of an appropriate methodology. Such efforts have scarcely begun.
To entrust the remodeling of the basic nature of Homo sapiens into a new species, with more clearly conceived characteristics than docility in the hands of their masters, will rightly be opposed. If use of drugs and chemicals, surgery, electrodes in the brain, brainwashing, and other techniques are added, I can only picture a new race of zombies, and it occurs to me that mechanical robots would be cheaper and better behaved.
AL a moment in history when nonwhite races are striving for self-identification and dignity, it is deeply disturbing that the old eugenics should be offered with pseudoscientific claims. Not all the New biologists have any such goals, and one must hope that they would refuse to be part of the intellectual caste of dictators. One thing is clear about our present society: the required freedom of research which makes the New Biology possible will also make individuals rebel against such a new society.
JULIAN H. STEWARD
Professor of Anthropology
University of Illinois
Urbana, Illinois

The claim that molecular and organismic biology no longer “constitute a community” is sheer rubbish. And rubbish it would remain even it some Nobel Prize winner endorsed it. The great discoveries which enriched biology in recent years have given biology, the science of life, an unmistakable coherence, not a schizophrenia. Life has two aspects, equally significant and equally fascinating—its unity and its diversity. It is purblindness or puerility to ignore either.
Yes indeed, we may be entering a century of biology. Yes indeed, it would be a bold man who would deny that the possibilities outlined in Mr. Fleming’s article may someday be realized. It takes an even bolder, or perhaps a thoughtless, man to be sure that they will be realized by the year 2000. And when and if they will, biologists had better keep in mind that the application of these and other possible discoveries to man will raise a host of tough problems, which will be sociological, ethical, and even political, rather than primarily biological, in nature.
THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY
The Rockefeller University
New York, New York

Professor Fleming’s article is encouraging in that it indicates scientists are becoming concerned with the social consequences of their discoveries. However, it is difficult to see how the technological discoveries he lists can be described as a “revolution.” Indeed, many of them are little more than faint hopes or biological curiosities, and one of them, the preconceptual determination of sex, is no closer to solution now than it has been for the past thirty or forty years. To put these matters into proper perspective, the major unsolved practical problems of today are those of poverty, violence, warfare, overpopulation, and last but not least, a general risingtide of discontent with a bureaucratic and impersonally organized society.
These are social and ecological problems, and their solution is most likely to come from the efforts of scientists in the behavioral sciences and the ecological portion of biological science. Indeed, there are two centers of ferment and discovery in the biological sciences at the present time, located at almost opposite poles of complexity of organization. One of these is molecular biology as described by Professor Fleming, arising from the application of new biochemical techniques to basic biological processes. The other is animal behavior, including the study of animal societies and their ecology. While the nature of the social problems is so complex that they will require the best efforts of all sorts of sciences for their solution, it is from the latter area of biology rather than the former that possible solutions of our major problems are most likely to come.
For example, the population problem is likely to be augmented rather than diminished as constitutional diseases are cured and embryos are provided a better prenatal environment. While the newer methods of contraception are somewhat more convenient than the old, the way in which these techniques may be used to bring about a desirable result provides an extraordinarily complex problem of social control and social engineering. We still have too many narrowly trained scientists who anticipate that all human ills will be removed by one simple technical discovery, and each hopes that that discovery will come from his own discipline. What we need is a new breed of scientists who are aware of the complex and interdependent nature of biological and social processes, and who have the ability and motivation to cooperate with each other in attempting to understand and control these processes.
J. P. SCOTT
Director, Center for Research on Social Behavior
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio

I see no excuse for beefing up brains. The human range of neurons in excess over basic mammalian needs ranges from 7 to 12 billion, almost 2 to 1. We don’t need more than 12 billion, only more people with better prefrontal areas and thus better judgment. A computer is a better storage house for excess information than a top-heavy skull.
If all these biological breakthroughs were employed, death might be abolished, and if it were, cultural change would be too. A frozen status quo is itself death, the end of the world, as presented by the Harvard Lampoon in its parody of Life in October, 1968.
But who is going to persuade or force people to accept these changes? Must we have a tighter dictatorship than any that the world has yet seen, or a reign of terror controlled by a Nobel laureate in a spaceship? Before it is too late, it might be wise to abolish the Nobel Prize as the world’s greatest breeder of arrogance. Statements like “We will succeed in doing such and such by A.D. 1985,” or “A.D. 2000,” etc. remind me of the Arab story of the little men underground trying to dig their way out to daylight and destroy the world. Every night they say, “Tomorrow we will break through,” but God fills in their holes because they forgot to say Inshallah (God willing). Perhaps these superbiologists might find some way to say their equivalent of Inshallah, or to cross their fingers when they set their timetables.
CARLETON S. COON
Gloucester, Massachusetts

