Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (122 page)

After the lecture, Cohen sought out Boyer. As Walter Bodmer and Robin McKie tell the story, in their history of the genome project, the two microbiologists adjourned to a delicatessen near Waikiki Beach and, over corned beef sandwiches, agreed on a collaboration that bore its first fruits in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
in November 1973, when they announced the first report of successful cloning. From now on there was enough DNA to experiment with.
³¹

The next step – important both practically and theoretically – was to explore the
sequence
of bases in the DNA molecule. Sequencing was necessary because if biologists were to discover which genes governed which aspects of functioning, the exact order needed to be understood.
Fred Sanger
in Cambridge, England, and
Walter Gilbert
in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard), both discovered methods of doing this, and both received a Nobel Prize for their efforts. But Sanger’s method was identified first and is the more widely used.
*
Earlier, Sanger had developed a way of identifying the amino acids that make up proteins, and this had earned him his first Nobel, when he discovered the structure of insulin. But that method was far too slow to work with DNA, which is a very long molecule. Moreover, it is made up from only four subunits (A, C, G, and T), so long sequences would need to be understood before they could be related to properties. His breakthrough was the creative use of chemicals called dideoxy, otherwise known as chain terminators.’
³²
These are in fact imperfect forms of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine; when mixed with DNA polymerase, the DNA-copying enzyme, they form sequences, but incompletely – in fact they stop, are terminated, at either A, C, G, or T.
³³
As a result they form DNA of varying lengths, each time stopping at the same base. Imagine, for the sake of argument, a strip of DNA that reads: CGTAGCATCGCTGAG. This, treated with adenine (A) terminators would
produce strips in which growth stops at positions 4, 7, and 15, whereas the thymine (T) terminator would produce strips where growth stops at 3, 8, and 12, and so on. The technique actually to separate out these different strands consisted of placing the DNA in a tray of special gel, in which an electrical field had been applied to opposite ends. DNA, being negatively charged, is attracted to the positive pole, with the smaller fragments pulled faster than the larger ones, meaning that the strands eventually separate out, according to size. The DNA is then stained, and the sequence can be read. The technique was announced in
Nature
on 24 February 1977, and it was from that moment, coming on top of the cloning experiments, that genetic engineering may be said to have begun.
³⁴

Just over a year later, on 24 August 1978, Genentech, founded by Boyer and a young venture capitalist called Robert Swanson, announced that it had produced human insulin by this method – gene sequencing and cloning – and that it had concluded a deal with Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant, for the mass manufacture of the substance. Two years later, in October 1980, when Genentech offered 1,100,000 of its shares for sale to the public, another phase in the microbiological revolution was born: offered at $35 a share, the stock immediately jumped to $89, and Boyer, who had invested just $500 in the company in early 1974, saw the value of his 925,000 shares leap to more than $80 million. No physicist was ever worth so much.
³⁵

Compared with the electron and other fundamental particles, the gene had taken some time to be isolated and broken down into its component parts. But as with physics, the experimental and theoretical work went in tandem.

Beginning in the 1970s a new form of literature began to appear. It grew out of Robert Ardrey’s works but was more ambitious. These were books of biology but with a distinct philosophical edge. However, they were not written by journalists, or dramatists, as Ardrey was, or Gordon Rattray Taylor was, in
The Biological Time Bomb,
or by scientific popularisers, as Desmond Morris was essentially in
The Naked Ape,
but by the leading scientists themselves. These books each contained a fair amount of complex biology, but they had wider ambitions too.

The first appeared in 1970 in French and a year later in English. Its author was
Jacques
Monod, part of a three-man team that had won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for uncovering the mechanism by which genetic material synthesises protein. In
Chance and Necessity,
Monod sought to use the latest biology, since Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix, to define life, and in considering what life itself is, went on to consider the implications that might have for ethics, politics, and philosophy. The book is almost certainly more impressive now, at the end of the century and with the benefit of hindsight, than when it was first published (it was republished by Penguin in 1997). This is because Monod’s thinking foreshadowed many of the ideas promulgated by biologists and philosophers who are now much better known than Monod, authors like E. O. Wilson, Stephen J. Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.

Although a biologist, Monod’s underlying insight was that life is essentially a physical and even mathematical phenomenon. His initial purpose was to show how entities in the universe can ‘transcend’ the laws of that universe while nevertheless obeying them. Or, as he put it, evolution does not confer ‘the obligation’ to exist but it does confer ‘the right’ to exist. For Monod, two of the great intellectual successes of the twentieth century, the free market and the transistor, share an important characteristic with life itself: amplification. The rules allow for the constituent parts to spontaneously – naturally – produce
more
of whatever system they are part of. On this reasoning there is nothing in principle unique about life.

In the technical part of his book, Monod showed how proteins and nucleic acids, the two components which all life is made from,
spontaneously
adopt certain three-dimensional forms, and that it is these three-dimensional forms which predetermine so much else. It is this spontaneous assembly that, for Monod, is the most important element of life. These substances, he says, are characterised by physical – and therefore mathematical – properties. ‘Great thinkers, Einstein among them, have often … wondered at the fact that mathematical entities created by man can so faithfully represent nature even though they owe nothing to experience.’ Again Monod implies that there is nothing especially ‘wonder’-ful about this – life is just as much about mathematics and physics as it is about biology. (This foreshadowed work we shall be considering in the last chapter.)

He went on to argue that evolution can only take place at all because of the ability of nucleic acids to reproduce themselves
exactly,
and this therefore means that only accident can produce mutations. In that sense, the universe was and is accidental (statistical and, therefore, again mathematical). This too, he felt, had profound implications. To begin with, evolution did not apply only to living things: adaptation is another expression of time, no less than another function of the second law of thermodynamics. Living things, as isolated, self-contained energetic systems, seem to operate against entropy, except that it is inconceivable for evolution – being a function of time – to go backwards. This implies that life, being an essentially physical phenomenon, is
temporary:
different life forms will battle against each other until a greater disorder takes over again.

