Ralph Brave

But the development and use of genetic engineering are the subject of ferocious debate among the scientific elite. Some influential scientists, notably James D. Watson, the father of DNA research, are pushing for experiments that were once unthinkable: tampering with the human germline — sperm and egg cells. In other words, genetically altering not only an individual, but future generations.

“Some people are going to have to have some guts and try germline therapy without completely knowing that it’s going to work,” Watson said at a UCLA conference in 1998. “And the other thing, because no one has the guts to say it, if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes (from plants or animals), why shouldn’t we do it? What’s wrong with it?”

Human germline engineering is prohibited in federally funded research. But there is no ban on such experiments in the private sector. Last weekend, a coalition of activists and organizations met in San Francisco to form the Exploratory Initiative on New Genetic Technologies. On Wednesday, the group will announce efforts to develop a broad movement to push for limitations on genetic technologies, including statutory bans on germline genetic engineering and human cloning.

“A ban,” says Watson, “would be a disaster.”

To get a glimpse of what might very well be our future, it helps to understand some boring science. All current human genetic therapy trials are called somatic: they involve genes in various parts of the body, but not the sex cells, which produce eggs and sperm. Tampering with sex cells — producing genetic alterations that will be passed to your offspring, and their descendents — takes genetic engineering into an entirely new technological and ethical realm.

While many experts believe that germline engineering is at least a decade away, Hamilton Smith, a Nobel laureate biochemist, sees the technology developing much more rapidly. “It might come pretty quickly,” he says.

Smith knows something about the speed of technological advance. He is the director of DNA Resources for Celera Genomics Corp., which, in just nine months, produced a rough map of the human genome — a feat that most scientists said would take years.

The pressure for germline engineering is also likely to come from another direction — you and me. We want children better than ourselves. We certainly don’t want them to suffer unnecessarily. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate who heads the California Institute of Technology, believes that consumer demand will encourage the rapid development and utilization of germline engineering.

Genetic screening is already standard in prenatal care. It is not farfetched to imagine that prospective parents will one day turn to clinics to produce embryos that can not only be tested for genetic defects, but also “corrected.” And is there any reason to think people will stop at fixing disease-causing defects? Is it such a stretch to imagine people demanding genetic enhancements — mental, physical, behavioral?

Prominent scientists not only believe the possibility is real; they are also preparing for it. At a retreat of the premier geneticists and policy analysts last summer at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, LeRoy Walters, director of the Kennedy Center of Ethics, gave a speech on methods for guaranteeing equal access to the enhancement of intelligence.

How close are we to being able to alter the human gene book? Germline genetic manipulation of other mammals is already occurring. Genes are routinely deleted from and added to mice for experiments. Five years ago a University of Pennsylvania researcher discovered how to alter the genes in the sperm of mice, and applied for a patent on it. In the wake of that advance, ethicists called for national and international meetings on germline engineering. Mice and humans are estimated to share 90 percent of their genomes.

The implications of germline engineering are so profound, and scary, that some leading scientists dismiss the possibility that anyone would seriously contemplate doing it. Asked Monday whether any reputable scientists are advocating germline engineering in humans, Celera founder and president J. Craig Venter said that he knew of nobody.

But in a new book, Watson, perhaps the most influential figure in biological research in the last half-century, is quoted as calling for germline engineering during a 1998 conference at UCLA. Watson co-discovered the double helix structure of DNA, the basis for all the genetics research, including the mapping of the genome. He was the first director of the publicly funded Human Genome Project, and is now president of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. On July 4, he is scheduled to receive the $100,000 Liberty Medal in Philadelphia for his life’s work.

However shocking Watson’s opinion might sound, he provides sound reasons for germline engineering, according to the transcript published in “Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to our Children,” edited by Gregory Stock and John Campbell. For one, germline engineering is more efficient than treating patients one by one. “You delete a bad gene from the gene pool, and no future generation need worry about it or undergo genetic therapy for it. Also, if a deadly infection broke out across the globe, humanity would be saved by implanting disease resistance into the germline.”

Watson offers scientists a strategy for confronting the social challenges that will face germline engineering.

“I’m afraid of asking people what they think. Don’t ask Congress to approve it. Just ask them for money to help their constituents. That’s what they want … Frankly they would care much more about having their relatives not sick than they do about ethics or principles.”

Although other nations, including Britain, Japan and China, cooperated in and contributed to the sequencing of the human genome, Watson believes that attempts to coordinate globally on the genome manipulation would retard the effort. “I think it would be a complete disaster to try and get an international agreement, he says. “I just can’t imagine anything more stifling. You end up with the lowest common denominator.”

As for regulating genetic engineering, he says: “I think our hope is to stay away from regulations and laws whenever possible.”

Watson ridicules the notion that human genome has sanctity, or that civil rights should somehow enter the debate. “I think it’s complete nonsense. I mean, what or who sanctifies? … Evolution can just be damn cruel, and to say that we’ve got a perfect genome and there’s some sanctity? … Terms like sanctity remind me of animal rights. Who gave a dog a right? The word ‘rights’ gets very dangerous. We have women’s rights, children’s rights; it goes on forever.

“I’d like to give up saying rights or sanctity. Instead, say that humans have needs, and we should try as a social species to respond to those needs … To try to give it more meaning than it deserves in some quasi-mystical way is for Steven Spielberg or somebody like that. It’s just plain aura, up in the sky — I mean, it’s crap.”

Watson is not alone in his support for germline engineering. But in science circles there is also strong emerging opposition to such experiments, and growing support for regulation.

Last month, Eric Lander, a friend of Watson and director of the largest publicly funded genome sequencing center, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called for a ban on human germline gene therapy because of our limited knowledge. The human genome, Lander says, “has been 3.5 billion years in the making. We’ve been able to read it for the last year or so. And we suddenly think we could write the story better?”

Lander acknowledges that there are potential benefits to germline engineering. “There is the prospect that by changing things we might put off aging, prevent cancer, improve memory.” The dazzling possibilities, he says, makes it tough to recommend reining in scientists. “I find it a very difficult question,” he said. “For my own part, I would have a ban in place, an absolute ban in place on human germline gene therapy. Not because I think for sure we should never cross that threshold, but because I think that is such a fateful threshold to cross that I’d like society to have to rebut that presumption some day, to have to repeal a ban when it thought it was time to ever try something like that.”

Though Celera’s Hamilton Smith and Lander were competitors in the race to complete the mapping of the human genome, they agree on this point. “The only thing I’m certain of is that we don’t possess the knowledge to monkey with our germline,” Smith says. “We don’t fully understand the consequences of changes that even look like they would be good.” As an example, Smith cites the single genetic mutation responsible for sickle cell disease, which has now been found to simultaneously provide resistance against malaria.

Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health Human Genome Project, also has repeatedly urged caution on germline, which he views as humans fully taking charge of their evolution. But asked Monday whether he would support a ban, he demurred, afraid that opening that door for legislation could lead to other prohibitive measures that would impede important biomedical progress.

Princeton’s Dyson has his own ideas on what is to be done. In his view, the speciation of humans into different groups is inevitable — and it would be a disaster to allow such diversification without restraint. “We must travel the high road into space, to find new worlds to match our new (genetic) capabilities,” Dyson writes in “The Sun, The Genome and The Internet,” published last year. “To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.”

More sci-fi fantasy? The ravings of an aging academic? I asked Celera’s Smith what he thought. He paused, and then said, “Dyson’s a very smart guy. I think there’s a lot to what he says for the future. It’s hard to tell where mankind is going here.”

The result, McKibben fears, would be the loss of what he most values in human existence, values he hopes others share. His new book surveys what scientists are cooking up, then delivers his meditations on the choices we will face and on whether we will have the wisdom to say “Enough.”

While some experts doubt that the technologies in question will ever develop to the point that McKibben fears, others equally expert argue that it is just a matter of time. Earlier this year, University of Wisconsin scientists announced that they had successfully carried out targeted genetic changes in human embryonic stem cells, declaring they now had a technique “that allows us to manipulate every part of the human genome that we want.”

The risks associated with genetic experimentation with human subjects present a major obstacle to perfecting this technology. But DNA double helix co-discoverer James Watson, for one, is unfazed: in his own new book he argues that scientists should proceed with the experiments even though “they put lives at risk.” For McKibben, this is unthinkable.

McKibben spoke to Salon about the Watson worldview, the politics of genetically modified humans, and his own view of the human future.

A theme of a recent talk you gave to the Rachel Carson Society was “the legacy of questioning progress.” Lately your writing has been focusing on human genetic engineering. What’s the question that you are pursuing in this area? And what kinds of conclusions have you come to?

I’m interested in, and have always been interested in, threshold issues. Issues that are large enough that if you go past a certain point, everything’s different. That’s why I’ve been interested in climate change, on which I’ve spent most of my work. Unlike other environmental issues, everything changes if you change the temperature of the atmosphere.

The first such threshold issue was nuclear weapons. The second one is climate change. And the next great one is this question of whether or not we are going to tinker with human genetics — in particular, with the human germ line: with making genetic changes that we will pass on to future generations.

This technology is much riper than people understand. We’ve performed large-scale changes on every other mammal that you can name. And we have the capacity to begin to do it with people. There are teams of people now trying to clone human beings. Quite likely, we’ll succeed. This is a fateful moment. If we go past it, then what our definition of a human being will change. We will think of ourselves as an endlessly improvable species, and that will have all kinds of sad effects.

For me, the saddest ones have less to do with all the practical dangers, or even with the very clear dangers to democracy, than with the even more basic questions of identity and meaning. It’s extremely hard in the modern world to carve out an identity as it is, a thoroughgoing, full identity, because we have so little context in our lives. But now even our very individuality will be up for grabs. If you turn out to have been engineered by your parents to have a certain temperament or a certain kind of intelligence, you will spend your entire life unclear [about] what is you and what isn’t, in a far deeper way than we have ever had to confront before.

So the point of this book, “Enough,” is that we are reaching one of these really significant points in human history where we have to decide if we have enough power already and whether we can afford to bypass some. My contention is that we can, that human beings as currently constituted are good enough. In fact they’re kind of wonderful in a lot of ways. And that it would be a grave mistake, for any reason, to begin to undermine that.

Happily, the technologies are such that you can use other, much less dangerous genetic technologies to deal with questions of human disease, to deal with cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia or the other sadnesses that are genetically transmitted. You don’t need to do that kind of fundamental re-engineering of human embryos to accomplish those ends.

People don’t realize that and tend to think of it all as a piece. Happily it isn’t. One of the points of writing this book is to begin to explain those distinctions to people.

You’ve encountered scientists like James Watson. These scientists claim that it’s precisely germ-line engineering which might save the human species from things like viral epidemics that might occur due to climate change.

Watson’s biggest argument is that the epidemic he’s most concerned about is the epidemic of human stupidity, and that’s what we need to save people from by engineering their brains to make them work better.

James Watson has a very good brain for a certain kind of scientific inquiry. But I think there’s very little indication in his other thinking that he sets the kind of standard for what we should aspire to in the human brain in general. I think we’re OK without the upgrade.

When I interviewed Watson, he specifically mentioned germ-line engineering as a salvation from viral epidemics like AIDS.

The places where AIDS is endemic, across Africa, across Asia now, even across the poor parts of this country — no one is seriously talking about doing germ-line engineering of tens of millions of embryos of poor people every year. That’s a complete joke. I mean, you can’t come up with 50 cents a year to provide them with bed nets to keep them from getting malaria.

We’re not going to put IVF [in vitro fertilization] clinics in every corner of the developing world. Germ-line engineering is a technology aimed at the very rich to allow them to act out their whims and fantasies on their children.

So you would ban germ-line engineering? Is this one of the areas of progress that you would not want to be pursued, and instead we should enact laws forbidding its application to humans? If so, would you apply such a ban to other species as well?

My sense is that human genetic engineering is now a mature enough technology that we can begin to sense where the line should be. So-called somatic genetic engineering seems OK within appropriate bounds, treating people who already exist and who already have some problem, and in such a way that those changes aren’t inheritable. That seems sensible. It can be misused. It needs to be governed carefully. Germ-line genetic engineering is on the other side of this “enough” point, it seems to me.

Just to be clear: If I went into an IVF clinic and I said that I carry a high risk for diabetes, and we’ve come up with a genetic solution to that, you would say…

I would say that if you have a disease that’s genetically determined and so serious that it needs to be dealt with, then let’s use some other technologies, like pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or something like that, if it’s a truly tragic disease like cystic fibrosis and you’re determined. Just like we use genetic screening of parents now to avoid those sorts of things. That makes some sense. But if the question is, should we begin engineering embryos against prospective problems that may someday develop? then, no. It’s the double black diamond ski slope of all slippery slopes.

Given the relative quiescence and even antagonism of much of the American public in responding to the challenges of self-induced climate change, how do you think about the prospects for politically responding to a challenge like germ-line engineering?

The advantage of human genetic engineering over climate change is that we haven’t done it yet. When you’re dealing with climate change, you have to go and rewrite the entire basis of the economic system to get at it. That’s a hard task, and it’s been a hard one since the beginning. This will be a hard task for other reasons, but at least we’re not already deep into it.

Social conservatives, including opponents of abortion rights, have been so vocal in their own opposition to human cloning. Does that make you uncomfortable politically?

