Man-made life : an overview of the science, technology and commerce of genetic engineering / Jeremy Cherfas.

  • Cherfas, Jeremy.
Date:
[1982], ©1982
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Man-made life : an overview of the science, technology and commerce of genetic engineering / Jeremy Cherfas. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/296 (page VI)
    viii Preface The revelations of genetic engineering are awesome and fascinating, but one cannot expect them to affect everyone in the same way. The practical benefits are closer to hand. In February 1982 an issue of the journal Science contained some unremarkable looking photographs. One showed a collection of bacteria, the sort of picture that is now fairly commonplace. The bacteria seemed a bit lumpy, but otherwise quite ordinary (see page 166 below). They were, in fact, insulin factories. The lumps were packages of insuhn, manufactured by the bacteria in response to instructions from a human insulin gene, deliberately placed in the bacteria by genetic engineers. The other photograph showed a collection of needle- shaped crystals (see page 179). They too looked quite ordinary, until one read that they were crystals of pure interferon. This wonder drug, scourge of viruses and possibly of cancer too, is so hard to obtain that its effects have not yet been properly evaluated. It has always been too impure and too scarce to crystallize. Now here were crystals of pure interferon, and like the insulin they too were made in bacteria according to instructions from a human. In this book you will find the details of how these, and other, marvels were achieved. The ability to create living organisms to order - 'man-made life' is no exaggeration - brings with it responsibilities. The furore that surrounded the birth of genetic engineering is testimony to the strong passions that this sort of power arouses. Many of us have a deep fear of genetic meddUng, a fear that Mary Shelley, for example, capitalized upon in her novel Frankenstein. The public response to the scientists' new abilities reflected that fear and uncertainty, and the scientists' own concern was indicated in their decision to halt experimentation while they assessed the com¬ pletely unknown risks. Now, almost ten years on, genetic engineering is seen as no more dangerous than other forms of microbiology. But the issues of safety and responsibility, and the effects that the commercial aspects of genetic engineering are having on the old academic freedoms, are still cause for concern. Those worries too are discussed in this book. With the knowledge we have today there can no longer be any excuse for the unin¬ formed debate that characterized the early stages. Back in 1977 Alfred Velluci, mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, asked the president of the National Academy of Sciences to investigate reports of a hairy, nine-foot creature with orange eyes. Velluci felt