Books Reviewed
The Century of the Gene.
Evelyn Fox Keller.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. 192 pp. $22.95 (Softcover).

Beyond Cloning: Religion and the Remaking of Humanity.
Ronald Cole-Turner, editor.
Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2001. 160 pp. $17 (Softcover).

The "age of biological control." This common shorthand for our era both exaggerates the scope of science and technology and represents a smattering of human hubris. Yet the phrase does point to a sobering reality, as registered in this quote from the work of Ian Wilmut, one of the lead scientists of Dolly and Polly fame: Previously "scientists were apt to declare that this or that procedure would be 'biologically impossible'—but now that expression, biologically impossible, seems to have lost all meaning. In the twenty-first century and beyond, human ambition will be bound only by the laws of physics, the rules of logic, and our descendants' own sense of right and wrong."¹ The conjunction of genetic engineering, genomics, and cloning have made good on the promise of a genetic revolution that is transforming every aspect of cultural life, from the way we farm to how we provide medical care and how children are conceived. The reality behind talk of "biological control" is that advances in genetics are not about a startling discovery here and a new technological advance there, but rather about wholesale cultural transformation. At its core, the era of biological manipulation—in my estimation a more accurate phrase—is about the ability to modify the very nature of the human species. This includes, by the way, the ability to modify every other living organism as well. The trouble is, to recall a well-worn phrase, everything has changed except our thinking.

A key segment of this revolution's shock troops are the everyday folks of the medical establishment. In a culture, like ours, that is committed to individualism, privatized decisions, and freedom from "excessive" public regulation, it is the small-scale, private decisions of thousands of doctors, clients, parents, nurses, and hospital administrators that will become the collective decision of humanity. These everyday actions, when taken in the aggregate, will move us toward or away from acts that forever change humanity. This is the reality of the micro decision maker's role in today's big picture. But everything has changed except our thinking; that is, micro decision makers often do not give much thought to this big picture. The Century of the Gene and Beyond Cloning: Religion and the Remaking of Humanity are important to readers interested in faith, health, and ethics for this reason. These two slim volumes are accessible and attentive to the broad implications of genetics and to the cultural challenges underway. They are not introductions to the issues, but are attempts to think, accessibly, beyond the ad hoc nature of much genetics literature of the 90s. Beyond Cloning does not always succeed, but both books make sterling contributions to the conversation around genetic advancements. Together they provide an excellent and up-to-date view of the comprehensive challenge—the big picture—of geneticized medicine.

Evelyn Fox Keller is professor of the history and philosophy of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her book is about the philosophy of biology. The philosophy of molecular biology seems tangential, at best, to practical concerns such as the direction of genetic medicine or whether there should be a legal ban on certain forms of cloning. But, to overstate her argument for the sake of being clear about its significance: The gene is a has-been. The century of the gene was the twentieth, and the gene as the core explanatory concept of biological structure and function is a failure. If such statements startle, then there is nothing irrelevant about her provocative and carefully presented argument that the central dogma of molecular biology—DNA yields RNA, RNA yields protein, and proteins yield living things—has been undermined by its very successes. It may be ironic that the results of the Human Genome Project and the appearance of somatic cell nuclear transfer (the "Dolly" technology) has called into question the fundamental concept upon which such work is based, but there is nothing irrelevant. If she is right, this argument matters to every concerned citizen and especially to those whose professional lives involve the "little word" gene that was first coined in 1906 and that has guided biological research for a century. It is all the more significant since the word as a public concept has taken hold of both medical and public imaginations in the last decade.

Since I have overstated her case, I must now be precise. Her argument proceeds through four chapters, each of which examines a key aspect of the central dogma of molecular biology. Chapter one expounds the growing realization among molecular biologists that DNA requires the help of a complex network of cellular editing, proofreading, and repair to maintain the fidelity of inheritance. This fidelity was once thought to reside in the sequence of DNA alone. These non-DNA mechanisms also play an active role in setting the range of fidelity because they trigger mechanisms that generate genetic variability under conditions of stress. Chapter two explores the "one gene–one enzyme" assumption that underlies most of what the public has been taught about genetics in the last several decades. Keller indicates that molecular biology has now come to understand that even the kind of proteins synthesized depends upon the kind and state of the cell in which the DNA finds itself. This leads to chapter three's rejection of the popular metaphor of a "genetic program" that directs an organism's development. Keller suggests that we must replace that faulty notion with the more dynamic concept of a "distributed program" in which the various genetic components function alternatively as both instructions and as data. Chapter four explores the problem of developmental stability to suggest that genetic and functional redundancies also fall outside the current genetic paradigm. The processes for developmental fidelity in the face of the vicissitudes of environment, cell, and even of genes reside outside the genetic paradigm as much as within it.

