Genes, bits and bytes: January 19, 1998 issue of New Thinking

January 19, 1998 New Thinking:
Genes, bits and bytes

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January 19, 1998

Genes, bits and bytes

By Gerry McGovern

There has been a lot of talk over the last week with regard to cloning. Of course, the science of cloning didn’t come down in the last shower, and animals have been cloned already, but now we’re talking about human cloning.

A struggle has raged for very many years between evolution and the human mind. Evolution is a slow, try all options type of process. It hasn’t done too bad since life emerged some billions of years ago. One could say that it was the only game in town.

Until yet one more of its accidents arrived. We humans find evolution boring. It’s so, so slow. We don’t have a million years to hang around to evolve something new. We live in the fastest lane. We are children of change.

There is no doubt that the evolutionary process is slow. There is equally little doubt that it gets things wrong quite often. If it didn’t then there wouldn’t be such a huge medical industry and interest in cloning the ‘perfect’ human in the first place. (There is a point to consider here: If we do clone the perfect humans then a lot of doctors and hospitals will be out of business.)

There’s always a point to consider. In fact, there are very many points to consider when dealing with that ultimate complexity: life. Now, the secrets of creating life are supposed to be held by God, and the human has always had a hunger to play God.

I would think that God doesn’t know nor want to know the secrets of life. Life is its own secret. But us humans want to know. We have a hunger to know and ultimately control everything, and this almost defines us as a species.

The ultimate want is to control ourselves. How we live and how we breed and how we form and grow. Gene technology is here to stay. The new tools are in our hands.

We should be very wary about playing God. As smart as we are I doubt we will ever be smart enough to truly understand how all 100,000 genes, 3 billion chemical code letters and 10 trillion cells work. How they interact, what they control and what controls them.

As the New Scientist pointed out in 1994, “Some disease genes, for example, also carry benefits. Sickle cell anaemia develops in people who have two copies of the gene. But a single copy can protect the carrier against malaria.”

Of course, all these advances in gene technology would never have been possible without the computer. Interestingly too, it could be said that the structure of our genes is not all that different from the structure of digital bits; the 1s and 0s combining to make up the structure of a bit in a similar way that DNA sequences make up the structure of a gene. (We are all electric.)

In this fluid, digital world let us not assume that everything can be molded to our liking. We may have got to the bottom of things as we manipulate our bits and bytes and probe and reshape our genes. However, in time we may find that this bottom is in fact the top of something bigger than anything our imagination can hold.

Gerry McGovern

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The ultimate want is to control ourselves. How we live and how we breed and how we form and grow.