The Intrinsic Value of Genes and Organisms

Department of Physics, The University of Auckland

Peter R Wills

From the perspective of modern biology what defines species is their genes. Species gradually diverge from one another when they stop interbreeding and the inheritance of their genes follows separate paths. This has been the guiding force of biological evolution for three or four billion years, but genetic engineering has put an end to its status as a natural principle. We have found ways to overcome the apparently arbitrary restrictions on what combinations of genes are found in organisms.

It is now possible to take human genes and put them into viruses, bacteria, plants, mice, sheep, cows and other animals. It is also possible to transpose foreign genes into human cells. From a technological perspective there is absolutely nothing special about human genes or cells. They can be analysed and manipulated in the same way as genes or cells from any other organism. From an engineering point of view human genes are just DNA molecules with particular sequences. And now that we know the sequence of the entire human genome, any human gene can be artificially synthesised at will and inserted into another organism.

Actually, we should no longer think of genes as DNA molecules, but as information. Genetic information is transmitted naturally through biological inheritance, but it can also be transmitted and stored artificially in whatever way we choose: as letters written on a page, as digital information burned onto a compact disk or, as is proposed for individuals, carried on a bracelet-chip ready for immediate access as a record of that person's unique set of distinguishing genetic features. The information in the human genome is considered so valuable that billions of dollars and enormous scientific effort have been expended to retrieve it for human use. It has become yet another material resource, a commodity, available for ownership and exploitation according to the rules and agreements of our globalised society.

But what about genetic information in itself, as it has been given to us by evolution and before we retrieved it for our own use? Do genes have intrinsic value? What respect, if any, should we afford human genes themselves? The way we answer these questions will have a profound effect on what it means to be human in the future. Our ability to manipulate human genes poses an existential dilemma of unprecedented proportions. We cannot escape deciding, as if handing down a judgment that will take immediate effect, what intrinsic value human genes have here and now. And when we put human genes into other organisms, the value of both changes irreversibly.

The intrinsic value of humans?

Before we change ourselves and our world forever, we should investigate very carefully the basis on which we identify and value ourselves as human. What is the relationship between humans and our evolutionary relatives, and how has it come about? Are our genes really our own? Do we have any broad responsibility for our genetic relationship with other species and the biological origins of our place in the world? There is a relatively recent point in time beyond which we cannot differentiate ourselves from other hominid species. The genes of all the hominid species have a recent common origin and they differ comparatively little from one another. After comparing our genes, we can say that the average difference between humans and chimpanzees seems to be only about 10 times the normal difference between two unrelated people. If we go back further through evolution we find that all cellular life derives from an ancient common ancestor. Yet we humans assume a position of enormous privilege above all other species, emphasising our separateness from, rather than our commonality with, other organisms.

Although it is not always recognised in practice, humanity, down to the level of the individual person, assigns itself a certain intrinsic value that is upheld by political and societal principles and institutions. Our genetic information, differentiated through the branching of the tree of life, is what makes us human, so if humans have intrinsic value does this mean our genes have intrinsic value? The prospect is odd. How could information, recorded in the form of sequences of molecules, accumulate intrinsic value, something immaterial, during the processes of evolution?

Science and intrinsic value

The idea of intrinsic value makes no sense within the Western scientific tradition. Science deals with general categories of material objects, their interactions and transformations. Even its methodology is said to produce value-free knowledge, dissociated from the details of any particular process of observation. From a scientific perspective values are arbitrarily assigned to things or situations in a way that is completely contingent on the assumptions or perspective of whoever makes the judgment. Scientists think of evolution as a series of events taking place in the material world, governed by dynamic physical processes, which are devoid of any intrinsic relationships to values. The idea of intrinsic value is foreign to science and within the context of science cannot be applied to genes or organisms - either human or non-human.

On the other hand, by applying scientific methods we can reconstruct the patterns of genetic change that have occurred during evolution. Sometimes we can even guess why a particular genetic change has conferred an advantage on some members of a species to the extent that no other members of the species survived. Here is where we must situate any concept we have of the intrinsic value of genes. The value a gene has lies in the selective advantage - the fitness for survival and reproduction - that it confers on the organism carrying it. And the most important feature of the selective advantage conferred by a genetic change is that it is always relative to the characteristics that alternative genetic sequences confer on the organism.