Keller completes her book with a discussion of the future of "gene talk"—it still has a place—and of molecular biology. She then concludes: "Genes have had a glorious run in the twentieth century, and they have inspired incomparable and astonishing advances in our understanding of living systems. Indeed, they have carried us to the edge of a new era in biology, one that holds out the promise of even more astonishing advances. But these very advances will necessitate the introduction of other concepts, other terms, and other ways of thinking about biological organization, thereby inevitably loosening the grip that genes have had on the imagination of life scientists . . . [and the] even more powerful grip that genes have recently come to have on the popular imagination."

My only complaint about Keller's book is that she does not sketch the significance of her argument for contemporary conversations. What does her argument imply, for instance, for promises that parents will be able to conceive offspring who match their designs? What does it mean for the political debate about whether human cloning should be banned? What impact do her ideas have on the widely held beliefs in our culture about genetic determinism, that is, that we are the result our genes? Keller would have aided us all if she had applied her understanding of molecular biology to these questions—questions that are being debated currently on the basis of apparently faulty understandings formed in the century of the gene.

Such moral and social questions that Keller leaves hanging are, of course, the concerns to which Beyond Cloning attend. This is the value of reading these books as a set. Keller provokes one to rethink the issues around the foundations of genetics, while Ronald Cole-Turner's compact anthology advances one's thinking about moral and theological implications in that light. Given the volume of literature on genetics, however, it is fair to ask what this book offers anew.

Part of the answer is that this text refocuses public attention beyond the reproductive cloning debate to the more sweeping issues raised by geneticized medicine. This book was conceived with the broad public conversation in mind. As Cole-Turner puts it, he asked the writers to consider: "How do we bring the insight of one religious tradition, Christianity, to bear upon the public deliberation?" It is quite fair to measure it, then, against the criteria of whether the anthology as a whole and whether the essays as individual contributions do indeed enlarge the conversation for public deliberation. Does this volume help the reader rethink the fundamental theological and moral questions of our burgeoning ability to reshape the nature of the human species? The answer is a qualified "yes"; I will qualify this before illustrating it.

Beyond Cloning does not live up to its title. The anthology struggles to get past the overly narrow gaze at reproductive cloning that has captivated public and professional scrutiny since the appearance of Dolly. Six out of nine chapters are largely, some exclusively, devoted to reproductive cloning questions. This count does not include the introductory and concluding essays by Cole-Turner. This failure to deliver on the book's premise is disappointing. In public conversations, from the level of policy decisions down to street corner conversation, we need to consider the sweeping implications of the genetic revolution, and spend less time on the rarefied question of whether we should clone human beings. Less disappointing, but still noteworthy, is the disparity between the solely Christian authorship and the subtitle's claim to be about "religion and the remaking of humanity." The writers do represent an unusually diverse group within the Christian faith, including Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, a range of Protestants, and several international voices. Still, a more accurate subtitle might have been "Christian faith and the remaking of humanity."

These limitations noted, Beyond Cloning still offers readers interested in health, faith, and ethics an astute array of reflections on stem cells, germ line modification, and other forms of genetic engineering as well as the various kinds of cloning. Most importantly, the essays are reader friendly and often provide an infusion of critical information and fresh perspective.

In a fine example of such information Kenneth Culver, a member of the medical research team who administered the first human gene therapy trial in 1990, attempts to help readers understand where genetic medicine is headed. Culver compares the burgeoning genetic technologies to traditional therapies and explores the breathtaking range of potential treatments, from the possibility of tailoring medication to individual genomes, to solving the shortage of available organs for transplant, to the correction of inherited disorders before birth. Culver's confidence in what he calls "the most exciting period ever in biomedical research and clinical medicine" is balanced within the volume by the warnings of several authors.

