Repeating history in playing God

Carl Zimmer has a good post on the history of fears over genetic engineering. The fears people had over changing E. coli 30 years ago mirror the things we hear about genetically modified crops or gene therapy today. To this I could add the history of plant breeding documented by Nina Fedoroff in Mendel in the Kitchen. There was talk of playing God and assaulting nature when hybrid crops were first introduced, with the use of plant cell culture techniques, with the use of radiation to induce mutations, with grafting, and with the new varieties produced by Luther Burbank. All of these were seen as abominations against the order of nature, but are completely accepted today and are responsible for almost everything we eat.

In addition to the points made by Zimmer and Fedoroff, I would like to add that a common misperception of genes underlies much of the opposition. Genes are somehow seen as the essence of an organism. People have no problem with extracting a chemical from a plant or animal and using it in humans. We don't have a problem with moving an organ from one human to another. We accept blood transfusions. We don't have a problem with products made from the proteins of an animal. When I take an antibiotic, I am taking a compound made by a fungus or other organism into my body. But genes are seen as different. Genes are the essence of a creature, and if we take a gene from one organism and put it into another, it is changing the essence of life, unlike all of the other examples.

A gene just codes for a protein. How is introducing a gene different from introducing the protein product it makes? There is nothing specifically human about a human gene or a pig gene. Evolution shows us they are just variants of the same protein and are often interchangeable. I argued this in more detail before.

The problem with the opposition demonstrated by Zimmer and Fedoroff and others, and that we see today, is that it makes it hard to distinguish between the serious arguments and the specious ones. We should proceed with care with any new technology. Technologies like gene therapy do pose serious issues from health risks to costs to possible abuses for cosmetic enhancements. But serious issues are drowned out by the cacophony of voices complaining about how this is not natural and exaggerated fears.