The revolution that Dr. Fleming describes is real enough, but I do not feel that he has really come to grips with its implications. I kept asking myself “So what?” at each new revelation, and it is a good question. What Fleming fails to do —yet he is certainly equipped to do it—is to spell out what the biological engineering he describes will do to the traditional structure of American society. How, specifically, will it affect our egalitarian ideals, our laws, our lives? He hints at some of the answers—for example, the relief that might be felt by many adults if they could justify not having children—but such hints are not enough. Fleming, it seems to me, treats his “revolutionaries” entirely too gently. He is in awe of them and handles them with kid gloves. I would much prefer a bolder attack.
Joshua Lederberg may be a genius with macro-molecules, but he would appear to be a rather untrustworthy kind ol guide to the new, biologically engineered society. What are his qualifications for this task? What are the implications of publicly sponsored research being used to destroy the institutions of the society paying for the research? Mow much autonomy should be granted scientists when the results of their research have implications of fundamental importance to society? These are questions that desperately need answers today; unfortunately, Fleming does not even raise them. I wish he had.
L. PEARCE WILLIAMS
Professor of the History of Science
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

I believe that Donald Fleming has quite misconstrued or at best oversimplified my own position on the subject he discusses.
I am indeed fascinated by embryology, since so much of the biochemical and physiological machinery of the body is laid down during fetal life. But I am equally fascinated by the psychological and social development of the child afterward. I would take particular exception to the phrase “maddened and obsessed,”unless it is answered that my concern for healthy maternal nutrition to sustain the fetus’ developing brain is an obsession. I think the further phrase “such a waste of time before the scientists can get at us" is particularly offensive—if Mr. Fleming wants to voice such an opinion on his own account, that is fine with me, but I hate to have even an indirect attribution of such language to myself appearing on the record. I also have to stress that the emphasis I have given to “euphenics" is a counterslogan in reaction to the zealous eugenicists. I pointed out elsewhere that euphenics is in fact nothing but medicine.
Mr. Fleming has certainly misunderstood me if he believes that I advocate a program of action. I do advocate that research that can enable us to achieve the human mastery of nature that has been the main thread of his cultural development; and I advocate the widest possible public education about these opportunities precisely in order to minimize the chance that they will be dominated by monolithic bureaucracy. For example, I am quite opposed to “foolproof compulsory contraception.”At the same time, I join a great many biologists and others in warning that we must somehow achieve a humane solution to the very pressing problem of world overpopulation and underdevelopment.
As to organ replacements, I was among the first to point out the difficulties that would arise in managing the potential “market" in organs, and primarily for that reason, pointed out the need to stress some countertechnology in the direction of artificial organs.
I do not see any prospect of gene manipulation and substitution along the lines specifically laid out by Fleming, but I certainly do see new possibilities of therapeutic repair of those diseases about which we achieve sufficient biochemical understanding.
I do favor continued research on human development, particularly on the correlated questions of the development of the brain and of intellect, and there is no doubt that such research will provide answers to many tragic questions that plague people today.
I am in accord with Mr. Fleming in his cautions that the opportunities for more and more incisive intervention may have cumulatively insidious by-products, and that these will be far the worse if we do not broaden the base of public understanding of biology.
Finally, let me state one specific program that I do advocate and a theme to which I have returned again and again in my columns. The world’s most pressing problems are the nutrition and education of the young.
JOSHUA LEDERBERG
Professor of Genetics
Stanford University School of Medicine
Palo Alto, California

It is too bad that Professor Fleming emphasizes the split at Harvard between the “old” and “new" biologies. Harvard in this area is way behind the times, and now appears to be going through the sort of convulsions which characterized other departments nearly a decade ago (and which Stanford was very fortunate to avoid). It is now abundantly clear that biologists of all persuasions must remain in close touch while attempting to solve the fantastic problems now confronting mankind. Many molecular biologists, presumably because of their extremely narrow training, have promoted preposterous systems of priority in biological research. One need only consider the money which over the past decades has flowed into what broadly can be described as “cancer research” in contrast to what has gone into research in areas related to population control. Cancer is a disease primarily of concern to older people in a world where almost 40 percent of the people are under fifteen years of age. The population explosion threatens to exterminate us all. On the other hand, “classical biologists,”out of envy, ignorance, or stupidity, have all too often denigrated the striking advances made in molecular biology, refused to see their importance in all biological disciplines, and have reacted too defensively against the molecular biologists. The time has long since passed for this kind of nonsense. The brilliance of the molecular biologists must be directed first at problems of immediate importance, and the classical biologists must bring more rigor to bear on those problems which are too complex for a simple chemical solution.
If we had the time, perhaps the most interesting study of all would be essentially the study of the theology of science. There already has been one immensely interesting contribution to this area in Professor James Watson’s superb book The Double Helix. Scientists could profitably spend more time trying to understand their own motives and faiths rather than promoting the corny ideas of how science operates that are characteristically repeated to secondary school students.
PAUL R. EHRLICH
Professor of Biology
Stanford University
Stanford, California

