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Genetics and the Manipulation of Life: The Forgotten Factor of Context (Renewal in Science) | Paperback

by Craig Holdrege (Author)

List Price:

$14.95

Binding:

Paperback

Publisher:

Lindisfarne Books

Page Count:

190 Pages

Publication Date:

September 01, 1996

Sales Rank:

1,129,429st

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

Product Description
A provocative work that challenges our common assumptions about nature and science, this book is for all who want to understand the biological revolution of the late 20th century. Clearly written, well-illustrated, and without unnecessary technical jargon, Holdrege describes through fascinating examples how living organisms develop and exist within the context of their environment, and asserts that genes alone cannot determine organisms because their effects are always qualified by the contexts within which the organisms live. With a unique and probing perspective on contemporary science, Holdrege shows how scientific theory and practice inevitably fuse to produce the systems that will ultimately create our future, and he questions our understanding of the organisms we manipulate through genetic engineering and the consequences of such manipulation. In an age when we are able to reshape life on earth, this book offers a deeper, more complex vision of nature, and gives us the means for establishing a more conscious and responsible connection to the world around us. From the Renewal in Science series.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 3 reviews)

The Pinned Butterfly Effect by Andre (Amherst, MA)

5 Stars
August 06, 2008
Because it is so filled with philosophical quotes - from Hegel, Emerson, Alfred North Whitehead, etc. - one might be tempted to think that in Genetics and the Manipulation of Life: The Forgotten Factor of Context, Craig Holdrege is theorizing about science as a discipline from a postmodern viewpoint. Nothing could be further from the truth. Holdrege is in debt to a decidedly earlier philosopher and scientist, Goethe, whose method he imitates, and whom he quotes freely and happily. "If we want to reach a living perception of nature," Goethe wrote, "we must become as living and flexible as nature herself." (42) This sentiment is echoed later in Holdrege's own words, which conclude the book: "A contextual approach is not to be looked at as yet another solidified doctrine or theory. Rather, it is a necessary complement to the prevailing conceptions and practices of contemporary science. It is a way of making science a healthier whole, modeled after the organisms it studies." (173) Both Goethe's and Holdrege's methods of science rely heavily on observation without jumping to conclusions. They advise letting conclusions emerge themselves from repeated observations. We should not try to fill that space between prior knowledge and the unknown with theory. Nature will fill the gaps itself if we are patient and careful in observation. This unpredictability in method thus follows the unpredictability of nature itself rather than attempting to control it, and so is likely to yield a better understanding of the natural world. In his book, Holdrege reveals how and why the history of the science of genetics is riddled with presumptuous conclusions. Holdrege's thrust is the condemnation of geneticists' collective dismissal of the natural context of organisms (including environment, but also behavior) in favor of what he refers to as "object-thinking", the seeing of isolated "things" rather than relationships. Holdrege is not content with typical reductionism-is-bad arguments, but instead provides real examples. A few exceptions to the genetic model of inheritance would be glaring - the wealth of examples he provides is damning. He shows this, at first, through botany. Silhouettes of leaf and flower and root structures are provided to show changes in plant development based on variations in soil and light conditions. The differences are striking and extreme. A dandelion grown in the woods, for example, is shown to have leaves well over four times the size than those of a dandelion which grows in the yard. "If we now imagine one of these plants producing seeds that are dispersed by the wind, we may correctly suppose that the offspring will develop according to the conditions in each different microhabitat. The seeds from the small-leafed plants will not develop into tiny forest-clearing plants; we find no such plants in forest clearings." (22) Given the ubiquity of dandelion seeds, this is, of course, no coincidence. Rather, the organism's relationship to the environment heavily influences the size of the organism, within a very large range of forms. In other plants, a difference in soil quality - sand loam for one, garden soil for another of the same species - create differentiation so stark that the plants appears at first to be of different species all together. Holdrege cites research done by French botanist Gaston Bonnier, who noticed that these differences in the same species in different environments go down to a cellular level. It would be wrong-headed, Holdrege tells us, to assume that these changes did not echo throughout the entire organism. "...while the roots, in direct contact with the soil, change according to soil type, so does every other part in a similar way. The part serves the whole, but the whole also lives in every part." (34) Such a statement poses problems for the reductionist-functional view of evolution by random genetic mutation. If every part changes as the whole develops, how can separate features of an organism be viewed as aspects that developed independently of the rest of the organism? Either all of it changes, Holdrege suggests, or nothing does. A mutated sheep with an extra leg does not die prematurely because it has an extra leg. Rather the extra leg is a reflection of an unhealthy development. Furthermore, the changes in one part of an organism, echoed throughout the rest, change its relationship to the environment, which in turn changes its morphology, all in a rather cyclical motion. The roots of broad bean and rape plants form larger nodules in garden soil than sand loam. The bacterial-plant relationship is altered in regards to environment (27). Cultivations of greater numbers of bacteria are obviously not incidental when it comes to the health of the plant or symbiosis, which are intertwined with one another. It may be tempting at first to understand environmental influence on morphology as a plant-specific phenomena. So embedded in the earth, it is easier to view plants as an expression of their environments than any other organism - which, aside from some fungi and select exceptions in the other five kingdoms, are mobile. This is perhaps why geneticists are so apt to study animals, which do not display such extreme morphological variety in regards to environment. However, as Holdrege explains, animals, rather than having morphological plasticity as plants do, have a plasticity of behavior. Like weather, animals respond to the environment with varying reactions because they are so mobile. They have what Holdrege calls a "behavioral environment". In other words, whereas a plant has a vocabulary in its form, an animal expresses its relationships most obviously with its behavior. Perhaps for the sake of zoologists, Holdrege does not confine his investigation to plants. He ventures into the animal kingdom several times, but most notably with the example of the human foot, the very appendage of locomotion. He painstakingly details the development of the human foot in accordance to its environment and the individual's behavior. "The feet we walk on when we are seven are not the ones we inherited." (142) Interestingly, geneticists often view genes as a static thing, even as they are examining animals, which are mobile. But this is ideological, not scientific. Genes themselves are not examined in time (that is, in the context of dynamic change), nor in the context of their environment: the organism. Constant development is a prerequisite of nearly all life. To examine stillness in biology is contradictory; it is to examine death. Indeed, death is so often that which produces the genes to be studied. Holdrege details the typical acquisition of sequenced genomes from a mouse: "The mouse is killed and its thymus is immediately frozen...The frozen tissue in a salt solution is