My intent is not to promote alliances with social conservatives. My intent is to make progressives understand that this is a really dangerous issue that they need to take on. So my allies in this are people like Judy Norsigian [of the Boston Women's Health Collective] or Tom Hayden or Greenpeace or all the other people who have taken this stance.

Have you ever taken a day or an evening or a weekend and thought through the possibility of re-engineering the human species? There are scientists and even bioethicists who are actively promoting it, saying: “Let’s go for it. Let’s really alter the human species. There is no essential human nature that we need to protect. Whatever we call human nature is part of the problem, maybe even part of the problem that won’t allow us to adequately respond to the climate change that we’ve induced.” Have you ever allowed yourself to pursue that line of fantasy, if not thought, and consider it as an option?

You know, it’s entirely possible to make the case that human beings are a huge problem and that we’d be better off with something else in their place. Of course, everyone who’s ever dealt seriously with environmental issues or issues of war and peace, or any other of the great human failings can think that. For me, we remain a sweet, interesting, intriguing species, full of enormous potential that we have yet to fully realize. I think that we’ve got all kinds of room to find out good ways of being human within our biological limitations.

No one knows how quickly we will decipher this “code of codes,” the Holy Grail of human biology. Both the biotech industry, which has a considerable investment at stake, and scientists, who seek to alleviate suffering, to secure a place in history and to make their own molecular millions, want to move rapidly. Yet, facing a genome that contains thousands of genes, coding for a million or more different proteins (the biochemical powerhouses that do much of the work in making a human and guiding its functioning), they have a long road ahead. And we know even less about the proteome (the entire array of human proteins) than we do about the genome. That’s why J. Craig Venter, president of the Celera Corp., who delivered the genome text to Science, told a science writer earlier this year, “We don’t know shit about biology.”

This strange moment, in which we hold the genetic keys but have no idea which doors they open, has given rise to a peculiar literature. Writers naturally want to tout the very real importance of their subject, but when it comes to what it all signifies, they don’t have much solid data to work with. The result is a series of books that walk a tightrope between the minutiae of biochemical structures and mechanics, with their attendant technical vocabularies, and the most open-ended speculation about how a new era of genomics will affect humanity.

It’s hard to single out any one of these books for recommendation. The authors have varying strengths and weaknesses in making the science accessible, and when it comes to sketching the outer reaches of scientific possibility, the human genome currently functions as a kind of Rorschach inkblot. Each author’s beliefs and politics determine much of what he or she thinks the genome can tell us. And there are some big questions at stake here: When we fully understand the genome, will we know ourselves? Will this knowledge require a revolution in our understanding of what it means to be human? If so, do we even possess the cognitive capacity to grasp it? What limits can and should be drawn around what we do with that knowledge? And who shall decide?

The most recent addition to the shelf of books on the Human Genome Project (and the first account to include the completion of the project), “Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA” by Kevin Davies, is also the most disappointing. Davies is a clear and competent writer, and his book doesn’t contain any inaccuracies or gross distortions — all of which are great virtues in science writing. But for a book with the word “Inside” in its title, “Cracking the Genome” contains very little inside to speak of. Instead, it’s an entirely derivative artifact, cobbled together from secondary sources, with only a few original interviews, none of them providing anything remotely resembling behind-the-scenes revelations.

Even a casual but consistent reader of the coverage of the genome project by the New York Times’ Nicholas Wade or the Washington Post’s Rick Weiss would spend $25 on Davies’ book to learn nothing new. The author tacitly, if not guiltily, admits as much in his acknowledgments when he thanks Wade, “whose superb coverage of all aspects of this story has been invaluable.” (We can only hope Davies has enough integrity to also share with Wade whatever fee he received to write the book.)

An accomplished science editor and writer with a Ph.D. in genetics from Oxford, Davies says his goal was “to capture the excitement, intrigue, mystery and majesty of the quest for biology’s holy grail” and not to pen “the definitive record” of the genome project. In that, alas, he also fails. He breaks up his narrative of “the race” to sequence the genome with sections and even entire chapters that address subjects that, while often interesting, are only indirectly related to the project. Any approximation of excitement or mystery he generates is quickly dissipated by the padding.

More significant, while Davies continually reminds the reader that this is “the defining moment in the evolution of mankind,” he hypercautiously avoids bringing a critical or even a personal eye to what we have done and where we are going. He makes passing mention of findings that suggest that a person’s overall sense of happiness may have a genetic component, and of a “remarkable attempt to go nature one better” by expanding the repertoire of proteins for which DNA can code. Davies even refers to physicist Stephen Hawking’s conjecture that the genome project may ultimately enable an increase in human brain size at faster rates than the glacial pace of evolution.

But Davies never asks what these advances might mean for our understanding of ourselves as a species or a culture. In fact, the innovative Ethical, Legal and Social Issues program of the National Institutes of Health genome project gets only a single paragraph near the beginning of the book. The Davies who is the editor of technical scientific articles repeatedly trumps the essayist and the thinker. Nevertheless, as a compendium of the major media stories on genetics and genomics over the past decade (with a bit of historical background), “Cracking the Genome” might serve as a useful guide for beginners.

If Davies avoids adopting any viewpoint, science writer Matt Ridley goes to the other extreme, putting forth a thinly disguised political treatise in “Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.” “Genome” was chosen as one of the eight notable books of 2000 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review, which will no doubt give the curious novice the unfortunate impression that this is a definitive work on the subject. But what is most notable about “Genome” is that Ridley makes the scientific advances he writes about serve as mules for his beliefs, which are those stereotypically libertarian views to be expected in a former science editor and Washington correspondent for the Economist.

Nevertheless, Ridley can certainly write. His accomplished prose shines as he takes us through complicated biochemistry with exceptional ease. His four-page “Primer” on genetics (in the book’s preface) is among the clearest and most succinct summaries of the subject available. Ridley has designed his 23 chapters to correspond with each of the 23 chromosomes that contain the human genome. He identifies a particular gene on each chromosome and uses it to illuminate an aspect of genetics and human life. So Chromosome 6 is entitled “Intelligence,” Chromosome 15 is “Sex” and Chromosome 22 is “Free Will,” and in each case Ridley shows how science connects intimately with human experience.

Not too surprisingly, though, in “Genome” human experience and genetics connect to demonstrate the truth of Ridley’s political stance. For example, Chapter 18 (about Chromosome 18) tackles “Cures” and provides Ridley with the opportunity to hold forth on genetic therapy, which is necessarily a form of genetic engineering. That leads him to the topic of agricultural biotechnology and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), of which he declares, “The opposition to genetically modified crops, motivated more by hatred of new technology than love of the environment, largely chooses to ignore the fact that tens of thousands of safety trials have been done with no nasty surprises.” He offers no footnoted reference to a peer-reviewed scientific paper discerning hatred as the basis for opposition to GMOs.

