Health Spectator

For most people, glimpsing the world of science has an aura like peeking behind the Wizard of Oz’s screen or falling down that rabbit hole through which Alice entered Wonderland: Science remains shrouded in wonder and mystery, and is always far removed from everyday life.

My personal introduction to the everyday life of science came as a postgraduate (in my case, a post-undergraduate) lab technician.

That post is as low as you can go in science, barely on speaking terms with real scientists. Indeed, one visiting professor from the Max Planck Institute in Gottingen, Germany literally refused to acknowledge either my presence or my greetings until taken aside by my more politically correct employer, who tactfully explained that in the United States, lab technicians were actually allowed to address their superiors. Call it the price of a democracy.

Although I thought him needlessly arrogant at the time, he did, at least, confer on me a proper appreciation of my standing in the scientific world. And he, no doubt, thought me equally arrogant for summoning the temerity to speak to him.

At the time, I was working toward becoming a doctor and found myself engrossed in the heady realms of hard science, which I knew would never confer recognition on one who had just secretly decided not to get a Ph.D. What’s more, since my goal was to become a psychiatrist, I was having a hard time reconciling—on the one hand—my desire to help distressed people with—on the other hand—my job, which entailed not only the predictable sous-chef-like duties that befell an underling in a chemistry lab, but also the occasional sacrificing (and, to my mind, outright torture) of animals, at which I became the reluctant local practitioner by decree.

It literally was my job to cut the tails off electric eels so that electrophysiologists could experiment with the cells of their electric organs, after which I would return the hapless creatures to their tanks in an attempt to keep them alive for as many such vivisections as possible. Each day or so I would remove another slice of tail, until the animals either died or had no more electric organ to be experimented upon. It was within this gruesome context that I learned that science was not the neat, orderly progression of knowledge most of us believe it to be. In some respects, everyday science is like the common description of life in the military: endless boring repetition punctuated by periods of intense excitement. What’s more, science is as grimly competitive as the business world and equally dog-eat-dog, while its purpose—to judge by the behavior of some scientists—is primarily self aggrandizement.

So scientists are real people, like the rest of us.

That’s not to say that people don’t become scientists for all the right reasons. But let’s just say that if you’ve ever been appalled by the behavior of business executives, imagine the amount of ego involved when one needs a Ph.D. just to get through the door. Science can be like the business world on steroids.

The eye-opener for me in this context was the realization that real-life scientists don’t always tell the complete truth in their published papers.

At the time in question, I was working at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, otherwise known as Columbia Medical School, and one of our competitors at another research institution had just published the results of a study. We needed to replicate his procedures as a step in our own research, but could not do so no matter how hard we tried. Eventually, my superiors acknowledged what a less naïve practitioner than myself would have realized from the start: an important step or two had been left out of the published procedure, enabling the other lab to stay one or two discoveries ahead of us.

It happens all the time.

Not long after that, a researcher at a famous cancer institute was pilloried for falsifying the data for some ostensibly significant cancer research. This was a particularly egregious example of research falsification; along with a cluster of similar events, it led to public disillusionment with scientific research for some years to come.

So, scientists caught up in the pressure of competition—whether for the Nobel Prize or simply for teaching tenure—will sometimes mislead, exaggerate or outright falsify results. Those are the deliberate cases. Although I’m dropping the dime on some of these guys, I still believe that most scientists are perfectly honest people whose highest goal is finding the truth through the application of the scientific method.

Still, even the most honest of scientists get caught up in the way science can naturally, well… lie. It is inherent in the nature of the scientific model, which proposes a representation for some aspect of reality, that old models eventually wear out.

Eventually some piece of data comes along that simply does not fit the model that we all know to be correct. Whatever the law or theory, the day may come when new data no longer fits within its predictive framework. Think of Newton’s Law of Gravitation, the DNA genetic model, or the inheritance of male-pattern baldness. Chances are that what you think to be true just isn’t; or, it is at least mildly discordant with reality.

Almost everyone knows, for example, that so-called male pattern baldness is inherited from the mother. Baldness is caused by a gene carried on the Y (female) chromosome that is dominant in men and recessive in women. Thus, a man needs only one such gene to be bald, while a woman requires two–one on each Y chromosome. Women carry the gene without manifesting baldness and can pass it to their offspring; the sons who inherit the gene will be bald and the daughters will simply pass the gene on unless they obtain a second baldness gene from their father, in which case they too will be bald.

Practically everyone knows this description of baldness, and it is wrong. No one really has any reason to perpetuate such a myth; companies that sell baldness cures have no vested interest in convincing people of inaccurate models of baldness inheritance, since they simply sell their products to those who display its symptoms. Yet, the myth persists.

It is tempting to say that this is how bad science works. In reality, it is the way science works. First, someone proposes a theory to explain a phenomenon; in this case, the inheritance of baldness. They then test the theory by examining evidence to support or refute that theory. When Dorothy Osborn performed her baldness study in 1916, her findings supported her expectations. She published her findings, and they became common knowledge, since baldness was a subject of interest to many.