The fine piece by Lisa Sowle Cahill, theological ethicist at Boston College, is one such essay and another example of the arguments that advance our thinking in this volume. The issue of social justice is a question often conspicuously absent in discussions of genetic advancements. Cahill, by contrast, rightly points out that the record of the life science industries suggests that the development of new genetic technology has been and will be dominated by industrialized nations with little regard for its effect on the welfare of a society or the globe. Cahill then employs a language that could be used to lift one's voice on behalf of that larger human welfare. She links Reinhold Niebuhr's analysis of the social character of sin with a Roman Catholic insistence on the possibility of the common good, guided by the liberationist criteria of the needs of society's weakest. She directs Niebuhr's analysis of disguised human self-interest of a larger group at the freewheeling justifications of genetic technologies in fields such as assisted reproductive technology. Typical justifications are made in those fields in the name of scientific freedom, or the "needs" and "desperation" of the infertile, or of the "vast potential benefits" for humankind. But Niebuhr's negative assessment of human nature is balanced by the Roman Catholic insistence on the possibility of developing a public sense of the common good that could guide regulation of potential technologies. Sowle Cahill's essay equips readers with language that can be suspicious and yet constructive in determining how genetic knowledge will be used.

Another example of a much needed infusion for the broad conversation is provided by Audrey Chapman, director of the Program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ. Chapman reviews the theological and moral questions around germ line modification. The germ line conversation has been left on the back burner because early promises of gene therapy did not deliver. However, recent successes, such as treatment for inherited severe combined immunodeficiency and the development of gene-based vaccines for some types of cancer, are turning up the heat. Despite many unknowns, gene therapy remains attractive because it could mean eliminating genetic conditions and preventing irreversible damage that occurs during the first weeks of embryo development. Once again the central issue is that the effort to modify genes, even therapeutically, entails the prospect of modifying the human species in unknown and potentially novel ways. Chapman's chapter draws from a recently completed AAAS study of the moral and theological implications of developing human germ line modifications. The study included consultations with a wide array of thinkers and attempted to provide warnings and some initial criteria for guiding the development of such gene therapy.

In a volume with ten astute thinkers, this review cannot do justice to the wealth of ideas presented. Additional topics include discussion of the moral status of embryos, an issue central to embryonic stem cell debates. Questions around therapeutic cloning are addressed. Some of the work presents a new generation of thinking about reproductive cloning, such as arguments that cloning and designer offspring could impair the nature of family and parenthood. The volume also raises the often-neglected question of how we understand human nature in light of genetic advancements. This question's importance is signaled by the common reaction to reproductive cloning that the human soul, or that human dignity, somehow requires a unique genome. Even in this volume two authors slip into such language. We must put to rest this simply wrongheaded notion that a cloned human being will somehow be soulless or have less human dignity because of the means of their conception. This is so, among other reasons, for the sake of those who will come into this world as cloned human beings. To move beyond such notions requires fresh attention to constructive work about human nature. That the book addresses this question is praiseworthy, even if more ink would have been worthwhile. Finally, it is refreshing to find several authors asking the big questions: In what ways could genetic developments be part of our human destiny? How is it, as Cole-Turner concludes, that God might make use of all that lies within human ability to create anew? Is it possible that God intends to move beyond human nature as it currently exists? How is it that our technology could be responsibly used as an instrument in the creator's hands to add new chapters to the evolving creation story? These far ranging questions make Beyond Cloning an anthology that will help readers frame the big picture.

One challenge for large medical or religious institutions is to equip staff members to recognize, appreciate, and constructively respond to the larger implications of what they do. The medical field is, as suggested above, the primary arena in which choices will be made about tinkering with the nature of human beings. In this age of biological manipulation, it is crucial for members of the health, faith, and ethics communities to have the intellectual tools to act locally but think globally—to borrow a phrase from the world of political activism. The Century of the Gene and Beyond Cloning should be in the tool chest.

NOTE
1. Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell, and Colin Tudge, The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 5.