Photo © Bill Geddes Since his contribution to the discover of the structure of the DNA molecule, James D. Watson has been a leading figure int he greatest ongoing scientific quest of our times: to understand the mystery of life. Now in DNA: The Secret of Life he explores the great consequences of genetic advances for the way we live now and will live tomorrow. From genetically modified food to genetically modified babies he reveals a future of choices and implications of which we dare not remain uninformed. Read on to learn what his key viewpoints about DNA really are. You might be surprised....   Excerpted from DNA: The Future of Life © 2003 by James D. Watson With Andrew Berry. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Genes and Brains In fact, I would propose there is a correlation between intelligence and low gene count. My guess is that being smart--having a decent nerve center like ours or even the fruit fly's--permits complex functioning with relatively few genes. The Meaning of Life Does life have some magical, mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answered that question with a definitive No. Can We Make it Ourselves? Will we ever be able to construct a functioning minimal cell from scratch, by artificially combining its separate purified components? [S]uch a goal seems for now a long way off. Even the five hundred proteins of Mycoplasma, some represented in the cell by a huge number of molecules, some by just a handful, constitute an enormously complex living system. I, for one, have enough difficulty following a movie like Gosford Park in which there are more than four or five major characters; the thought of blocking out the complexity of interactions among the vital players inside a living cell is nothing short of mind-blowing. Who's Afraid of GM Foods? Let me be utterly plain in stating my belief that it is nothing less than an absurdity to deprive ourselves of the benefits of GM foods by demonizing them; and, with the need for them so great in the developing world, it is nothing less than a crime to be governed by the irrational suppositions of Prince Charles and others. In fact, a few years from now, when the West inevitably regains its senses and throws off the shackles of Luddite paranoia, it may find itself seriously lagging in agricultural technology. What Drug Companies Cost Us For most big pharmaceutical firms gene patents on drug targets, filed by biotech companies with little or no biological information on function, become a poison pill. The large royalties demanded by gene-finding monopolies tip the economic balance against drug development; cloning a drug target is at most 1 percent of the way to an approved drug. Furthermore, if a company produced a drug with a particular target for which it also holds the patent on the underlying gene, that company has no immediate incentive to develop better drugs for that target. Why invest in R&D when your patent makes it prohibitively costly--if not simply illegal--for other companies to get in on the act? Embarrassing Relations Still some of the implications of the DNA-based approach to the tree of life have been difficult to take: they have shown, for instance, that animals are not, as we once supposed, closely related to plants; rather, the closest relatives of animals are fungi. Humans and mushrooms stem from the same evolutionary root.... Some 46 percent of the proteins we see in yeast, for example, also appear in humans. The Human Genome With a fully formed dynamic understanding of when and where each of our 35,000--plus genes functions during normal development from fertilized egg to functioning adult, we would have a basis of comparison by which to understand every affliction: what we need is the complete human "transcriptome." This is the next holy grail of genetics, the next big quest in need of superfunding. Vaccine in The Banana Trick We are merely at the beginning of a great GM plant revolution, only starting to see the astonishing range of potential applications. Apart from delivering nutrients where they are wanting, plants may also one day hold the key to distributing orally administered vaccine proteins. By simply engineering a banana that produces, say, the polio vaccine protein--which would remain intact in the fruit, which travels well and is most often eaten uncooked--we could one day distribute the vaccine to parts of the world that lack public health infrastructure. Dropping a Dime on OJ In the Simpson trial, crucial evidence included a single blood drop scraped from the sidewalk. But sufficient DNA for analysis can be extracted from cells in the saliva left on a cigarette butt. If even the slightest trace of DNA from another source--a single molecule from someone handling the samples, for example--contaminates the evidence sample, the results are at best confused and at worst useless. "I Think Everyone Should Give a DNA Sample" Civil libertarians will always object to the broad application of DNA fingerprinting in society as a whole. But it is hard to argue with the social utility of applying the technology to those who, for whatever reason, pass through the criminal justice system; for the chances are, sadly, that those who pass through once will pass through again. Criminological data indicate that those convicted of minor crimes are likely to commit more serious offenses; 28 percent of homicides and 12 percent of sexual assaults in Florida have been linked to individuals previously convicted of burglary. And such patterns of recidivism can be detected among white-collar criminals as well: of twenty-two who had been convicted for forgery in Virginia, ten were linked through DNA fingerprinting to murders or sexual assaults. It would seem prudent to make the corporate bosses of Enron, ImClone, and Adelphia Communications provide DNA samples. Boys Will Be Boys Violence, too, can be viewed through the lens of genetics. Some people are more violent than others. That's a fact. And violent behavior may be governed by a single gene interacting with environmental factors. This does not, of course, mean that we all carry a "violence gene" (thought it's likely that most violent individuals do possess a Y chromosome), but we have identified at least one simple genetic change that can lead to violent outbursts. Playing God One wonders what our visceral response to such possibilities might be had human history never known the dark passage of the eugenics movement. Would we still shudder at the term "genetic enhancement"? The reality is that the idea of improving on the genes that nature has given us alarms people. When discussing our genes, we seem ready to commit what philosophers call the "naturalistic fallacy," assuming that the way nature intended it is best. By centrally heating our homes and taking antibiotics when we have an infection, we carefully steer clear of the fallacy in our daily lives, but mentions of genetic improvement have us rushing to run the "nature knows best" flag up the mast. For this reason, I think that the acceptance of genetic enhancement will most likely come about through efforts to prevent disease. Science and The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy Modern genetics has taken to heart the lessons of the eugenics experience. Scientists are typically careful to avoid questions with overtly political implications and even those whose potential as political fodder is less clear. We have seen, for instance, how such an obvious human trait as skin color has been neglected by geneticists. It's hard to blame them: after all, with any number of interesting questions available for investigation, why choose one that might land you in hot water with the popular press or, worse, earn you an honorable mention in white supremacist propaganda? But the aversion to controversy has an even more practical--and more insidious--political dimension. It happens that scientists, like most academics, tend to be liberal and vote Democratic. While no one can tell how much of this affiliation is principled and how much is pragmatic, it's certainly the case that Democratic administrations are assumed to be invariably more generous toward research than Republican ones. And so having signed on to the liberal end of the political spectrum, and finding themselves in a climate intolerant of truths that don't conform to ideology, most scientists carefully steer clear of research that might uncover such truths. The fact that they duly hew to the prevailing line of liberal orthodoxyÑwhich seeks to honor and entitle difference while shunning any consideration of its biochemical basisÑis, I think, bad for science, for a democratic society, and ultimately for human welfare. Genetic Testing and Your Insurance Rates Insurers have traditionally set rates using actuarial tables that estimate overall health and longevity mainly on the basis of how we live. I suspect that even if genetic data were universally available, insurers would still find such lifestyle factors--whether one smokes or not, whether one works in a coal mine as opposed to a flower shop--vastly more predictive of one's health risk than the overwhelming majority of relatively subtle differences determined by genetic variation from one person to another. The essential premise of insurance, that payments of the happy many who never have cause to collect will underwrite the relief of the unfortunate few, is not likely to be abolished owing to the accumulation of any amount of genetic information. Plus: Click through a photo gallery of amazing images from DNA: The Secret of Life: 1. The many faces of DNA 2. 3-D structure of a cellular protein factory 3. How DNA becomes protein 4. A mass producing DNA lab 5. 3-D structure of a cancer causing protein 6. Cell division 7. How genetic fingerprinting works