Pursuing the issue further, Ridley asserts that “the politicization of the issue [of GMOs] has had absurd results.” He relates that a corporation abandoned a transgenic soybean project because the gene inserted into the soy came from Brazil nuts and therefore was allergenic to those susceptible. “This [abandonment] was despite the fact that calculations showed that the new soya-bean allergy would probably kill no more than two Americans a year,” Ridley declares, “and could save hundreds of thousands worldwide from malnutrition.”

Putting aside the question of the causes and cures for malnutrition — opinions vary on the effectiveness of GMOs in alleviating it — it’s worth noting here that Ridley shows himself quite willing to jettison his unstinting rhetorical devotion to the individual when it conflicts with a technology or corporate policy that he favors. Ridley will not allow his much-championed free individual to stand in the way of Monsanto’s unilateral decision to genetically alter the world’s food. The two American individuals killed annually are a small and acceptable price to pay to allow corporate agriculture free rein.

“An absurd attitude to risk,” Ridley later declares, regarding a similar case. Though he doesn’t explicitly say so, Ridley accepts an actuarial evaluation of risk, like those performed by the insurance industry: The most unlikely possibilities, which tend to be the most catastrophic, are to be given the least consideration. Of course, many people who are mindful of the consequences of a “highly unlikely” Chernobyl- or Bhopal-type catastrophe suggest that when it comes to irrevocable genetic experiments, we might want to proceed on a more precautionary basis. Ridley, of course, would dismiss this as mere hatred of new technology.

In his final two chapters, “Eugenics” and “Free Will,” Ridley most fully elaborates his philosophy that the social environment and particularly government are the greatest evils facing humankind, much more to be feared than any genetic determinism. After all, he says, while genes may do much to determine who we are, at least they are our personal genes. He even claims that Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” demonstrates “how hellish a world in which nurture [rather than nature] prevailed would actually be.” For Ridley, the notion of the individual is uncomplicated and the individual’s relation to the social world can only be one of unending antagonism and defensiveness — except of course when they are abstract individuals to be sacrificed to the actuarial tables of science and industry.

In the end, perhaps what’s most enlightening, and depressing, about Ridley is how willing he is to limit his obvious intellectual capacities in the service of his ideological predilections. In the preface he asserts, “I genuinely believe that we are living through the greatest intellectual moment in history.” Yet when he surveys the meaning of this moment, it requires no adjustment of his mind-set — instead it all uncannily mirrors what he already believes.

The left sees the genome as confirming its views just as readily as the right does. You can’t find a better example of this than the curmudgeonly brilliance of Richard Lewontin, Aggasiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and longtime opponent of genetic determinism. Lewontin is one of the central objects of scorn for Ridley and his ilk, who loathe anyone who challenges their vision of the perfect alignment of genetics and capitalism or questions a sociobiology that proves that people like them are born to run the world.

No one has questioned and belittled the potential of the Human Genome Project as persistently as Lewontin has. Equally famed as a geneticist and for his neo-Marxist approach to science (titles of his earlier works include “The Dialectical Biologist” and “Not in Our Genes”), Lewontin has repeatedly argued that biology is a lot more complicated than the A, T, C and G nucleotides of DNA and, further, that many important realities of our social lives can’t be found there. “They still haven’t found the gene for unemployment,” Lewontin sarcastically told me in an interview about the genome project several years ago.

In his latest book, “The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment” (based on a series of three lectures with an added final chapter), Lewontin lays out his position with devastating clarity; the science in the book should be accessible to most laypersons. However much our DNA may tell us about individual diseases, he says, ultimately reductionism provides a simplified and therefore false picture of both the interactions between the genes of any cell and the other parts of the cell and the interactions between a cell and all the other cells of an organism. By extension, that false picture also undermines a true understanding of any organism’s interaction with its environment.

Lewontin says that all biologists know this to be the case, but are rewarded for pursuing scientific investigations as if it were otherwise. Dangerously, “science as we practice it solves those problems for which its methods and concepts are adequate, and successful scientists soon learn to pose only those problems that are likely to be solved. Pointing to their undoubted successes in dealing with the relatively easy problems, they then assure us that eventually the same methods will triumph over the harder ones. If the determination of DNA sequence has solved the problem of how information about protein structure is stored in the cell, then surely the determination of the structure of some molecules, perhaps even DNA itself, will solve the problem of how information about social structure is stored in the brain.”

The argument is not against genetic reductionism per se, he says. Sometimes parts of the genome are causal elements, sometimes they’re not, “depending upon which genetic differences in which species living in which circumstances are considered. There are no universal rules for cutting up organisms,” he informs us. Just as during the recent election Americans were educated about the differences in the election laws among the 50 states, Lewontin writes, “so too in biology, it depends upon the jurisdiction.”

Lewontin claims that a correct understanding of gene, organism and environment would stress that they function as a whole. He’s not suggesting that we escape into a holistic mysticism beyond analytic grasp, but that we recognize that genes function in organisms and organisms function in environments, and each plays a role in “co-creating” the other, reciprocally. Co-evolution of organism and environment, says Lewontin, is demonstrably the most accurate scientific account of the world. Rather than reducing life to physical-chemical systems, such as the molecular chemistry of DNA, biologists need to stand by their knowledge of the open, ongoing interaction between organism and environment, and to design methodologies that take this into account.

Lewontin’s arguments are sound, but his perpetual “Yes, but …” qualifications may not offer the kind of progress people get with reductionist science. Certain genes do seem capable of causing certain diseases, no matter what the environment. Lewontin wouldn’t disagree with that, smart scientist that he is. But someone suffering from a genetic disorder wouldn’t necessarily want to wait it out while Lewontin’s methodologies produce a cure.

Lewontin is also unabashedly derisive when it comes to the contribution of science and medicine to the redress of human suffering. The primary causes of death in the third world are overwork and undernourishment, he says, a product of “an anarchic scheme of production that was developed by industrial capitalism and adopted by industrial socialism.” Though he admits that an old-style red future is not the answer, he’s equally unenthusiastic about the Red Cross, even one armed with genetic medicine, as a solution to the massive ill health and early death caused by international inequities and injustice.

Lewontin scorns efforts by the left to incorporate the methods and even some of the findings of genetics, but one of the most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, Peter Singer, argues the opposite tack. He proposes that the left regroup in the wake of the collapse of Marxist regimes. The left is, Singer says, “in need of a new paradigm.” Though Singer’s new book, “A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation,” weighs in at a mere 64 pages, it is one of the few genuinely stimulating meditations on the topic, and one whose perspectives have implications far beyond the considerations of the left. Although the precise details of genomics are of only tangential concern to Singer’s project here, you need a basic understanding of genetics and its role in human life to appreciate the book.

