A Times Editorial

On the genetic frontier

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 8, 2000

A for Adenine, C for Cytosine, G for Guanine and T for Thymine: This is the alphabet of life.

These four chemical bases make up the spiral strands of deoxyribonucleic acid, the two-strand chain of genes that makes us what we are. In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered that DNA takes the form of a double helix. The genetic revolution began. And now, for the first time, we know the arrangement of those elemental spirals. We have cracked the code.

Standing in the White House with the directors of the public and private genome projects, President Clinton said that the sequencing of human DNA is "the most wonderful map ever created." Others have compared the achievement to Newton's discovery of the universal law of gravitation, the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone or Einstein's theory of relativity. These claims may be overlarge. The sequenced genome is a miraculous map, but a map on which we can't yet determine north and south or tell what's ocean and what's mountain. We have the genetic information, but we don't yet know what it means. The genome is like a coverless and unbound copy of War and Peace, its unnumbered pages scattered all over a room. We have the whole text, but we need to figure out what order things belong in and what the story is.

Still, this is a mighty achievement of international science. It was good to see Craig Venter of Celera Genomics and Francis Collins, leader of the publicly funded genome research, working together rather than against each other. Celera, a private corporation, had boasted that it would beat the consortium of labs sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health to the genetic finish line and publish its research first -- or a fee. Celera intended to make money off human genes by charging scientists to get a look at its information and by identifying "profitable" genes for use by pharmaceutical companies. The Wellcome/NIH project, in contrast, posted its findings every day on the Internet. For free. Now Celera has relented and will make its data available to everyone who wants it as well.

For all the hype, all the hopeful or fearful speculation that soon we will be able to switch off the gene for cancer or erase the gene for aging, the mapping of the human genome raises more questions than it answers. Will pharmaceutical mega-corporations try to patent the stuff that makes us human? Will eugenics at the molecular level become acceptable? Are we playing God?

These discoveries are, as the geneticist Norman Zinder said, "the beginning of the beginning." We don't know where they will lead. But the things we know now are encouraging, rather than frightening: For example, we now have confirmation that there is no genetic basis for race: Humans are 99.9 percent alike biologically. The billions spent on the genome project were worth it just for this.

We will do well to remember what we don't know, as well as what we have learned. The fundamental letters ACGT tell us what life is made of, but not what life is. Humans will work on that one for a long time to come.

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