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UNRAVELING THE SECRET OF LIFE: DNA self-duplication, the basic precept of biotechnology, is denied

by Barry Commoner
GeneWatch
May-June 2003

References

Unraveling the DNA Myth: The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering

by Barry Commoner
Harper's Magazine
February 2002

Synopsis
References

The Paradigm Shift

I am happy to return the compliment. Matt Scholz, M.R. and several other respondents who have made the same point are right; there is a paradigm shift under way. The question at issue is this: Is the cardinal, and thus far unique, property of living things, inheritance, an attribute of one of its singular molecular components, DNA, or is it instead inherent in the complex chemical system that comprises living matter?

The enormous proliferation of molecular genetics since the discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953 has operated on the premise that DNA is, in fact, the sole molecular source of genetic information. Yet, in the mountain of data generated by this effort, there are repeated instances of "unexpected" results. The most prominent example is, of course, the Human Genome Project, which showed that there are far too few genes to account for the number of human proteins or for the vast inherited differences between people and plants.

In the ordinary course of science, an "unexpected" experimental result is a signal that there is something wrong in the interactive connection between theory and experiment. The logical response is to improve the theory, testing it by experiment until the results are predictable - and the theory has been changed. Molecular genetics has not followed this course, so that despite a growing array of discordant results, the basic DNA-dominant precept persists. It is significant that a recent survey (in the September 10, 2002, issue of Nature)⁵ of efforts to encourage collaboration between physicists and molecular biologists concluded that "Physics is theory driven; molecular biology has become an empirical and descriptive science...an exercise in molecular stamp collecting."

The practical consequences of applying a science that lacks a theoretical foundation properly responsive to experimental results are evident in the recent experience with transgenic plants and animals. Despite the scarcity of detailed publications, the efforts to produce useful transgenic plants clearly have had a high percentage of failures. According to a report by the Committee of the Royal Society of Canada,⁶ "It is, in fact, an accepted part of the genetic engineering of plants to screen for unusual phenotypes within the primary populations of transgenic crops generated in the laboratory. These will usually be discarded and only those ones displaying apparently normal phenotypes will be carried through for further analysis and/or breeding...." In other words, the transgenic plants that are commercialized are the apparently normal survivors of a large number of experiments that produced plants that were hopelessly abnormal and therefore discarded. Indeed, plant biotechnologists boast that their commercial transgenic products are the survivors winnowed from far more numerous failures. Nor are the commercialized survivors necessarily normal; as we know, field testing is rarely done, and in Roundup Ready soybeans it has already been found that the host's own DNA is disrupted.

A more detailed study on animal cloning has been reported by a committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.⁷ Compiling all available data on various animal species, the committee found that of a total of 12,260 successfully formed embryos, there were only 207, or 1.6 percent, live births and a wide array of abnormalities occurred in these surviving clones. Even more important than this high rate of failure is the committee's conclusion that:

"Although healthy clones can in some cases be produced, success is not a reproducible phenomenon [emphasis added], and the precise molecular mechanisms responsible for the high rate of failure are almost entirely unknown.... [The failures] arise from the accumulated effects of sometimes unpredictable and stochastic (random) errors in several independent biological processes."

These failures, and the even more distressing ones that have occurred in clinical trials of human gene therapy, exemplify the crucial testing ground of the conventional DNA-dominated precept of molecular genetics: the behavior of a gene transferred into an alien cellular environment. According to conventional theory, in such a transgenic organism, the newly incorporated gene should reproducibly engender, in its unaccustomed host, protein products identical - in their amino acid sequence, folded configuration, and biochemical activity - to those produced in the gene's normal cellular environment. Anything short of absolute identity in these readily measurable molecular characteristics contradicts the rule that the gene's DNA sequence is the sole source of its protein product's molecular features. Moreover, this rule is also violated if the transgenic host's complement of genes and proteins is altered in their normal molecular structures and functions. Of course, this is an extraordinarily rigorous test of the conventional theory, but it is demanded by the extraordinary, absolute power that this theory ascribes to the DNA gene - and which is relied on in its commercial, agricultural and medical applications. There is no evidence that this challenge has yet been met on any appreciable scale, for example with respect to the trillions of transgenic crop plants now grown in the United States. If there are individual published transgenic experiments that meet the test, they have thus far proven to be hard to find. And the growing array of discordant data include instances in which the test has been applied, and failed.

In this way, the Harper's article and, even more, the numerous responses to it help to define the scientific and technological arenas in which the paradigm shift must play out - not only the basic areas of research, but its application to transgenic plant crops and animals, to bacterial production of therapeutic proteins, and to the mitigation of human disease. For our part, we at the CBNS Critical Genetics Project plan to serve as a resource for the assembly and critical analysis of the relevant data.