Singer, as usual, presents his case with straightforward simplicity, an absence of jargon and an apparently self-evident logic. As Singer sees it, Marx got it exactly backward, and the left needs to correct itself with that in mind. Marx believed that the individual emerges entirely from his or her social reality. Change the social reality, and you change the person; the human being is completely malleable.

The problem, says Singer, is that the opposite is closer to the truth: There is a bedrock biological human nature that contributes mightily to the structure of our social lives. “To be blind to the facts of human nature is to risk disaster,” writes Singer, holding up Stalin’s gulag, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia as evidence.

The kernel of Singer’s corrective is that “it is time for the left to take seriously the fact that we are evolved animals, and that we bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in our behavior, too.” The left’s continual rejection of this notion emerges from the idea that human beings are perfectible, an assumption that Singer says Marxism shares with Christianity. And that idea originates in the assumption that human beings are separate from — and more valuable than — animals. Singer, famous for his 1990 book “Animal Liberation,” long ago rejected that notion.

Singer doesn’t wholly reject Marx’s insights on the role economics plays in shaping culture and ideas; he wants to make them “part of a larger picture.” The failure of egalitarian revolutions does not mean “that hierarchy is good, or desirable, or even inevitable,” writes Singer, “but it does show that getting rid of it is not going to be nearly as easy as revolutionaries usually imagine.”

Singer’s larger picture includes an understanding that humans are biologically driven to act out of self-interest and should not be asked to act against their self-interest. But self-interest, as it has evolved, includes cooperative and even altruistic impulses as well as competitive ones. If we increase our understanding of how our human nature interacts with our environment, we can begin to systematically emphasize, build and reinforce our noncompetitive traits.

Singer is a self-described “consequentialist,” a descendant of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism and William James’ pragmatism. Utilitarianism’s guiding belief is that reason can determine which actions will result in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Singer’s reason informs him that his own self-interest is best served by this ethical approach, not only toward all people but toward all sentient beings.

Singer also believes that we should not fear scientifically based programs of genetic improvement but instead ask how they might contribute to the greatest happiness. Genetic improvement, says Singer, holds out the prospect “of a new kind of freedom.” After all, if human nature is the major obstacle to creating a better society, then the solution may ultimately lie in altering that genetically based nature.

What makes Singer so provocative is that he takes up the left’s commitment to fighting injustice and at the same time urges scientists to pursue the knowledge and control of our biological makeup to the furthest reaches. He synthesizes, in a way, the determinism of Ridley with the social commitment of Lewontin. But, at least in this work, he doesn’t clarify who’ll be in charge of deciding which policies will lead to the greatest happiness for the most people — a key question, particularly given Singer’s controversial advocacy of euthanasia for those born with severe mental disabilities.

In Singer’s preferred social order, molecular biologists like James Watson would be free to do what they wanted. To see why this is troubling, look to Watson himself and the other contributors to “Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children.” This book of essays, compiled and edited by UCLA neurobiologist John Campbell and the director of the UCLA Medicine, Technology and Society Program, John Stock, also contains the fascinating transcript of a 1998 panel discussion about how far we should go in modifying genes in the sperm and eggs we use to produce future generations — what scientists call the “human germline.” Currently, almost all clinical trials of genetic therapy are directed at specific parts of the body and affect only the patient involved; germline therapy would alter the genes passed on to all future generations. Earlier this year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a report recommending that any effort to proceed with germline engineering, whether in the public or private sector, be regulated.

Watson, the co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, appears in his catalytic prime here, casting aside what he views as the “prejudices” of social and moral concerns in order to advance science and medicine. Not only should we “try germline therapy without completely knowing that it’s going to work,” Watson says, but “if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we do it? What’s wrong with it? Who is telling us not to do it? I mean, it just seems obvious now.”

Watson suggests that just as we might find benefit from putting a Brazil nut gene in a soybean to enhance its nutritional value or an Arctic fish gene in a strawberry to help it resist damage from freezing weather, so too the human genome might be improved with the implantation of a plant gene or an animal gene or perhaps even an artificially devised gene. After all, Watson says, “we [molecular biologists] should be proud of what we’re doing and not worry about whether we’re destroying the genetic patrimony of the world, which is awfully cruel to too many people.” While some voices in “Engineering the Human Germline” recommend a less ambitious approach to modification of the human genome, Watson’s fellow panelists and many of the book’s essays mostly echo his views.

Ian Wilmut, the leader of the team of scientists who cloned the sheep Dolly and a scientist who nearly equals Watson in stature, proposes a moral alternative. As coauthor of “The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control,” Wilmut shows a humility in the face of our potential ability to alter the genome that’s the opposite of Watson’s brashness in every way.

Wilmut has always insistently opposed the cloning of human beings, and in this book he repeats that objection; he views human cloning as an unwarranted imposition on the new person brought into being. On the same grounds (except in the case of correcting single-gene diseases), Wilmut opposes attempts to enhance the human genome to promote any particular physical or mental quality.

His book, written with fellow Dolly project biologist Keith Campbell and science writer Colin Tudge, sets the record straight on the history and impetus behind cloning research, relates the scientific journey to the creation of Dolly and provides an insider’s view of the cutting edge of biotechnology. But the core of the book is its final section, “The Age of Biological Control.” Here Wilmut squarely confronts the dilemmas of an era in which, inevitably, we will achieve nearly total control over the creation and development of any and all biological organisms, including humans. While Celera Corp.’s Venter is right that we currently “don’t know shit about biology,” knowing all of it — or close to all of it — could happen within a few generations.

“Cloning and genetic engineering are conceptually linked,” Wilmut explains, “because they are technically linked.” The real purpose behind cloning, after all, was to allow for precise genetic alteration and duplication. The traditional path of a fertilized egg, Wilmut tells us, “is a hit-and-miss affair, offering only limited possibilities.” “But when cells are cultured by the million, and laid out in a dish for months at a stretch,” Wilmut says, “genetic engineers can work their full repertoire.” What shall be done to these cells? Who shall decide?

In a chapter called “Cloning People,” authored by Wilmut alone, the scientist looks at many of the perspectives found in the other books covered in this essay. He endorses Lewontin’s argument for a more complex understanding of the interaction of genes, organisms and environments because “the genes operate in constant dialogue with their surroundings,” which in turn affect how genes function. That’s part of the reason even biological clones would still be different people.

In response to the libertarianism advocated by Ridley and deeply embedded in American culture, Wilmut suggests that when it comes to risk, we need to look beyond statistical calculations and ask, “Risk to whom?” and “Risk of what?” The manipulation of our genetics involves more than just one individual. Even basic genetic test results have implications for all the blood relatives of the person undergoing the test.

