Feature

Untwisting the story of DNA

Fifty years after the discovery of DNA, David King looks at how genetic knowledge has been used to control and exploit natural processes — including human reproduction — for profit

This spring has seen a massive jamboree celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Given the debates about GM foods and designer babies, one might have expected the official celebrations to be tempered by a little attention to public concerns. Yet with the exception of a couple of critical events organised by watchdog groups such as my own, the scientific establishment took the opportunity to reassert a traditional ‘social vacuum’ history of scientific discovery by great men (and the odd woman).

The failure to set science in its social and economic context – and thereby address the roots of the controversies – is a sad reflection of how professional science communicators continue to think within a naïve liberal model of science and society. They will, no doubt, continue to be surprised by public suspicion and to treat it as ‘anti-science irrationalism’. This article is an attempt to present a realistic history of DNA and to reflect on where we are after 50 years of the double helix.

Science and capitalism

Since the scientific revolution, the role of science has been fundamental to capitalist societies. As its prophet Francis Bacon insisted, by uncovering nature’s secrets science provides the knowledge and tools to extract profit from nature, and to control nature for the benefit of (some) human beings.

The continual unfolding of this process is defined as progress. Its long-term characteristics are the reconfiguring of natural processes as industrial processes, thereby subjecting them to criteria of efficiency and uniformity of output.

In our societies, the key method of science is reductionism: the explanation of higher-level phenomena by analysis of the properties of system components, and the assumption that the lower levels determine what happens at higher levels.

The discovery of the structure and function of DNA marked the beginning of the new phase in the capitalist control of nature. It allowed penetration of nature’s secrets at an entirely new level, which was believed to control higher levels of organisms’ function.

Controlling the food chain

The agenda of reductionist science and corporate control has been evident in plant breeding since before the DNA era. Beginning with early intellectual property rights legislation in the USA, and the development of hybrid maize in the 1930s, the aim of corporations gradually to eliminate the public breeding system, turn seeds into a commodity and control the food chain has been clear.

The pesticide corporations’ strategy of acquiring seed companies, which began in the early 1970s, predated recombinant DNA and plant genetic engineering. However, those developments gave a dramatic boost to the strategy, culminating in the acquisition of Britain’s plant-breeding jewel in the crown, the Cambridge Plant Breeding Institute, first by Unilever and then Monsanto in the mid-1990s.

The use of genetic engineering to create plants designed to boost proprietary herbicide sales, and, through ‘terminator technology’, to eliminate the fundamental basis of plant life processes and farming (seed production and saving for sowing in the next year) are textbook examples of the way in which, under capitalism, scientific control of nature serves the ends of corporate profit.

Geneticisation, reductionism and commerce

The DNA structure opened a new, incredibly fertile area for investigation using reductionist methodology, and has been astonishingly successful at generating basic scientific knowledge. Over the past 30 years, genetics and molecular biology have become the mainstream of biology, and have become ‘big science’, with projects such as the Human Genome Project.

Scientific and medical establishments have been convinced that genetics is the key to progress, while the pharmaceutical industry has invested heavily in genetics as the route to sorely needed new classes of drugs.

However, biotechnological attempts to apply these discoveries in the real world have starkly revealed the shakiness of reductionist knowledge of nature. By far the greatest investment has been in biomedicine, yet despite 25 years of enormous investment, now greatly exceeding that of the public sector, and the creation of thousands of biotechnology companies, there is relatively little to show.

There have been about 40 different, highly expensive, biologicals created through recombinant DNA (none of which have had a major impact on the death rate from leading diseases), some important diagnostics and a handful of new vaccines. Gene therapy is only the most obvious example of the failure of reality to match the hype.

Yet the excitement of genetics, and the promise of profit and economic growth, has continued to skew investment, public research funding and health policy towards biomedical treatments for disease and away from traditional preventive public health.

The lack of success of the biotechnological enterprise, and the political resistance it has inspired, parallels the earlier history of eugenics. In both instances overconfidence and enthusiasm combined with particular driving forces (political circumstances and racism in the earlier case, capitalist competition in the latter) have led to premature attempts to apply genetic knowledge. As in the 1930s, this is already leading to acknowledgements that more basic research is needed.

Eugenics persists

The historical roots of the 1953 discovery lie in the history of eugenics. Despite its broad political support, by the 1930s the scientific shortcomings of eugenics were very apparent. In the USA, the Rockerfeller family, one of the eugenics movement’s main backers, decided that more basic science was needed to discover the molecular basis of heredity. Owing to the 1953 discoveries and the subsequent development of genetic engineering, molecular biology has become the mainstream of biology.

Since the end of the Second World War there has been a genuine attempt to avoid the brutal excesses of pre-war eugenics, and an intense insistence by the medical and genetic establishments that current practices have no relation to earlier atrocities. However, it is unreasonable to think that the social attitudes and underlying economic and technological factors that produced eugenics will suddenly disappear or fail to be expressed.

In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault identifies eugenics as an element of ‘biopower’, the development of discourses and practises for social control through control of the population and of individual bodies and behaviour. These techniques of power are what separate modernity from earlier stages of Western society. Their aim is to exercise social control not through direct state repression and violence but by management and normalisation: they operate with the consent and active participation of individuals.

From this perspective, the coercive element of 20th century eugenics was an aberration caused by particular political circumstances, which encouraged over-confidence and over-enthusiasm. In fact, the received history, with its emphasis on right-wing politics and coercion is an extremely biased and partial version of the truth, designed to distance current medical genetics from eugenics. Eugenics was a mainstream movement, with support from all political quarters; it always contained a strong element arguing for persuasion rather than coercion, descending from the movement’s patrician founder Francis Galton.

Nowadays eugenic biopower is expressed in two main ways: through population control programmes in developing countries; and through medicalisation and technological intervention in reproduction in industrialised countries. The ongoing imperative is to dismantle natural barriers and create a completely controllable system, to eliminate the randomness and mess that is inherent in natural sexual reproduction.

As reproduction becomes increasingly technological and medicalised, it is inevitably subjected to pressures for quality control. The most obvious aspect of the latter is the introduction of prenatal screening programmes, first promoted by a eugenically minded medical establishment but now embraced by most women.

The reconfiguration of reproduction as an industrial process is most apparent in cloning, with its Fordist production of identical copies. The ultimate trajectory of this trend is germ-line genetic engineering, in which the capital intensification evident in plants and animals will be applied to labour itself, as designed and traded human embryos become just another commodity.

DNA: past and future

The key significance of the 1953 discovery and subsequent genetic engineering is the opportunity for biopower to operate at a whole new level and, for the first time, to begin to redesign human nature. My aim in emphasising continuity in eugenics is not to stigmatise geneticists as fascists but to understand the meaning of current trends and to highlight that expanded free market/consumer eugenics scenarios are realistic and must be taken seriously.

To combat such a development we will need new social movements that, like the green movement, force us to question the underlying drive to control nature in capitalist societies.