This article was originally published in the Guardian, February 5, 2001; used here with permission.

The Our Genes Are Doomed

by Johnjoe McFadden

According to yesterday's Mail on Sunday, the Queen has "sparked a furious row" by investing in a bio-pharmaceutical firm, ReNeuron. One of the firm's alleged crimes is that it has supported legislation allowing the cloning of human embryos. Whatever the merits of this particular case, the fact remains that, if mankind is to escape an enfeebled future, we must embrace this scary technology. Detractors are quick to remind us of the dangers of designer babies once we remove our parents from their role as exclusive providers of our genes. But, like it or not, if humanity is not to become an endangered species, we must face up to the challenges of genetic engineering.

The reason is the same one that brought us here – natural selection. Over millions of years, the simple mechanism that Darwin first described – let the strong survive and the weak perish – has turned us into the successful animals we are today. Every gene in our bodies has been passed, baton-like, from parent to offspring over millions of years. But our genes are not unchanged by their passage through the generations. Replication of our chromosomes introduces errors called mutations. All children acquire a few mutations on top of those inherited from their parents. Occasionally these will make our children run a little faster or think more quickly than ourselves, but mostly, they will do harm. Our genes have been finely tuned to do a particular job inside our cells. Mutations are, by and large, random. Just as random tinkering with your car engine is likely to leave you stranded the next morning, random tinkering with your genes is like to leave your offspring similarly stranded.

In our brutal past, defective genes would have been weeded out by natural selection, their owners suffering disease, predators or infertility. Modern medicine has changed all that. In the west at least, many of us survive and lead active lives with gene mutations that would have been fatal to our ancestors. I'm not talking about single-gene defects like cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy that remain devastating, but the far more frequent mutations that predispose us to ailments like diabetes, heart disease or cancer. A few hundred years ago, a child with diabetes would have been lucky to survive to adult life. Thanks to insulin injections, diabetics now have nearly as much chance as the rest of us to leave their genes to the next generation. The same is true for scores of other diseases. Infant mortality in Palaeolithic times was probably higher than 50%. Bad genes, or bad combinations of genes, didn't make it through to the next generation. Now we see most of our offspring provide us with grandchildren, whatever their genetic inheritance.

Where does this leave Darwinism? Natural selection needs the grim reaper. Without his cruel separation of the fit from the weak, we will grow weak. We are healthier and will live longer than our parents, but our genes are not improving. Modern medicine, and improved living conditions, rescue us from our imperfect genetic inheritance. In Britain we spend less on healthcare than almost any other wealthy country, but 6.7% of everything we earn goes to keeping us alive. Each government promises to spend more. Health advisers may pin their hopes on lifestyle changes to reduce the burden of disease, but most of the risk for cancer and heart disease is in our genes. As our genes become more faulty, our bodies will require more and more medical intervention. Use it or lose it is the advice of physiotherapists to those with mobility problems. It applies equally well to genes.

The provision of healthcare has brought about the greatest shift in selective pressure on the human species since we came down from the trees. The grip of the grim reaper has been loosened and our genes are free to roam the murky paths towards ill-health. The consequences will take many generations to be realised, but they are inevitable. There is no way to stop mutations accumulating in our genes. As long as we have a health service to carry the burden, genes that introduce disease will multiply. We will become enfeebled parasites of our health systems. It's as inevitable as taxes.

Where will it all end? Is it our fate to become a frail and sickly species with chromosomes shot through with mutations? Perhaps the end will come when the NHS waiting list embraces the entire population and the burden of healthcare finally exceeds our capacity to provide it. Many of the founding fathers of genetics were proponents of eugenics as a means of improving the human stock. If the horrors of that particular vision are not to be repeated we must find an ethical way of ridding our bodies of faulty genes. ANDi, the first GM monkey, is a step towards that solution. The same technology that inserted a jellyfish gene into his chromosome will be used to correct defective human genes. We must see ANDi, not as a danger, but as our only hope for the future.

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