No less controversially, but a good deal less apocalyptically, and anticipating the work of E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and others, Monod felt that ideas, culture, and language are survival devices, that there is survival value in myth (he avoided use of the term
religion),
but that they will in time be replaced. (He thought Christianity and Judaism more ‘primitive’ religions in this sense than, say, Hinduism, and implied that the latter would outlast Judaeo-Christianity.) And he felt that the scientific approach, as epitomised in the theory of evolution, which is a ‘blind’ process, not leading to any teleological conclusion, is the most ‘objective’ view of the world, in that it does not involve any one set of individuals having greater access to the truth than any other group. In this sense he thought that science disproves and replaces such ideas as animism, Bergson’s vitalism, and above all Marxism, which presents itself as a scientific theory of the history of society. Monod therefore saw science not simply as a way of
approaching the world, but as an
ethical
stance, from which other institutions of society could only benefit.

Not that he was blind to the problems such an attitude brought with it. ‘Modern societies, woven together by science, living from its products, have become as dependent upon it as an addict on his drug. They owe their material wherewithal to this fundamental ethic upon which knowledge is based, and their moral weakness to those value-systems, devastated by knowledge itself, to which they still try to refer. The contradiction is deadly. It is what is digging the pit we see opening under our feet. The ethic of knowledge that created the modern world is the only ethic compatible with it, the only one capable, once understood and accepted, of guiding its evolution.’
³⁶

Monod’s vision was broad, his tone tentative, as befitted someone new to philosophy, feeling his way and not trained in the discipline. His vision of ‘objective knowledge’ largely ignored the work of Thomas Kuhn and would come under sustained attack from philosophers in the years that followed. But not all the biologists who came after Monod were as humble. Two other books published in the mid-1970s were much more aggressive in making the link between genes, social organisation, and human nature.

In
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
(1975), the Harvard zoologist Edward O. Wilson intended to show the extent to which social behavior – in all animals, including man – is governed by biology, by genes.
³⁷
Widely read in every field of biology, and a world authority on insects, Wilson demonstrated that all manner of social behavior in insects, birds, fish, and mammals could be accounted for either by the requirements of the organism’s relationship to its environment or to some strictly biological factor – such as smell – which was clearly determined by genetics. He showed how territoriality, for example, was related to food requirements, and how population was related not only to food availability but to sexual behavior, itself in turn linked to dominance patterns. He surveyed the copious evidence for birdsong, which showed that birds inherit a ‘skeleton’ of their songs but are able to learn a limited ‘dialect’ if moved.
³⁸
He showed the importance of bombykol, a chemical substance that, in the male silkworm, stimulates the search for females, making the silkworm, according to Wilson, little more than ‘a sexual guided missile.’
³⁹
As little as one molecule of the substance is enough to set the silkworm off, he says, which shows how evolution might happen: a minute change in either bombykol or the receptor structure – equally fragile – could be enough to provoke a population of individuals sexually isolated from the parental stock. Wilson surveyed many of the works referred to earlier in this chapter – on gorillas, chimpanzees, lions, and elephants – as well as the studies of
Australopithecus,
and produced at the end of his book very contentious tables claiming to show how human societies, and human behavior, evolved. This produced a hierarchy with countries like the United States, Britain, and India at the top, Hawaii and New Guinea in the middle, and aborigines and Eskimos at the bottom.
⁴⁰

Wilson’s arguments were rejected by critics as oversimple, racist (he was from America’s South), and philosophically dubious; they called into question the entire concept of free will. A more technical area of controversy, but very
important philosophically, related to his discussion of altruism and group selection. If evolution operated in the classical way (upon individuals), critics asked, how did altruism arise, in which one individual put another’s interests before its own? How did group selection take place at all? And here the second book published in the mid-1970s provided a clearer answer. Perhaps surprisingly for nonbiologists,
The Selfish Gene
contained a fair amount of elementary mathematics.
⁴¹

Its author, Richard Dawkins from Oxford, imagined in one of his crucial passages a bird population made up entirely of either hawks or doves. Hawks always fight but doves always back down. Now enters the mathematics. Dawkins attaches relative – and entirely arbitrary – values to various encounters. For example, the winner in a contest between two doves scores 50 but pays a penalty of – 10 for a long staring ritual, meaning he scores 40 in all. The loser is penalised —10 for also wasting time and staring. On average therefore any one dove, in competition with other doves, can expect to win half and lose half of his contests, so the average payoff is half the difference between +40 and – 10, which is +15.
⁴²
Now assume a mutant, a hawk. He never backs down so wins every fight, at 50 a time. He enjoys a big advantage over doves whose average payoff is only +15. In such a world, there is a clear advantage to being a hawk. But now hawk genes spread through the population, and soon all fights will be hawk fights, where the winner scores +50 but the loser is so seriously injured that he scores —100. If a hawk wins half and loses half of his fights, the average payoff of all hawk fights is halfway between +50 and —100, which is —25. If, amid such society, a dove mutant arises, he loses all his fights but never gets injured, so his average payoff is o. This may not sound much, but it beats —25. Dove genes should now start to spread. Looking at the arithmetic in this way, communities of birds would eventually arrive at an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) in which 5/12 are doves and 7/12 are hawks. When this point is reached, the payoff for hawks and doves is the same, and selection does not favour either of them. The point about this admittedly simple example is to show that a group of birds can take on a certain character while selection is taking place on an individual level.