For this reason, Wilmut insists that market forces alone should not determine how genetic technologies get applied. “Worldwide, we may perceive a trend toward libertarianism,” he observes, but “various societies in recent years have shown that they can resist new technologies of many kinds, whatever the market forces.” He cites nuclear power, high-rises and genetically modified organisms as examples.

To his credit, Wilmut claims no greater authority for his positions than that of a well-informed citizen. These issues are human and moral and not merely scientific. Coauthor Tudge adds, in an individually penned epilogue, “How, in general, can we ensure that … we don’t stop scientists from following their noses — but that on the other hand we are not encumbered with technologies that offend us, or lower our quality of life, or simply hand over life’s controls to powerful companies?”

Wilmut, Campbell and Tudge don’t pretend to have final answers. They urge that “if we are serious — if we are not simply trying to score political points or to underplay what has been achieved so far — then we should think in serious intervals of time.” They suggest 200 to 500 years as the block of time during which the age of biological control will be realized. If they’re right — and unless we are satisfied with the alternatives offered by Ridley’s libertarianism, Lewontin’s interactive constructionism, Singer’s consequentialism or Watson’s naturalism — then a book that helps us think in just those terms is the book that urgently needs to be written next.

This year marks a major event in the Heidegger world: the publication of a new translation of his 1935 lectures, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” rendered into English by Richard Polt and Gregory Fried. Their work is noteworthy because it brings Heidegger’s voice alive in ways that the earlier translation by Ralph Manheim failed to do, and in places it corrects Manheim’s attempts to soften Heidegger’s resonance with the Nazis.

Polt and Fried are representative of a new generation of Heidegger scholars, a group that has unflinchingly looked at the evidence of Heidegger’s affiliations with German fascism, fully investigated the ways in which his thought might have led to such a disastrous political regime and yet still found reasons to value the meditations of this provincial German. For them, Heidegger’s work offers possibilities for constructively transforming one’s life and for positively challenging the current direction of our technological world.

Polt is an associate professor of philosophy at Xavier University and widely acknowledged to have written the most incisive and accessible summation of Heidegger’s thought (“Heidegger: An Introduction”), published last year. In this interview, Polt discusses Heidegger’s current status as a philosopher in America and in Germany, how to consider the paradox that the man many call the greatest philosopher of the 20th century was also a Nazi and why Heidegger is worth bothering with at all.

I realize this is a bit unfair, but can you offer, to the novice reader, a summary of the essence of Heidegger’s thought?

Heidegger’s basic problem is the question of “Being”: How is it that we’re able to understand what it means for anything to be? So when a philosopher like Descartes declares, “I think, therefore I am,” Heidegger wants to ask, What is this “am-ness”? Or when any of us say that something “is” — whether it’s a molecule, a man or the planet Mars — what do we mean by “is,” and how does it come to pass that “is” means anything to us at all? Heidegger’s answer is that we understand Being because we live in time — we belong to a past and we anticipate a future. So without time and history, things couldn’t be present or revealed to us at all. Their Being would have no meaning.

What first drew you to Heidegger?

I didn’t read Heidegger until my senior year, but when I did I thought he was very refreshing because he seemed to articulate problems that I had dimly perceived in previous philosophers that I had read, none of whom had really satisfied me. They all seemed to be missing something. And Heidegger put words on that.

What was that?

That truth can’t be grasped in an abstract, universal way without taking into account that we are concrete human beings living in a particular time and place. Heidegger tried to show that our particularity is not an obstacle to truth but in fact it’s what makes truth possible. There’s no truth apart from that. It seems to me that he does that without just falling into relativism. So I found that very appealing.

The particular truth that many are aware of about Heidegger is that he was a Nazi and a committed Nazi. After the war he tried to cover up many of his actions that were aligned with Nazi policy, including distorting the text of the lectures you’ve just translated. Why should we bother with a Nazi philosopher? Why do you bother?

Somebody can be thought-provoking even if he’s wrong. The fact that he definitely was wrong in politics doesn’t mean that he might not also be right in certain areas. If you look for a philosopher who has very safe and reasonable politics, he’s not likely to be a very interesting philosopher, unfortunately. So I think we need to keep in mind Heidegger’s politics, always. But that’s not to ignore him.

When you say “keep in mind” his politics, how then do you suggest we keep it in mind when we read him?

I think we need to ask regularly, Does this way of thinking either promote some sort of political tyranny or else leave the door open for it in a way that we want to avoid? I would say his thought leaves the door open for it without necessarily leading through it. Even if it did necessarily lead through it, it might be interesting to understand his philosophy and become aware of the objections to it.

There are some American philosophers and researchers out there who suggest that there’s a direct line between Heidegger’s philosophy and the embrace of Nazi ideology or others like it. How would you distinguish your thought about the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazism from others who see a more direct link?

One can make a reasonable case that his philosophy led him straight to National Socialism. The case would be something like this: In “Being and Time,” his main work, he characterizes everyday existence and everyday language and thinking as inauthentic, in other words superficial and not fundamentally disclosive about the human condition.

So it would seem to follow that he would have no reason to support democracy or free speech or any parliamentary system, because it would all just be inauthentic, idle talk. At the same time, also in “Being and Time,” he suggests that a deeper and authentic truth can be found in going back to one’s roots, one’s heritage, and appropriating them for some future project, perhaps under the leadership of some hero. It’s not much of a stretch to see how he could be very excited by this very charismatic figure Hitler, who claimed he was returning to the German roots in a historic way. As it turned out, what he really wanted was something much more revolutionary than Nazism. The Nazis were not radical enough because they weren’t provoking the German people to a confrontation with Being. As the ’30s wear on, he becomes more and more disillusioned with the Nazis and comes to see them as just another product of modern metaphysics. I think he genuinely supported the movement, though probably from the very beginning he was not a standard Nazi. He was a card-carrying Nazi, but not just another average party member.

Now when I say he left the door open without forcing anybody who’s Heideggerian to become a fascist, what I mean is that you could accept his view that everyday existence is inauthentic and yet still reject authoritarian tyranny.

When you say he saw everyday life as not disclosive, how should we understand disclosive?

Everyday life for Heidegger is absorbed with particular things, in particular projects, without standing back, as it were, to explicitly choose those projects. He says we do not choose to choose in everyday life. Authenticity would involve choosing to choose — in other words, being really self-aware and free in what one is pursuing. In that sense authenticity would be more disclosive and more illuminating about the human condition.

I’m told that Heidegger isn’t taken seriously anymore in Germany, that his involvement with the Nazis has caused him to be no longer viewed as a legitimate part of the debate in philosophy or about Germany.