homogenized in a mixer for three minutes. The homogenized pulp is centrifuged at three thousand revolutions per minute for ten minutes. A separation takes place, and the more solid precipitate is saved; the more fluid portion is discarded. Centrifugation is usually repeated one or two times. Then a salt solution and alcohol are added, and a milky white precipitate begins to form in the solution. This...can be further purified in additional steps by adding specific enzymes or other substances. When alcohol is added again, white threads form, which can be rolled up onto a glass rod. One now has DNA in hand!" (101-102) To someone unfamiliar with DNA extraction processes, this would no doubt seem daunting and strange. All this takes place before the DNA is separated into distinct genes and sequenced. Certainly, this is incongruous with the common perception of genes as "things" that one can simply look at through a microscope. This is not to say that the sequenced pairs of nitrogenous bases in the nucleotides of DNA have nothing to do with inheritance, but one can see through this description of extraction process that they cannot possibly exist inside the organism in the same state in which they are examined in a laboratory. Referencing David Bower, environmentalist David Foreman once said, "...you can't take a California Condor out of the wild and put it in the L.A. zoo and still have a Condor, because the being of the Condor does not end at those black feathers at the tips of its wings. It's the rising thermals over the Coast Range. It's the rocky crag where she lays her egg. It's the carrion she feeds on." In genetics, the rapidly spun, alcohol-processed, partially discarded, salt-added, rolled-up threads are often considered to be not just the organism, but - if the geneticist subscribes to the idea that organisms are "vehicles" for genes - the organism's reason for being. If it seems surprising that genetics as a science is based on such far-reaching jumps in logic, that's only because the history of genetics is not often exposed as tellingly as it is in Holdrege's book. He starts with Mendel, finding the very foundations of the science wanting. Scrutinizing Mendel's experiments reveal the depth of its arbitrariness. Mendel famously tried to determine inheritance of features by examining the flowers and seeds of pea plants. He separated the plants based on specific features, and into two categories in each case, and these categories were based on Mendel's discretion: purple flowers vs. white flowers, yellow seeds vs. green seeds, and round seeds vs. angular seeds. When we look closely at a plant, no matter what the plant, we will see variations at every level. There are no plants with only purple flowers or only white flowers. The flowers vary in color. Some are lighter purple than others. Some are whitish-purple. Others are more distinct. Mendel ignored this, even in the case of the less-easy to dichotomize factor of seed shape. How flat must a round seed be before it is angular? His reason for doing so was that it was not important to him, because he was not examining a process or a spectrum. Instead he was looking for a causative agent, a thing that determines variation. Because of this, each trait was chosen for its tendency to not vary too often or all that much, and each trait was understood as separate from the other traits. Then a direct one-to-one relationship between each trait of the parent plant and each of the offspring plants was determined. "Mendel's approach is similar to watching a basketball game while attending only to the score - that is, noting only whether or not the ball passes through the hoop...(all the other) facets of the game, however, are still there to be viewed even when they are not attended to. Mendelian genetics rigorously ignores essential aspects of the organism's life...Presentations of Mendelian genetics usually do not clearly delineate the reduced field of phenomena he worked with. But this restriction is critical, because all subsequent explanations will pertain only to the reduced field." (55) This flawed foundation has become a disaster for genetics. Unable to determine what a gene actually is, geneticists after Mendel were nonetheless willing to attribute all aspects of organismic development to genes. A famous genetic textbook stated, "...genes determine what kind of an individual a representative of a given species is going to be." This determinism was echoed all the way up the classification chain, and yet a confession furtively followed; of genes and their actual nature, "...one is forced to resort to speculation." This means that genes were the determining factor of an organism's morphology and behavior, even if they (genes) didn't quite exist yet. This confusion still abounds, although it has been skillfully dodged by saying that genes and all inheritance are "in" DNA. This has caused more problems, particularly for so-called gene therapy, which seeks to treat various diseases, most notably cancers, with genetic manipulation. Gene therapy has been one of the most over-funded disasters of medicine, and is detailed with great care by Holdrege. We should not, he tells us, be shocked when attempts to cure cancer using methods that are based on human dismissal of variation and context in nature fail. The book's treatise has only strengthened with time, and is still relevant in the face of recent melanoma gene therapies (detailed in both Science and Nature) that were hailed as successes even though they yielded less-than successful results. There is a fundamental problem with much of genetics in medicine, and that is that it treats the map - the human genome ("The world's most boring book..." according to the quote from J.S. Jones on page 86) - as if it were the territory - the human being. Worse still is the idea that one map can be applied to more than one territory. The variability within the genome is too great to create such a universal map at all. To try and determine genetic predispositions in one fetus or person based on the map of another is like trying to find a city in Ohio using a map of Oregon, simply because the two states are square. None of this is to say that genes are irrelevant. Holdrege takes care to not assert such a message. The question of how genes relate to the processes of evolution and the vocabulary of form and behavior is offered by the text as an interesting one. But it will not be answered by simply naming them the cause of all things organismic. Holdrege quotes German scientist Ernst Peter Fischer to hint at the actual nature of genes, rather than the speculative one: "A gene is by no means a molecule that exists in the cell. Rather a gene is a task that a cell has to accomplish. Genes don't exist; they are always becoming." (78) Genes lost their path in history because they have been seen as objects. They are not examined as the relationship between two organisms as per Holdrege's warnings. Indeed, if a relationship is considered, it is that organisms (which do have a visible and observable physical embodiment), a la Richard Dawkins and friends, are examined as the relationships between genes! Because of this, ridiculous gene-based statements abound, such as the assertion that we are 98% (the percentage varies) chimpanzee. We need to rethink (as Holdrege does here and in an earlier article, "Genes and Life: The Need for a Qualitative Understanding") statements that we are "98% chimpanzee" if our behaviors and environments and morphology are distinct from the chimps'. This is not to debase commonality: the chimpanzees give us an easy door into understanding ourselves as animals rather than as above animals. However, this genetic determinism - we are similar to chimpanzees because our genes tell us so - leads less to an understanding that humans are animals and more to thinking that chimpanzees are somehow more special than other animals because they are so genetically like humans. Quantitative understanding offered through genetic mapping leads to equality in relation to humans. "Neither organism nor environment can be understood without the other." Holdrege writes. So-called "junk DNA" theories may be, thankfully, falling out of fashion. But the junk-environment theory still prevails. Genetics and the Manipulation of Life is a stern and beautifully-written reminder that context is important beyond the protein sequences surrounding the genes for eye and hair color.