Dr. Fleming’s review of the revolutionary implications of some of the recent discoveries in biological science is challenging, even if there will be some disagreement as to the equal validity or equal importance of each of his twelve items.
The omissions seem to me to be the more important. Decisions will have to he made about whether and how to use our increasing ability to control hitherto uncontrollable natural and biological processes. These decisions will have great individual and sociological importance; and in addition, they are emotionally highly charged. Therefore they require men who are both erudite and emotionally mature. But to produce this combination in abundance implies revolutionary developments in the educational process. This cannot even begin until we acknowledge the fact that in the entire history of human culture, erudition and wisdom have had at most a purely accidental correlation.
I agree wholly that we must accept the responsibility of bringing order into planning the intervals and gender sequences of family life. Among the thousands of other variables which determine the processes of growth in human life, these have special and early importance. Once we have this knowledge, however, we will face the problem of how to use it. I agree that the right to prevent conception or to interrupt it will soon be taken for granted, and that our main problem will then be to determine how to induce people to use these rights. In itself this is an unsolved psychological and psychosocial problem on conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels. Even more fundamental will be the next problem—namely, to ascertain who has a right to have babies at all, and when, and how frequently, and at what intervals. So I agree that we will have to consider every possible technique by which genetic determinants can be ascertained, selected, and brought into harmonious use and control. But this implies again the same revolution in education, because to determine what are the most favorable intervals and the most favorable gender sequences in any family unit demands a special kind and degree of maturity.
Finally, as we attempt this, we will also have to avoid the danger of reverting to the ancient fallacy that genetics can operate in a vacuum. There is some danger that Professor Fleming’s thesis, if accepted uncritically, will throw us back to a modern version of the ancient and unreal controversy between heredity and environment, as though either ever operates apart from the other.
For example, recent studies of infants have shown that in addition to genetic factors, inadequate nutrition can block the development of brain size, of the central nervous system as a whole, and of the IQ. But “nutrition" involves emotional as well as caloric and biochemical ingredients. So genetic factors do not operate independent of nutritional and other factors, and to select genetic factors for separate and isolated emphasis brings a danger of overlooking other concurrent determinants.
Professor Fleming steps furthest from his own field when he discusses drugs and the brain. In principle there is nothing new about the so-called hallucinogens and their simulation of psychotic states. Alcohol was doing this long before anyone coined the term “psychopharmacology.” The fact that such deliria are a form of psychosis does not lead to the unwarranted conclusion that psychosis is due to some inborn error of metabolism which is remediable by the administration of drugs. This is an unwarranted assumption made by Linus Pauling and others who have observed this field only from clinically naive armchairs. Even if true, the existence of a drug delirium does not prove this thesis, whether the drug is alcohol or LSD. We must not assume too much that is still unknown about the relation of the hallucinogens to the psychotic disorganization of the neurotic process.
Similarly, the lack of a tranquilizer is not the cause of a psychosis any more than a lack of aspirin is a cause of headaches. Actually, it is not always clear when a drug is therapeutic in any real sense, or when it simply masks symptoms to produce a temporary illusion of health while the underlying process of illness goes on unimpeded until even greater disorganization occurs. Also, when drugs make an illness accessible to psychotherapy, this is a valuable achievement, but only when the opportunity is seized upon by experienced psychotherapists. I am unhappy to see the current newspaper ballyhoo over psychopharmacology and hallucinogens given such unwarranted support.
LAWRENCE S. KUBIE
Sparks, Maryland

I consider it improbable, not impossible, that within this century eugenics by biological engineering will become feasible for man; that “euphenics” will become a reality; that it will be possible to prevent and cure mental diseases by drugs, although they will be increasingly important in ameliorating symptoms; or that the transplantation of organs will become more than an act of desperation to gain a worthwhile prolongation of life.
It is my opinion that the processes of life and development are too complex to be mastered to the extent predicted by Professor Fleming.
It is my opinion that predictions of successful transplantation of the human brain require gross ignorance or disregard for the complexity of its anatomical connections. Prolonged survival of the caput without a body is more probable.
DWIGHT J. INGLE
Editor, Perspectives in Biology
and Medicine
Chicago, Illinois