Her results were so logical that no one felt compelled to challenge them. Yet, by the 1980s, scientists knew that Osborn’s conclusions were not entirely sound. Today, no one really understands the inheritance of baldness in precise detail, because at this writing, we can’t account for the genes that cause it; it has been established, however, that the simple model described by Osborn is not adequate to describe all the data. It appears that several genes interact in concert to produce baldness, perhaps influenced by triggering factors we do not yet fully understand.

In any case, the original theory—-so appealing precisely because of its simplicity—-turns out not to contain the real scoop on genetic baldness, though it served as a close enough approximation for many years.

The same, of course, is true of Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. It works well enough for everyday phenomena, but calculations of planetary orbits (specifically, precession of the perihelion) using Newton’s equations show substantial error over time. Einstein’s general theory of relativity adequately accounts for currently available data, but it won’t astound most physicists if someday someone finds data that requires a revision to that theory, too.

This is simply the nature of science. As a consequence, what any of us believes to be true based on scientific study at any given point in time will likely be proven false or inadequate at some later point in time.

The latest casualty on the list of generally held Great Truths earned Crick and Watson the Nobel Prize in 1962.

There was tremendous beauty in the model Crick constructed to describe our genetic encoding in the DNA double helix with a one-to-one correspondence between the nucleic acid chains of our genes and the resulting proteins that form our living bodies. However, even while I was still involved in research, parts of the thread had begun to unravel as scientists came to realize that genetic transcription was prone to errors or dislocations, much like, say, translating novels between English and Japanese: What you got in the end was roughly equivalent, but might differ markedly at various points.

Specifically, gene splicing could occur in nature, with the order of genes scrambled slightly or simply inverted between two adjacent genes. Not a huge thing on the surface, maybe, but a slight disruption of the presumed order, in any case. And the simple one-to-one correspondence between DNA nucleotides and the proteins whose blueprints they contain has had to be thrown out completely. We now know that a given DNA sequence may control the generation of many proteins. The transcription from code to living being is far more complex than we once thought.

This is not to say that the works of Mendel, Crick and Watson have been completely thrown out the window. Their findings account for the vast majority of the data, but the simple elegance that gave their breathtaking models such beauty has given way to increasing layers of complexity.

As beautiful and as useful as these models may be, they are vastly simplified descriptions of the real world.

Nowhere do these general shortfalls of scientific knowledge prove more problematic than when we approach the long dreamed-of task of creating or designing life. Science has finally reached the point at which the technology exists to sculpt completely or refine slightly the properties of living beings. Many forms of life have already been genetically engineered, including mice, bacteria, corn, alfalfa, soybeans, tomatoes, potatoes, plums, papaya, and more.

The forefront of science generally, and of animal husbandry and agriculture in particular, has become the design of animals and crops based on genetic manipulation.

Some object on religious grounds that this is meddling with God’s design. Others—perhaps more accustomed to the visible incursions of science into daily life than the visible incursions of God—see all this as a step in the right direction, or at least as a predictable outcome: the culmination, if you will, of scientific endeavor, as presaged by Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and his monster.

Still others fear the outcome of this seemingly inevitable series of experiments, just as Frankenstein feared the actions of his monster and rued its creation.

It would be foolish to assert—as the major corporations that genetically modify food so often do—that genetically engineered (GE) crops are no different from conventional crops; if they were identical, there would be no reason to produce them in the first place. As potential improvements upon the naturally occurring varieties at hand, they hold alluring promise. There is an obvious draw in being able to shape or even control the properties of life.

But there is great irony here. Companies use genetic engineering not only as a means of modifying crops—which, except for transgenic strains containing genes from other organisms, might often be accomplished by conventional breeding—but as a means of establishing ownership through the questionable legal loophole that allows patenting organisms. This too has been presaged in works of fiction (think of the strange inventor of live toys in the movie Blade Runner) but has undesirable consequences that favor genetic manipulation on behalf of large companies purely for profit.

Wherever there is a large profit to be made, forces conspire to make that profitable outcome a reality.

Given the degree to which we dimly understand the mechanisms of gene expression and our even lesser ability to predict possible outcomes of genetic manipulation within the larger environmental context, there is indeed much to fear when such a powerful tool is turned over to those whose motivations are as transparent as their marketing literature. Perhaps even more disillusioning is the realization that genetic “engineering” is often nothing more than haphazard insertion of genetic material through a method that corresponds quite literally to a “shotgun” approach. That is, the desired genetic material is inserted into cells using golden “bullets” rather than some more precise and controlled means of insertion. On the cellular level, the results are chaotic and haphazard, with the point of insertion proving more or less random; some of the cells so treated survive to reproduce, many do not.

Back in my lab tech days at Columbia Medical School, Dr. David Nachmansohn, the discoverer of the acetylcholine/acetylcholinesterase cycle and the first to isolate these compounds from the tissues of electric fishes, was fond of quoting Einstein.

“God does not play dice with the universe!” he would bellow with a conviction that always amazed and delighted me.

Can we say the same about the modern-day gods who are busy designing the living beings and foods of our future?

I think not.