BT Corn: future or fear?

It doesn’t take much to see that the public discussion over the genetic modification of food within Europe has gone considerably astray. Scientists often lament the lack of scientific input (and may reflect on why there is so little), while civil society groups lament the lack of public voice and the restrictions on the current debate. The issue has become so sensitive that the slightest hint of agreement or disagreement with a particular form of biotechnology brings forth a barrage of media and political criticism (and support) quite out of proportion to any specific research or proposed introduction of new technology. Instead of sensitive debate about complex risks (not only bio-risks, but also socio-economic risks), we have two camps at war. I have little doubt - from the short period of time that I have been researching into the African biotechnology debate - this warring scenario is already spreading fast across the African continent. In this blog I will argue that one way out of this now polarised situation is to a step back, reflect upon our conceptualisation of the gene itself, and then re-launch the debate without recourse to deterministic views of genetics.

Ivan Toms, a victim of meningitis

Eric Lander is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Director of its world renowned Broad Institute. He was one of the key scientists involved in the human genome project. He fought very hard to make human genome DNA information available to science and health professionals. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of our time.

A confident and affable person, Lander, sitting in his office in a magnificent building, tells me that biologists have mastered the science of mapping every gene in the human body. We think that we have about 26,000 genes, but we are not sure. The science community has mapped about 20 per cent of the genes. Every day, more and more are being discovered.

The science community now maps genes faster and cheaper. For Lander what is important is to map genes in order to have better health, to create tools for what is known as ‘genome medicine’, which is to use the understanding of the association between genes and disease to develop better biomedical interventions.

With her husband, Frederika Spangenberg drove all the way from Kimberley to personally collect her DNA results. Through her mother’s line of descent she turned out to be L0d. Himla Soodyall wrote that L0d is thought to be the oldest of the L0 groups and common among the Khoesan populations of southern Africa.

I thought of Jan Raats, the director of the apartheid government’s census, who designed racial classification in the early 1950s. He had come up with the following definitions:

1. ‘Asiatic means a person of whose parents are or were members of a race or tribe whose national or ethnical home is Asia, and shall include a person partly of Asiatic origin living as an Asiatic family, but shall not include any Jew, Syrian or Cape Malay;
2. Bantu means a person both of whose parents are or were members of an aboriginal tribe of Africa, and shall include a person of mixed race living as a member of the Bantu community, tribe, kraal or location, but shall not include any Bushman, Griqua, Hottentot or Koranna;
3. Coloured means any person who is not a white person, Asiatic, Bantu or Cape Malay as defined, and shall include any Bushmen, Griqua, Hottentot or Koranna;
4. A white person means a person both of whose parents are or were members of a race whose national or ethnical home is Europe, and shall include any Jew, Syrian or other person who is in appearance obviously a white person unless and until the contrary is proven.’

An early racial slight

Scientists say that race is a meaningless concept; in that it does not explain anything in particular. The BBC headline for a news item published on 29 February 2008 though read ‘Race differences in immune genes’. If race is not meaningful a concept then what is this about racially based differences in immunity?

Either race is meaningless or it is not. So what is going on here? This is the issue; human beings vary as you can tell by just looking at how unique each one of us is. Percentage-wise differences are coded by anywhere between 0.01 to 2 per cent of the human genome. The differences include visible characteristics like colour or non-visible ones like blood type.

Differences are why we are here today. In my first demography lectures I used to give to sociology students at the University of Cape Town, I used vulnerability to smallpox or other infectious diseases as an example of selective mortality. If our ancestors had the same vulnerability to smallpox, they we all would have perished and left our species extinct.

The BBC news item refers to fascinating research done by Eileen Dolan and her team at the University of Chicago. ‘We want to understand’ she says ‘why different populations experience different degrees of toxicity when taking certain drugs’. As clinicians and population geneticists know, this is a fair, compelling question, to ask.

... would still be meaningless

We always thought that the term coloured was pretty meaningless. Let me now tell how meaningless, judging from the DNA based information just released by the Living History Project. A joint initiative of the Africa Genome Education Institute and Ancestry24.com, we took 500 DNA samples from individuals in Cape Town, Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg during 2007 and are releasing the results now.

The first result I want to tell you about is that of Keith Forbes. From his mother’s side he is West African. Technically, he inherited the energy producing mitochondrial DNA from his female ancestors linked a group referred, in the jargon, to as L2a1b. ‘The distribution of group L2a’ Himla Soodyall (2008) wrote, ‘is possibly a signature of the Bantu expansion, the great movement of black people of Niger-Congo origin who migrated in waves throughout Africa to eventually dominate the continent demographically speaking.

No-one understands...

The science journalist’s first and foremost duty is to understand the science – and secondly – in terms of time – to re-write this science into popular language. Simple!

So what’s happening - why aren’t the public not better informed? Why has scientific rationale appeared to bypass the public debate over GM crops? And why do scientists continually lament to the poor standard of scientific knowledge held by the general public (in Africa and elsewhere)? Time and again during interviews in South Africa on the implications of biotechnology I have heard from scientists that the general public basically knows nothing about biotechnology, they’re misinformed, or they hold views that are fly in the face of rationality. Presuming that the scientists themselves feel they know more - what’s going wrong with science journalism in Africa?