This means that the effect of any characteristic on the survival of organisms depends on the environment they are in, and that environment is at least partly determined by the genetically influenced traits of other species in the organism's ecological system. These complex influences on the mechanisms of genetic change could be described scientifically, but science avoids assigning any value to the coincidences of genetic patterns and historical events that constitute the survival of organisms. For science, value as survival is completely arbitrary. Yes, there are patterns in the genetic information of organisms. So what? Now we can change them and create new patterns.

Scientific knowledge and matauranga Māori

Science produces knowledge that makes a legitimate claim to being universal, but it is rarely noted that this 'universality' is restricted to a certain domain of experience. Knowledge derived from non-scientific perspectives does not always have the same limitations and can be a source of wisdom that transcends science. In our own country we have a living example of a non-Western perspective that does not take scientific agreement as the final arbiter of truth or sound decision-making.

Unlike science, matauranga Māori does not seek the ultimate foundations of reality in abstract principles that describe the behaviour of a purely material reality. Rather, Māori often express a sense of order and structure that is first and foremost local and historical, contingent on events and relationships established by precedent, not given unalterably and permanently as natural laws. In Māori tradition, achieving knowledge of something includes arriving at a perception of its proper location in time and space. Knowledge of things and events is concerned with the particularities of whakapapa - layers of genealogy and lines of descent, their patterns and linkages. Everything in the world is related to everything else and the true character of something is dependent on its history. Everything is rooted, not only to its origin in time, but also to its origin in space - the place and tradition of the tangata whenua to which it belongs. The relationship of people and events with the earth and its local geography, evoking the metaphor of an umbilical connection, is of particular poignancy in the contrast between scientific and Māori explanations of how things come about and what their value is.

We should not be surprised, then, to find that some Māori have been especially vocal in expressing opposition to aspects of projects that involve the engineering of human genes. The origin of the genetic material that was originally taken from an individual person and then amplified, analysed and transposed into another organism has often been a matter of special concern for Māori. The Royal Commission on Genetic Modification showed sensitivity to this perspective when it recommended that, wherever possible, synthetic genes or mammalian homologues of human genes should be used in transgenic animals, to avoid the use of genes derived directly from humans.

More broadly, rapprochement with Māori perspectives requires a renewal of cultural partnerships. We are now in a position to determine together what weight should be given to 'ancient' ways that are linked to a world view that does not give primacy to the scientific prescription of reality, and the 'modern' way that demands that we establish a single lowest common denominator based on narrowly prescribed global standards and specifications. Who, in the end, has the power to decide what ways of thinking will carry weight in our society? We do, if we choose to, and if we are courageous enough to live with the consequences. But shall we base our judgement on standards and processes that have been negotiated through consensual arrangements that follow from the Treaty of Waitangi? Or shall we conform to the demands and imposed force of current international commerce and global political power?

Expanding what it is to be human

In my opinion, we in Aotearoa / New Zealand should choose a path, contrary to global trends of recent years, that expands as far as possible what it means to be human in a direction that includes, rather than excludes, much of what we tend to look upon as non-human, as other, whether it is genes or organisms we are talking about. It seems to me that the most important genuinely humanitarian changes in recent history have been achieved by expanding the categories that are human rather than by limiting them. For example, being a citizen in a democracy is a privilege that has been extended to more and more humans over the last couple of centuries, encompassing the freeing of slaves and women's suffrage.

Accordingly, when we think of genes and other organisms we should think in a way that emphasises our commonality with other species and extends appropriate privileges to them in recognition of our shared ancestry and the relationships implicit in the tree of life. We should not rely on an antiquated notion that sets what is human above everything else in Nature. On what basis do we completely prohibit any engineering of our own species but allow the genetic engineering of animals after a brief process led by the Environmental Risk Management Authority?

If we decided to assign some intrinsic value to the orderly inter-species linkages that make up the tree of life, then we might want to place greater restrictions on what genetic engineers are allowed to do to other species. This would mean imposing a need to show respect for the precedents that the historical processes of evolution have established. The genetic engineering we currently allow reduces the value of the orderly linkages of the tree of life to pure utility. Our relatedness to other species is exploited for potential commercial gain, as was the case of the Waikato sheep that were used as bioreactors for the production of a human protein, which, it was hoped, might eventually be sold as a pharmaceutical product.

