The Economist recently ran a story under the headline: Genetically Modified People. The graphic was itself appropriately graphic.
The point of the piece was that human beings’ ancestors routinely absorbed genes from other species. The article began:
OPPONENTS of genetically modified crops often complain that moving genes between species is unnatural. Leaving aside the fact that the whole of agriculture is unnatural, this is still an odd worry. It has been known for a while that some genes move from one species to another given the chance, in a process called horizontal gene transfer. Genes for antibiotic resistance, for example, swap freely between species of bacteria. Only recently, though, has it become clear just how widespread such natural transgenics is. What was once regarded as a peculiarity of lesser organisms has now been found to be true in human beings, too.
Alastair Crisp and Chiara Boschetti of Cambridge University, and their colleagues, have been investigating the matter. Their results, just published in Genome Biology, suggest human beings have at least 145 genes picked up from other species by their forebears. Admittedly, that is less than 1% of the 20,000 or so humans have in total. But it might surprise many people that they are even to a small degree part bacterium, part fungus and part alga.
The article was picked up by a Reuters blog, which explored the GM issue, and organisations' anti-GM stances. The Economist, which is pro a careful development of GM technology (as, for the record, am I) on the grounds that it will be beneficial to humans and not harmful to wildlife, ends its piece like this:
Altogether, the researchers found two imported genes for amino-acid metabolism, 13 for fat metabolism and 15 which are involved in the post-manufacture modification of large molecules. They also identified five immigrants that generate antioxidants and seven that are part of the immune system.
This is quite a catalogue. If anything similar were inserted by genetic engineers into corn or cattle, there would no doubt be an outcry. In humans, however, they are doing a good job. It is fair to point out that many of them seem to have been cohabiting with the line that led to humanity for millions of years, and both sides have thus had ample time to adjust. Nevertheless there was once a moment for all of them when they were just as alien as a bacterial insecticide is in a maize plant or a herbicide-resistance gene is in a soyabean.
I thought of all this as I watched the BBC's all-too-superficial Panorama on Monday night with its clutch of defensive and seemingly quite out of touch NGOs, whose arguments, which all call for proof of safety, can never be countered. How convenient and comforting for them. The suggestion by a number of folk that new GM crops should be considered on a case-by-case basis seems a rational one, given that they are all so different one from another, and that we are some 20 years into the technology.
Anyway. back to humans; just how GM do you feel today? This seems a good question to ask students everywhere.
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