Dicing with doomsday
Leo Abse
When the House Of Commons recently Made the awesome decision to go ahead With the plutonium-producing reprocessing Plant at Windscale, half its members funked the issue. They abdicated their responsibility by absence or abstention: no party loyalties were at stake for, except for the Payroll, there was no proper whip on the day the House took the vote. The desertion Was an uncomplicated act of cowardice, Prompted by intellectual indolence.
The MPs, handicapped by their past occupations and professions — journalists, businessmen, lecturers on politics, economics and social administration, arts teachers and lawyers — literate but barely numerate, fled the field rather than face the discipline of sweating out the scientific complications and the physics of the battle. The Royal Commission's report, the rival literatures of Protagonists here and in the United States, and the Parker inquiry were not light bedtime reading, and certainly far removed from the stuff of instant politics. Too many lacked the will to metabolise the social implications of an advancing technology. The elected representatives were content to Play with their trivia and leave the significant to the wholly unaccountable experts. The creed of the shirkers is simple: tomorrow, not doomsday, is the general election.
Is the Windscale affair a premonition of worse to come? Will our Parliament, possessed of only a dozen out of 635 MPs able to make any claim to a scientific training, proclaim, by inactivity, lack of competence to make the fateful decisions contemporary science thrusts upon it? After physics comes biology: the next test, after Windscale, is genetic engineering, and if Parliament demeans itself again by shirking its responsibility, it subverts still further its claim to Shape the destiny of our people.
The omens are discouraging: since January 1975 several reports relating to genetic Manipulation have been presented to Parliament, one by Lord Ashby's working Party, another by Sir Robert Williams's committee, and a third from Sir Gordon Wostenholme's advisory group. In addition, almost two years ago the Health and Safety Commission circulated for discussion suggested regulations to govern experiments in the genetic manipulation of Microbes. None of these reports has been debated in the chamber: not one question has been asked and no ministerial statement has ever been made in the Commons. A flicker of interest was shown in the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology six months ago and the intention, not fulfilled, was to form a sub
committee; it has never met. The reports submitted to Parliament are evidently unread: and, as over Windscale, it will require the pertinacity of a handful of backbench MPs to make the attempt to compel a reluctant House, during the run-up to an election, to turn its attention, even for a little while, away from the institutionalised paranoia of vituperative party politics to a challenge such as genetic engineering presents.
For no responsible legislator can opt out of the challenge, the opportunities and the hazards. The discoveries during recent years in the field of genetic manipulation have provided researchers with new access to the secrets of the genetic code. Parts of a molecule containing deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) taken from a cell can be spliced into particles, and then carried into another host organism. This technique, called Recom binant DNA, enables scientists to transmit new properties to living organisms and to create new ones: this innovatory technique has been compared, with some justification, to the splitting of the atom. It could bring new boons to mankind, giving us under standing as to why normal developmental processes may fail, how we fall victims to degenerate diseases like arterio-sclerosis or muscular dystrophy, and how we could fight the effects of the disease carrying bacteria viruses. It may lead us to discover how the genes which cause certain types of cancer actually promote the growth of tumours: it may prove to be possible to give people suffering from genetic defects like haemophilia their missing gene: and by isolating and then multiplying the genes responsible for promoting the synthesis of human pituitary growth hormones, or viral proteins for vaccine production, these medically important substances may in certain circumstances be able to be manufactured from bacterial cultures.
Recombinant DNA may ultimately even lead us to the conquest of the world food shortage, one cause of which is the cost of artificial manures and the expenditure of energy in making them. If, therefore, genes which code for nitrogen fixation could be introduced and made to function in crops such as cereals, the benefits would be immense: experiments with these objectives, using the new techniques, are under way.
These are glittering prizes: but if man plays God he must beware of the penalties paid by those afflicted with hubris. To create new self-replicating hybrid organisms may mean bringing an unconquerable plague on mankind: there exists the hazard that a dangerous new organism could not only infect laboratory personnel but could escape from, the laboratory and cause untold harm to the outside world — devastating harm because this harm may transmit a disease for which science has no present treatment. It is to the credit of the American academic biologists, who feared that one day a single man-made mutation escaping from the laboratory might cause an ecological disruption and upset the balance of nature, that they were the first to identify the hazards, and called on world scientists to pause, to assess and reflect upon the consequences of the experimentation in which they were involved.
In this country the response to these warnings has been the creation, for a trial two-year period, of a genetic manipulation advisory group responsible to the Secretary of State for Education and Science. Its task is essentially advisory, giving advice primarily to those undertaking activities in genetic manipulation: and its main role is to make a continuing assessment of the risks and the needed precautions. But it has no enforcement powers: and co-operation with the group by scientists is entirely voluntary. It is coy about assuming any role in policing and, with deliberation, imposes a discipline upon itself by disclaiming any intention to assess the scientific merit of any proposed work; and its range of hesitant surveillances does not extend to Porton, the bacteriological warfare centre. Yet its essential inadequacy as a body set up to protect the public interest is frankly exposed in its first annual report: it fears any confrontation whatsoever with the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and the group's extraordinary placatory gestures, to ensure the co-operation of industrial interests, include privacy and confidential undertakings that must place parliamentarians on inquiry.
The high rewards in the field of genetic engineering are not only intellectual: they are commercial. A whole range of moneymaking possibilities exist. Insulin for diabetics, currently made from pigs and cattle, is in short supply, and there is some doubt about the suitability of animal insulin for long-term treatment of man. The manufacture of human insulin will probably within a few years be one of the first commercial applications of genetic engineering. General Electric has already patented in Britain new bacteria which eat oil slicks more efficiently than naturally occurring bugs. And soon trace elements in mines or sea water, currently uneconomic to exploit, may be collected by newly created bugs that would concentrate on minerals like plutonium and uranium; and then such enriched bugs by the use of a centrifuge could be harvested. Given the past history, often reckless, of pharmaceutical companies, their zeal for the profits to be gained from such innovations could outrun their concern for essential precautions.
Parliament clearly cannot, however, expect the genetic manipulation advisory group to assume responsibility for checking commercial adventurism: some members of the group are employed directly by industrial organisations and others have commercial interests by acting as consultants. Such conflicts of interest, however honourably acknowledged, must undermine public confidence in the group as a satisfactory instrument of defence against dangerous experiments in the private sector. The group knows its own weakness and has urged a deaf Parliament to expedite the making of enforceable regulations by the Health and Safety Executive. But the initial consultative proposals of the Health and Safety Commission have been savagely attacked by industrial interests, encouraged, unhappily, by prestigious scientists.
The pressures are on to dilute the proposed regulations even although they are already so debilitated that they relate only to the notification of certain activities in genetic manipulation: they are not genuine 'control' regulations and astonishingly do not cover the actual use of the products of genetic manipulation. If legislators do not intervene, the danger exists that industry's avid desire to exploit the applications of its research will leave the management of risk to the vagaries of the market place, the courts, and the actuarial skills of the insurance companies. At the very least, if the public interest is to be protected, authentic regulations must be buttressed by a licensing system of laboratories only permitting experiments compatible with a laboratory's safety equipment.
In his recent eloquent BBC Bronowski lecture George Steiner used genetic engineering as an illustration of man's irres istible compulsion, whatever the consequences, to search for truth: truth, Steiner detachedly affirms, is more important than man. But Steiner's constituency is Academia: mine is Pontypool. If, out of indolence or conviction, my colleagues continue to yield to Steiner's fatalism, as they have over Windscale, then truth may triumph, but man, literally, may be undone.
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