I wouldn’t state it as absolutely as that. But certainly Heidegger is not the main concern of most German philosophers. In the immediate postwar time Heidegger did have a sort of comeback in the ’50s, a wave of popularity. But at the same time philosophers like Habermas emerged who have a completely non-Heideggerian approach, a much more rationalist approach. Contemporary German philosophy is much like American philosophy in that there are analytic philosophers there, and there’s quite a bit of interest in American pragmatism in Germany. Of course there are pockets of Heideggerians. Still, it’s in France and America and a few other countries like Japan and Italy where Heidegger is really appreciated.

Do you think it is more rationalistic and pragmatic cultures like America and France, then, that in some ways are desperate for an injection of some mystical element — which opens them up to Heidegger?

I think that’s true. The Germans had their fill of mystical irrationalism. And Americans need some of it. Of course, irrationalism is a pejorative term. But I do think we need some Heidegger. That would be one way of putting it.

What element of Heidegger do you think America needs?

Science and technology have a leading role in our culture. They’re often seen as the arbiters of truth. One of Heidegger’s main points is that science and technology are built upon something that cannot be understood in scientific or technological terms. Poetry and art, for instance, might be ways of reaching that deeper truth, that experience of the world that is pre-scientific. Often we in America don’t know what to do with poetry and art. For us they’re just entertainment or relaxation. What if there were a deeper truth? Maybe there’s a strain of American culture that longs for that.

Heidegger spent a lifetime trying to capture the primordial experience of life itself, life as it’s experienced before rational thought orders and structures our experience, with some notion that regaining this experience would somehow inform our lives in a way that would allow us to live more fully and more truthfully. Was he successful?

It depends on what you mean by success. If success means to prove something once and for all, to give us a final interpretation of life, then the answer is no. But part of his thinking is that there is no final interpretation. Instead there is an ongoing process of reinterpretation. In my view he was successful in alerting us to certain dimensions of human existence.

There’s a substantial body of work that compares Heidegger to Eastern thought and particularly to Buddhism, to the attempt to awaken oneself from the jail cell of ego and the aging, sickness and ultimate death of the body. Do you think such comparisons are valid or useful? Was Heidegger, in effect, a Western Buddha?

He was definitely interested in Buddhism and Taoism. It’s also true that his thought found resonance in Japan. He gets a lot of attention in Japan. What a lot of Japanese say is that there is connection between Buddhism’s notion of emptiness and some Heideggerian notions of nothingness or unconcealment. We do need to be a bit skeptical about this, though. There is one passage in the “Contributions to Philosophy,” which were written by Heidegger between 1936 and 1938, in which he simply makes the remark, “Not Buddhism. The very opposite.” What he means by that I don’t know, except that I think he probably had in mind that Buddhism seems to try to release us altogether from existence, from the body, whereas Heidegger wants a more engaged dwelling or involvement in existence. Now it might be that that’s a misinterpretation of Buddhism, and of course there are many different strands of Buddhism. But that’s why I think that he might have been reluctant to say that he was a Western Buddha.

Heidegger is seen as the fount, along with Nietzsche, of much of the postmodern thought that has developed over the past three decades. Yet much of postmodern thought seems to have hit a dead end as a result of its own deconstructive strategies. The most renowned example of this is the infamous Sokal affair, in which a physicist submitted a parody concerning the supposed “hermeneutics of quantum gravity” to a leftist postmodern journal, and the editors accepted it as legitimate. Do you believe postmodernists have misused Heidegger? Or are we witnessing the logical outcome of the circularity that’s inherent in Heidegger’s method?

I think it is a misuse. As we were saying earlier, Heidegger points to the particularization of truth, its historicity. But I think he does not thereby become a relativist who dismisses scientific findings altogether. He is just saying that scientific statements do in fact reveal things to us, but let’s not forget that they’re possible only in an interpretive context. That scientific theories are open to revision, and it’s possible that better interpretations may come along. Which is different from taking any scientific statement and trying to deconstruct it and reduce it to its background in intellectual history, its cultural resonances, which ultimately, I think, ends up in a sort of Nietzschean interpretation, reducing all truth to power.

But even in your description, doesn’t this point up the problem with Heidegger and science? Most scientists would say DNA is not an interpretation, for example. DNA is DNA. It’s a fact and it has definite predictable results in our lives.

Well, I’ll try to speak for Heidegger on this question. His statements about science are sometimes sloppy and sometimes more careful. I think at his best he would say, “You’re right. DNA is real. The facts we’ve discovered about it are real. Now, what do those facts mean in a larger sense? What are we going to do with them?” That is certainly still in question. By discovering the human genome, have we unlocked the human essence, as the Cincinnati Enquirer said in a headline a few months ago? Or have we discovered something that, although true, does not really reveal what it means to be human? By discovering the human genome, have we gained a tool that we can or should use to exploit ourselves? Or would that be a misunderstanding of ourselves as a resource or an object? These are questions of interpretation. And here is where debate and discussion and deeper interpretation are always possible. I don’t think that relativizes the facts of what scientists have discovered.

One of the other areas where Heidegger’s influence has been acknowledged explicitly is in the environmental movement, where some claim that Heidegger’s understanding of the world and of technology informs their approach to saving the planet. What was Heidegger’s notion of technology? Are these environmentalists right in their reading of him?

I don’t know the details of how he has been appropriated. But I think it would be legitimate to try to use him in ecological thinking. Especially his views on technology, which are that technology is one mode in which things as a whole are revealed to us. They’re revealed to us as useful and manipulable resources. And he wants to alert us to the fact that that is not the only possible interpretation of things — that beneath that interpretation there is what he calls “earth,” which is a dimension of things that can never be fully interpreted or fully used up or fully understood by the human being. It’s a mysterious dimension. So the kind of ecological thinking that tries to get us to respect the mystery of wilderness is something that is very close to the spirit of Heidegger. The kind of ecological thinking that goes about trying to manage resources wisely so that we don’t destroy potential cures for cancer — that’s still thinking technologically, in other words, still seeing natural resources as objects.

In the famous Der Spiegel interview, which Heidegger gave in 1966 but wasn’t published until his death 10 years later, he ended by saying that given the technological developments going on in the world, “only a god can save us now,” a god with a small “g.” Do you think he has in mind the same kind of thing that Joe Lieberman and George Bush do when they pronounce their belief in God? How do you understand Heidegger’s statement?

Heidegger did not want to go back to the Judeo-Christian God. He thought that that God had been appropriated by metaphysics, and that metaphysics and that God had died together. But there is the possibility of the coming of a new god or gods — what he calls, in the “Contributions to Philosophy,” “the passing by of the last god.” It’s a very mysterious notion. Quite a bit of ink has been spilled on it, but nobody really knows what it means. Heidegger was inspired largely by the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who tried to invite the gods to return to us. There are ways of interpreting this that try to bring it down to earth. Hubert Dreyfus, for example, sees it as a turning point in our culture. He says that Woodstock might have been an example of a Heideggerian god. But that sounds too human to me, all too intelligible. It’s clear that he wants some kind of radical turning, some cataclysmic event that this god would have the power to bring about. More than that is hard to say.

