The Stubborn Gene

'TOPSY-TURVY' HISTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC WORLD

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which showed how all of life is interrelated, was a major advance in our understanding of the world in materialistic - physicochemical - terms. The breakthroughs of biologists Theodor Schwann and Louis Pastuer during the second half of the nineteenth century were also an important step forwards. Rotting meat did not spontaneously yield maggots; rather, familiar biological agents and processes were responsible - in this case egg-laying flies. The idea of spontaneous generation was long gone and finally discredited.

However, despite these advances, the theory that the origin and phenomenon of life are dependent on a force or principle distinct from purely chemical or physical forces, a.k.a - vitalism had been lingered on in the earlier centuries. Many biologists, reluctant to accept natural seletion as the sole determinant of the fate of evolutionary lineages had invoke a poorly defined overseeing spiritual force to account for. Physicists, accustomed to dealing with a simple diminished world - a few particles, a few forces - found the messy complexity of biology confusing. Perhaps they had suggested, the processes at the heart of the cell, the ones governing the basics of life, go beyond the familiar laws of physics and chemistry.

This is why the double helix was so important. It brought the enlightenment's revolution of materialistic thinking into the cell. The intellectual journey that had begun in 1500s with Copernicus suggesting the revolution of earth around the sun and not the other way around to Darwin's insistence that humans are merely modified monkeys had finally focused in on the very essence of life. And there was nothing special about it. It was the double helix, the elegant structure. Its message is unimaginative yet a matter-of-fact: LIFE IS SIMPLY A MATTER OF CHEMISTRY.

This emerged a new discipline in science: Molecular Biology, new science whose progress over the last fifty years has been astounding. Not only has it yielded new insights into fundamental biological processes, but it is now having an ever more profound impact on medicine, on agriculture, and on the law. DNA is no longer a matter of interest only to white-coated scientists in an industrial laboratory or some university laboratory; it affects us all.

By the mid-sixties, scientists had worked out the basic mechanics of the cell, and they knew how, via the 'genetic code', the four-letter alphabet of DNA sequence is translated into the twenty-letter alphabet of the proteins - CENTRAL DOGMA - See video below.

The next explosion in the new science's growth came in the 1970s with the introduction of techniques for manipulating DNA and reading its sequence of base pairs. We were no longer condemned to just watch nature affecting us but could actually try to mend with the DNA of living organisms, and we could actually read life's basic script. And now extraordinary new scientific ventures have opened up: scientists would at last treat genetic diseases from cystic fibrosis to cancer; they have also been revolutionizing criminal justice through genetic fingerprinting methods ever since. Scientists are now able to profoundly revise ideas about human origins - about who we are and where we came from - by using DNA based approaches to prehistory. They also have been improving agriculturally important species with an effectiveness we had previously only dreamed of.

"Today, we are learning the language in which God created life. With this profound new knowledge, humankind is on the verge of gaining immense, new power to heal", were the words by U.S. president Bill Clinton in 2000. The genome project was a coming-of-age for molecular biology: it had become big science, with big money and big results. Not only was it an extraordinary technological achievement - the amount of information mined from the human complement of twenty three pairs of chromosomes is staggering - but it was also a landmark in terms of our idea of what is to be human. It is our DNA that distinguishes us from all other species, and that makes us the creative, conscious, dominant, destructive creatures that we are. And here, in its entirety, was that set of DNA - the human instruction book.

However, it is also clear that the science of molecular biology - what DNA can do for us - still has a long way to go. Cancer still has to be cured; effective gene therapies for genetic diseases still have to be developed; genetic engineering still has to realize its phenomenal potential for improving our food. But all these things will come. The future will see many more scientific advances, but increasingly the focus will be on DNA's ever greater impact on the way we live.