The challenge to the 'industrial gene' paradigm

The technologies we use have consequences, some of which come back to haunt us in dangerous ways. We dive in, thinking we know how deep the water is, but find out later we've waded in beyond our ability to swim. Genetic manipulation is a prime example of this. I'm no Luddite, but this is one technology we'd do well to stop tinkering with.

The New York Times has an article called A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech which hints at the beginnings of an awareness just how deep these waters are. They report,

Last month, a consortium of scientists published findings that challenge the traditional view of how genes function. The exhaustive four-year effort was organized by the United States National Human Genome Research Institute and carried out by 35 groups from 80 organizations around the world. To their surprise, researchers found that the human genome might not be a “tidy collection of independent genes” after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, such as a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.

Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood. According to the institute, these findings will challenge scientists “to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do.”

This idea, called the "industrial gene" theory, operates from an assumption that each protein in the DNA sequence can be associated with a gene, which is then expressed in a deterministic way, called a phenotype. It is a useful assumption if you're planning to do your own sequencing and patent the modification. But it may not have any basis in reality.

I remember reading about how genes store data a few years ago, I think it was in Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life by Jeremy Campbell, and it was stated that the genetic code is infinitely more complex than we'd initially thought. Rather than one gene being read once for a specific function, the same DNA sequences were being read many times, in many different ways, for very different functions. For example the protein pairs might be read "left-to-right, one-by-one" for phenotype A, but also "backwards, skipping every other pair" for an entirely different phenotype B, and so on. It seems very likely the information contained within the DNA is far richer and more complex than we are used to thinking about, like a protein hologram of unimaginable complexity.

I read that years ago, and yet it's mostly been overlooked or purposely ignored because it's not convenient for biotech industries, who prefer the industrial gene model and its legal protections.

In the United States, the Patent and Trademark Office allows genes to be patented on the basis of this uniform effect or function. In fact, it defines a gene in these terms, as an ordered sequence of DNA “that encodes a specific functional product.”

In 2005, a study showed that more than 4,000 human genes had already been patented in the United States alone. And this is but a small fraction of the total number of patented plant, animal and microbial genes.

In the context of the consortium’s findings, this definition now raises some fundamental questions about the defensibility of those patents.

It's not hard to see the dangers posed by uninformed meddling, then. We can create animals with greater resistance to infection, but what other phenotypes are we unwittingly mucking up? One can't mathematically predict what these genes will do because they're only the instructions, not the machinery that acts upon the instructions. You must let the embryos grow and then hope you didn't stomp on anything important in the process.

Such hubris has serious consequences. Have you ever heard of "terminator genes"? Here's an article about it from Time Magazine, called The Suicide Seeds.

This stuff is going to get out of hand.