I’ll just comment as someone who was at Woodstock. I pray that Dreyfus was wrong. Some wonder, Why shouldn’t Americans simply stay with Emerson and William James for their readings and contemplations and avoid all the bother with Heidegger?

First off, I think Americans should read more Emerson and James and Thoreau than they do. Most American philosophy departments are not doing American philosophy. They’re doing British philosophy and the sort of German philosophy that is mathematical, such as Gottlob Frege. So maybe we should first read Emerson and then maybe turn to Heidegger. As a matter of fact, he would probably recommend that we do so because he might say, “I’m not your philosopher. I’m a German philosopher. I’m speaking to Germans primarily. If you degenerate Americans have anyone who’s worth reading, you should read that person.” But because of the breadth and depth of Heidegger’s thought, he’s not just a German philosopher. He does have things to say that are relevant to all human beings. One of the benefits that comes from studying Heidegger is a deeper sense of the sweep of Western intellectual history, the history of Western philosophy in full, which you don’t always get in someone like Emerson. Maybe we should read American philosophers and then read Heidegger and then try to understand what is distinctively American in the context of Western thought in general.

In the end, if someone asked you, “Why take the trouble with Heidegger and his mess of a vocabulary and his involvement with the Nazis,” what would you say? How would you advise him to look at a philosopher’s philosophy in the light of that same philosopher’s personal life? How would Heidegger urge us to approach that issue?

Heidegger himself says in “Being and Time” that philosophical insights are always based on or grow out of personal experiences. And I think he’s right about that. Philosophers are human beings. It’s always illuminating to think about the person behind the words. But it’s also easy to slip into a dismissive mode and say, “This person made mistakes and so his philosophy must be a bunch of mistakes.” That’s the kind of ad hominem argument that isn’t legitimate. Heidegger is somebody who, like all great philosophers, struggled with how to live, with the meaning of existence, and left behind a record of that struggle. And anybody who wants to struggle with similar issues can turn to some of these texts, including Heidegger’s, and find food for thought there. Not the last word, but food for thought. Why do we struggle with the meaning of existence? Because existence doesn’t mean as much unless you struggle with it.

Maybe the hoopla Monday did erase some acrimony between Francis Collins, leader of the publicly funded Human Genome Project, and Venter. When everyone is talking breathlessly about curing cancer, or glimpsing the “book of life,” who wants to think about a nasty feud? Why spoil the party by recalling that just weeks ago, Venter called Collins’ behavior “despicable,” or that Collins once said Venter was capable of producing nothing but a “Mad magazine” version of the genome.

On Monday, Collins made a poetic plea to forget the horse race: “The only race we’re talking about today is the human race.”

But Venter didn’t miss a chance to proclaim the achievement a “historic moment for private industry and private capital.” And he did not hesitate to remind everyone that, without his company’s efforts, the announcement (“this happy day for humankind,” as Francis Collins put it) might not have occurred for a few more years.

Asked last week what the role of the public sector should now be, Celera communications director Heather Kowalski spoke of the need to address the “orphan diseases” — rare illnesses that draw little attention from, or offer little profit to, private investors. A former counsel to the Biotechnology Industry Organization has a blunter assessment: the academics and the National Institutes of Health are going to have to meet the demands of the marketplace or find a new line of work.

Noted scientists already have leaped to the defense. Consider the op-ed piece by Nobel laureate David Baltimore, in Sunday’s New York Times. With all his hallowed praise for this moment of molecular magic, he made only one basic point: a plea to continue funding basic research at universities and public labs like the National Institutes of Health. The plea is necessary only because it has become a real question.

Even after Venter first announced that his tiny company would accomplish by 2000 what the international consortium was trying to achieve by 2003 or 2005 — and would do it at one-tenth of the cost of the public effort’s $3 billion budget — some scientists with the public project resisted modifying their sequencing strategy and schedule. Finally, at a pivotal meeting in December 1998, Human Genome Project scientists agreed that they had to compete with Celera or face humiliation. “Ramp Up or Die” became the motto at some sequencing labs.

Just two months ago, clearly at the behest of Collins and his British counterparts at the Sanger/Wellcome sequencing center in London, President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a broadside blast at Venter, declaring that the human genome should not be patentable. The worldwide reaction was a drop in biotech stocks, especially Celera’s, by some $30 billion in two days. But in typical New Democrat fashion, it turned out that Clinton and Blair didn’t really mean it, as both the White House and the U.S. Patent and Trade Office quickly tried to clarify in press releases. There was no change in patent policy, and the genetic gold rush was still on.

Collins, Clinton and Blair often refer to the pressing ethical and legal and social issues raised by the new era of genomics. Venter talks about these too. But in the rush to the finish line, ethical considerations have gone by the wayside. “The genome project has been a technological success,” says geneticist Paul Billings, a member of the Council for Responsible Genetics. “But when it comes to the protections for the public that were to be put in place, the genome project is a failure.”

What’s wrong? The director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, Arthur Caplan, offers a list: “There’s still no guarantee that people can get genetic testing paid for if they want it in terms of insurance. There’s still no national legislation protecting against genetic discrimination. There’s still no guarantee that genetic testing will be affordable. There’s still no guarantee that we won’t test people without their consent, including children and embryos. There’s no privacy statute.

“Want me to go on? There’s nothing to prohibit testing of the dead. There’s nothing to protect stored genetic information from being looked at by third parties. There’s no guarantee that counseling will always accompany testing. There’s not enough personnel to do it. There’s no training in law and in ethics for people in medical and in nursing schools who will be asked to interpret genetic information. There are no standards for advertising and marketing so that there’s no preying on others and companies don’t exploit fear and even create panic. Other than that, we’re all set.”

The biotechnology industry fears laws and regulations that would impede their ability to raise capital or develop markets for genetic tests and therapies. Whatever their commitment to public protection, scientists also express fears that regulations that would limit their ability to manipulate life forms, from the cell to whole cloned organisms. There are limits on researchers who use government funds, but few constraints on researchers in the private sector. So far, the American public seems willing to wait until there are casualties from the genetic revolution before demanding that the government put limits and protections on genetic testing.

In a packed hotel ballroom Monday, key scientists from the public and private venture took the stage to speak to the press. The public scientists gathered on one side, the Celera group on the other. During his introductions, Venter did not restrain himself from referring to the differences in salaries earned by the two groups, by the realities of stock options for one and not the other. As if competing, Collins asked a member of his team to name the number of hits that the Web site of public DNA sequence database receives each day from researchers around the globe. Five hundred thousand hits a day, the press was told.

So it’s come to this: number of hits versus stock options. Nobody doubts which side holds the advantage in that race.