It is part of the methodology of scientific engineering to make use of whatever in the natural order is available without assigning any intrinsic value to it. Considerations of value or respect that should belong to the objects being engineered, or their relationships, are superfluous to the engineering methods themselves. Just to prove that it is possible, humans have put into a rhesus monkey a gene from jellyfish that is capable of making the animal's cells fluorescent green. An engineer can put a human gene into a bacterium in an afternoon; or create cows that graze in a field and for all ordinary intents and purposes cannot be distinguished from ordinary cows except that they carry human genes and produce humanoid proteins.

If we are going to move beyond our current anthropocentric and utilitarian ethics of genetic engineering then we must first recognise that the genes that we call human are simply our versions of genes that also belong to other species - in many cases all other species. We could start by exploring how our view of genes would change if we inverted the usual relationship between science and matauranga Māori. Suppose we decided to subject the scientific conception of genes as pure information, dissociated from any physical or historical associations, to the Māori conception of phylogenies as whakapapa, bound to the circumstances and conditions of their occurrence and subject to appropriate tikanga. This would be a radical reversal of current trends. We would be saying that genes are to be given a status beyond their scientific, technical specifications.

I would argue that this is exactly the way of thinking that the character of genes requires. There is something in the unity and diversity of biological processes that points to and marks what happens at particular times and places as being uniquely differentiated from everything else, while simultaneously being related to it. Whakapapa gives vibrant voice to the character of Nature's history in a way that leaves science mute in the ethical, spiritual and cultural dimensions of human life. But, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, genetic engineering is refashioning the orderly linkages of whakapapa in its own image, having denied that either genes or organisms have any intrinsic value in the first place.

From an evolutionary perspective, what does it mean to put a human gene into a sheep or a cow? The genetic make-up of domesticated animals has been shaped and moulded by thousands of years of selective breeding conducted by generations of farmers. Much of this breeding is now done using artificial techniques, especially in industrial societies where many aspects of the formerly close domestic relationship with animals have been abandoned. The tendency for the value of these friends of humans to be measured in purely commercial terms has been taken to a new extreme. Sheep, cows and goats have all been converted, by putting human genes into them, into bioreactors for the production of humanoid proteins. I am not completely opposed in principle to every possible instance of genetically engineering an animal, but I do believe it is not something that should be done with impunity, outside of a deep intuition and understanding of the relationship between species. Genetic engineering changes the relationship between our species in an unprecedented way. Is it of no consequence that domestication involves the reciprocity of friendship between species?

What do I mean by reciprocity? It is highly probable that just as humans have altered the genetic make-up of domestic animals, so domestic animals have made a significant contribution to the genetic constitution of humans. We can reasonably surmise that the presence of domesticated animals has produced variations in individual human survivability, and thereby caused biological modification of our species, over tens of thousands of years. Possibly even the emotions that humans are capable of feeling are influenced by genetic features that have been acquired as a result of these selective pressures. If so, the character of what we take to be uniquely human, the conscious identification of the individual 'self', owes a debt to the other species with whom our ancestors formed societies. And we could recognise that debt by extending to other species privileges and rights of the sort that we claim for ourselves as humans on account of our selfhood.

Note that I have not said that we should attempt to extend exactly the same rights and privileges to members of other species. But I believe that the right not to be genetically engineered should be extended quite generally to the species with whom we have close genetic and social relationships. And if it turns out that the only way to give life to some humans is to put human genes into some animals, then those chimaeric beings should be given a very special status in recognition of the extreme imposition that we have placed them under, arbitrarily rearranging their very constitution for our benefit, down to the DNA in every one of their cells. Our current laws, conceived primarily in terms of protecting animals from immediate physical cruelty, are hopelessly ill equipped to deal with these realities of genetic engineering.

These brief comments about our relationships with animals serve only to demonstrate some of the considerations that have been neglected in discussions of the ethical, spiritual and cultural aspects of human genes in other organisms. Very different arguments need to be brought to bear on the question of human genes in laboratory mice, in plants, or in micro-organisms, but in each case the perspective offered by inquiring into the intrinsic value of genes and organisms must be adopted at some stage. Genetic engineering starkly confronts us with the question of the intrinsic value of life itself, its entire history and evolution. On the basis of my own respect for the complexity of biology and its historically determined structure, I oppose the release of genetically engineered organisms, including those that contain human genes, from contained laboratory conditions. By introducing the products of genetic engineering into the open environment where they can invade natural genealogies we have started reducing the ordered tree of life to a twisted heap of broken twigs. If we take the process to its ultimate conclusion, future generations will curse us for our arrogance.

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