THE REAL GENE GENIUS
In 1856 Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel began breeding pea-plants. For a scientific experiment it sounds mundane, but as Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in this remarkable and thought-provoking book, it was to unleash ‘one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science’.
Mendel probed the mechanics of heredity to try to discover how biological information is transferred from one generation to the next.
Mukherjee’s book explores the exhilarating and sometimes terrifying leaps in scientific knowledge that have brought us from experiments with pea-plants to the threshold of being able to manipulate genes and potentially eradicate fatal diseases.
This sounds wonderful and amazing, so why should it be terrifying? Mukherjee explores several reasons in considerable and lucid detail.
The first is historical. The nascent science of genetics spawned a sinister obsession with eugenics, the idea that some races were superior to others and that inferior physical and mental types could be weeded out through selective breeding. The Nazis used eugenics to justify mass murder.
After the war, eugenics was consigned to the moral dustbin of history, but it’s the spectre at the feast in the world of genetic experiment and explains why we should remain apprehensive about recent breakthroughs.
Mendel’s insight that hereditary information is passed on by means of genes led to the mapping of every gene in the human body. The Human Genome Project was a truly phenomenal example of international cooperation in the pursuit of knowledge that has brought scientists to the point where they can ‘edit’ human genes or, more brutally, play God with individual destiny.
How far should we go? Journalist Dominic Lawson, whose daughter was born with Down’s syndrome, recently described
The Gene Siddhartha Mukherjee Bodley Head €32.50 ★★★★★
the approval in Britain of a test guaranteeing detection of Down’s in unborn foetuses as ‘a scheme designed to bring about a world in which people like my youngest daughter will cease to exist’ – a kind of ‘state-sponsored eugenics’. Mukherjee floats the idea that eliminating harmful genetic traits could fundamentally threaten our sense of what it means to be human. Yes, eradicating terrible diseases would reduce the general store of grief, but would we also forget the meaning of tenderness? Mukherjee traces the history of the gene in illuminating detail and points up the moral implications. If you want to know what is happening right now in this fast-moving field, this is an essential read.