Genetic Engineering
Mapping the Human Genome
We have the intestines of chickens
to tell the fortunes of war.
We have slaves
that they might be silent.
We have stones
that we might build.
Why then should we trouble the gods?
Osip Mandelstam, “Nature is the Same Rome…”
Genetics is a very young science. The theory of evolution was
not forwarded until the late 1850s. In 1866 the Austrian
monk Gregor Mendel had begun to attempt to pry open the
secret of creation when he published the results of his controlled
pollination of the garden pea, but his discoveries were
ignored for the rest of the century, and Galton never learned
of them.
Even the discovery of the mechanism of fertilization
as a union of the nuclei of male and female sex cells was not
made until 1875; 1888 saw the discovery of certain deeply
stained bodies in cell nuclei, which were christened “chromosomes,”
and in 1909 the word “gene” came to be applied to the
Mendelian factors of heredity.
The first in vitro fertilization
(rabbit and also monkey) was not achieved until 1934, and as
for the double helical structure of DNA, its discovery dates
44 Future Human Evolution
back only to 1953. This is all so recent that although early
eugenicists had set their goals and methods they were largely
ignorant of the mechanisms involved.
The mapping of the human genome is still in an early
stage. The amount we don’t know vastly dwarfs what we do
know.
There appear to be approximately three billion bases,
or chemical letters, making up the nucleotide sequences that
form 20,000 to 25,000 genes which code directly for proteins.
Just how genes and the proteins they produce interact is still
poorly understood.52
But protein-coding genes comprise only 2% of the human
genome. The functions of other DNA sequences are still
largely a mystery.
We do know that some of them contain
switches that turn genes on and off, and we have learned that
at the ends of the chromosomes there are telomeres, whose
shortening appears to be related to the aging process, and
nonfunctional genomic parasites, whose only function in our
bodies seems to be to replicate themselves. An estimated 40-
48% consists of repeat sequences.
Even after sequencing the
genome, we will still have to determine how these data relate
to expression. The sequences are only the parts list to a grand
machine, the outlines of which we are only beginning to
trace.
Scholarly opinion is rapidly growing more cognizant of
the role of genes in human society. In 1998, University of
Massachusetts political scientist Diane Paul wrote that just
fourteen years earlier, in 1984, she had labeled as
“hereditarian” or “biological determinist” the view that
differences in mentality and temperament were substantially
influenced by genes – employing these terms as
though their meanings were unproblematic. That usage
today would surely be contested.
For the view implicitly
disparaged by these labels is once again widely accepted
by scientists and the public alike.53
The bottom line is that with every day we gain greater
knowledge and that in the not all that distant future we will
be able to predict, with a high degree of certainty, the genetic
load that we are passing on to future generations.
Reference:
Mapping the Human Genome, the Future Human Evolution E-Book
by John Glad Ph.D
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