very relevant, clearly written by Ted Byrd

5 Stars
May 21, 2008
This book challenges the current,generally favorable view of genetics "engineering" as presented in the popular media as well as science writing. Not that these researches should necessarily be abandoned, but they should be carried out in a manner more respectful of the processes nature already has in place. The author shows with clear examples the kind of decisions that are prompted by reductionist thinking in scientific circles. Holdrege shows that much of the public awareness of genetics is based on information that is given a positive spin by self-interested parties. Along the way, he exposes us to a different way of thinking about scientific endeavor; one that urges the consideration of every act as having possible ramifications in the broader environment. A good case is made that the genetics supporters are so enamored of their newfound knowledge that they have become overconfident and blinded to ethical considerations.The conclusion is that we should pay more attention to the formation of traits in the context of their interaction with the total organism, rather than seeking to manipulate them as though they existed in a vacuum. I found the ideas in this book easy to comprehend,yet profound. To get a balanced viewpoint I am also reading books by writers who favor genetic manipulation. So far, this book seems to me to contain much more earth-friendly and human-friendly ideas than others I am reading. I highly recommend this book for the clarity of the writing and its thought-provoking message.

Great book, dispels myths spread to laymen by Langer

5 Stars
October 04, 2004
In the past few years people outside of the academic pursuit of genetics have been fed terms like secret to life, code of life, and other central dogmas. Very misleading, very wrong. Holdrege does an excellent job of explaining why this is so in terms that is understandable to anyone. It may not spark a revival in Goethe's method but it will dispel the illusions cast by advertisment, the media, and science itself. A must buy for a philosopher, a scientist, or anyone looking to enlighten themselves above what CNN headlines feed you.

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