Banner Year for Science
Scientists had one of their most visionary years ever in 1997. Looking outward for signs of life in the solar system and peering inward at the source of most earthly life, DNA, they amassed information that will take years to interpret. They did not see, of course, with their eyes alone.
They explored the solar system with two probes that cost a fraction of the manned Apollo missions to the moon but yielded far greater returns of data. NASA sent Sojourner to Mars with a spectrometer that found chemicals suggesting the Red Planet was once warm and wet enough to support life. Deeper in space, the Galileo space probe photographed signs of an underground ocean on the Jovian moon Europa that would make Europa the solar system’s only known water-bearing body except Earth.
Aiming at targets closer to home, scientists used a new generation of stadium-sized machines called synchrotons to cast light beams bright enough to detect individual atoms. The huge machines unveiled such secrets as the manner in which DNA is tightly coiled within individual cells. This year the bold implications of the DNA teams’ work became apparent. At UC San Francisco, molecular biologist Frank McCormick began testing on humans an adenovirus (a cause of the common cold) that he had genetically programmed to find, invade and kill human tumor cells. Last year, McCormick found that the virus rid experimental mice of tumors, and preliminary results suggest it could aid humans.
The year’s most tantalizing scientific event was Ian Wilmut’s February announcement that he had created Dolly the lamb, the first animal ever cloned from a cell taken from an adult. Since the mid-1970s, scientists had been able to reproduce small segments of DNA, but until the surprise announcement by Wilmut, a Scottish embryologist, most scientists had dismissed as impossible the idea of duplicating a mammal from an adult cell.
This month a team of researchers led by Wilmut surprised us again with another giant leap in cloning. As with Dolly, the researchers began by isolating a single cell from an adult ewe. But before cloning it, they altered its genetic structure by inserting new sequences of DNA, including a human gene for a blood clotting agent. They succeeded in creating three identical lambs that contained the human gene and thus are able to produce a blood clotting factor that Wilmut and colleagues hope to sell as a medical agent to help hemophiliacs. Clearly cloning can not only serve as a kind of biological Xerox machine but also become a technique for changing the heredity of mammals, including human beings. California legislators, understandably unnerved by the implications, passed the nation’s first (and to date only) state ban on human cloning.
Science has leapfrogged legislators’ and citizens’ ability to understand many aspects of it, and some concrete measures to shape its development should be considered. For instance, Congress should consider two pending bills that would prohibit health insurers from discriminating against people with “defective” genes. And legal bodies like the Federal Judicial Center should train some judges in science and assign them certain cases, rather than expecting all judges to understand the science-based cases flooding the nation’s courtrooms.
But it’s important to keep laws permissive enough to allow researchers like McCormick to work with the cold virus or other scientists to understand how individual genes can be turned on and off. The key is to apply new scientific knowledge in ways that affirm rather than undermine the application of old values like common sense and compassion.
