Helmintholog

piece by Freeman Dyson, which I found when catching up with the NYRB: he foresees personal biotech kits, analogous to personal computers.

The first step in this direction was already taken recently, when genetically modified tropical fish with new and brilliant colors appeared in pet stores. For biotechnology to become domesticated, the next step is to become user-friendly. I recently spent a happy day at the Philadelphia Flower Show, the biggest indoor flower show in the world, where flower breeders from all over the world show off the results of their efforts. I have also visited the Reptile Show in San Diego, an equally impressive show displaying the work of another set of breeders. Philadelphia excels in orchids and roses, San Diego excels in lizards and snakes. The main problem for a grandparent visiting the reptile show with a grandchild is to get the grandchild out of the building without actually buying a snake.
Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too.
Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.

And what wonderful bats will arise from this battiness!

One of the reasons I am not a Christian is that I speak theology quite well. I am naturally gifted in seeing the world that way, so much so that I can never be certain whether I mean or believe the eleoquent things I sometimes say. And if I don’t know, then why should I suppose that anyone else does, when they speak?

None the less, some of the facts that Christianity tries to explain, and some of its assumptions, seem to me as close to axiomatic as an empirical fact can be. And I am always surprised that people misunderstand — for example — original sin as being a doctrine that sex is dirty. But when Augustine thought it was transmitted at the moment of conception, I don’t think he meant that we wouldn’t get it if our parents didn’t fuck; or, if he did, he shouldn’t have. He meant, surely, something much more like one of the central insights of Darwinism: that individual life necessarily involves differential survival, failure, great pain, and injustice. Conception in that sense is important as the moment of individuation, not the one connected to fucking. Otherwise, identical twins would have identical sins.

[Of course this is compatible with both evolutionary and non-evolutionary world views. That’s another question set of possible answers]

I was put in mind of this by Nature’s admirable rss service this morning, which carries a report on MS research¹ using mice:

Experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) models demyelinating autoimmune diseases, like multiple sclerosis. Researchers induce EAE by injecting animals with myelin components. These animals subsequently develop autoimmune responses to myelinated axons. Like multiple sclerosis, EAE induces demyelination, inflammation, neural death and paralysis. EAE severity is scored on a numerical scale, with higher numbers indicating increased severity.

I know enough about MS — and I have seen a friend die of a related disease — to be entirely in favour of animal experimentation as the lesser evil. But it remains lesser — it doesn’t lose an evil quality. “Original Sin”, for me, has a lot to do with the fact that we can only cure humans by caging and then torturing mice, not as some kind of voodoo ritual, but because that is the very best way to understand and then change the evils of the world.

Having got that far, a new thought occurs: suppose our understanding of mice grows so great that we can build a silicon mouse, like the virtual worm of which c. elegans researchers dreamed? Would that remove the stain? No. It would not. The only model on which we could rely would be one which told us little we had not already found out by other means and nothing which we could not check. I think. A computer model on which we had to rely and whose outcome we could never check against reality — well that would have free will, which is another theological conundrum.

¹ (there is a similar one which involves provoking variously aggressive lung cancers in mice)