A thrilling story muffled by gratitude
Robert Macfarlane
THE COMMON THREAD: A STORY OF SCIENCE, POLITICS, ETHICS AND THE HUMAN GENOME by John Sulston and Georgina Ferry Bantam, .£17.99, pp. 310, ISBN 0593048016
Marc gave me a sample of his semen and I broke open the sperm with detergent . .
We transferred a little puddle of it to a tall glass tube. Marc put the tube in front of a jetblack surface, and we stood back and hugged each other at the beauty of it.
Yuk. 'Marc' here is Marc Quinn, the contemporary artist who likes to use his bodily fluids in his work. 'I' is Sir John Sulston. molecular biologist, quondam head of the Sanger Centre and public face in Britain of the Human Genome Project (HGP). And this sticky little cameo is what opens Chapter 1 of The Common Thread, Sulston's account of the race to sequence the human genome. It's symptomatic of a book which has an astonishing tale to tell, but not the adroitness to tell it well.
The HGP, which was launched in 1990, is a publicly funded initiative whose aim is to sequence the human genome: that is, to
work out the order in which the chemical bases which make up genes occur on our DNA, Knowing this sequence is a major step towards deciphering exactly which genes do what to our bodies. The HGP was founded and funded on the principle of free release — that the information gathered would be available in the public domain.
In the late 1990s, however, the work of the HGP was imperilled when the now notorious Craig Venter, backed by his gang of Venter capitalists, decided he'd take on the public initiative. Celera Genomics, run by Venter, was launched in May 1998 and made a bid for monopoly corporate control of access to the sequencing information. Cetera boasted faster sequencing rates,
cheaper results, and told everybody they'd get the job done well before the HGP. At which point the public funding bodies in the US and Britain started to get cold feet. Why, it was wondered, should many millions more pounds of public money be paid out to duplicate the results?
It was John Sulston who orchestrated the British campaign to preserve public funding for the HGP, and thus also keep the sequencing results publicly available. In the course of this campaign Sulston — by nature a scientist and not a politician — had to learn a great deal very fast about the importance of public relations to science. With Venter and his team relentlessly fudging and glamorising their press releases, it was only by mounting his own PR crusade that Sulston could hope to keep the funding bodies on side. He succeeded, and in June of 2000, to much fanfare, both Celera and the HGP simultaneously published their findings.
Now this is a tremendous story — one which we are all dimly aware of and all intimately involved in. Frustratingly, though, Sulston and Ferry give a rather pallid account of it. It's all tremendously respectful; even the villain, Venter, is just mildly disapproved of. The only flash of colour comes when the volcanic grand homme of molecular biology, Jim Watson (of Crick and Watson fame), explodes at Venter, comparing him to Hitler and his private initiative to the invasion of Poland. Otherwise decorum rules OK. But then Sulston is more interested in naming and acclaiming than naming and shaming. This book seems partly to be meant as an extended letter of thanks to everyone involved in the HGP. So we get to meet a lot of people, briefly and unmemorably. The Judiths and the Martins and the Tims and the Jims and the Janes — they all get their 15 words of fame. Which is terrific for them, and doubtless much deserved, but it doesn't make for great reading.
True, there is some lucid explanation of the science involved, but this can be got more entertainingly elsewhere (in Matt Ridley's Genome, for example). And true, there are some fascinating glimpses into the world of molecular biology. The early years sound like a William Golding story, with the researchers splitting into two competing tribes: those who studied the nematode versus those who studied the drosophila — the worm people versus the fly people, And I did marvel briefly at the diligence of a research team which studied the gonads of a millimetre-long worm for about a decade. But what Sulston really has to offer is the inside version of the politicking, and in the wrong writerly hands — i.e. Sulston and Ferry's — this turns out to be rather tedious. Sulston himself comes over as an immensely nice, modest and passionate man, and the bottom line is that he may have helped prevent the founding of the most powerful oligarchy ever seen. But he hasn't written a very good book.
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