Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Like clipping a Scotty's tail?"

"Only this snip is inherited."

"And this sort of deletion — can it happen in nature?"

"It is nature. Only infinitely quicker."

"So where's the danger?"

Ressler shrugged. "Where's the danger in a mongoose?"

"But a mongoose is a separate species. Ice-minus bacteria are just a protein away."

"And you are just proteins away from either." It thrilled to hear the man, the edge of alertness in his voice, discernible only in outline until then. "Yes, the Frankenstein fear is overblown. Transgenesis is not about creating life from scratch. It's about juggling existing genes — existing formulas for protein manufacture. Deleting, adding, moving the factory parts from one organism to the other. You're right: the whole genetic engineering revolution is only a quantitative extension of the ancient art of livestock breeding. Even interspecies gene transfer has a viral precedent. Only human snipping is a billion times faster, more facile."

"Moving around existing traits? That's all we're talking?"

Ressler smiled. "All," he said ironically. "For the time being."

Todd was high-strung. He spoke rapidly. "That just proves my point, then."

"No." Ressler shook his head painfully. "That proves my point. Genetic engineering is not one single thing, but an assortment of various techniques and projects, all with different risks. By far the largest is ecological imbalance. Unpredictable, irreversible environmental mayhem that used to take selective breeders a lifetime to produce can now be knocked off in a dozen weeks."

"Mayhem?" Todd sounded personally wounded. "Are we that stupid? I'd think that any science capable of reaching down into the cell with a syringe a few molecules thick, of doping out the genetic commands and figuring out just where to cut and paste, should be able to predict the effect a simple rearrangement will have once it's in place. The hard part's doing it. Figuring out what you've done ought to be trivial."

"One would think so. But remember our simulation, back at the office. We wrote the piece. We knew what every line of the code did. We knew what effect a change to a given parameter would have locally. But the only way of determining the overall outcome was to run the code." He learned forward under his quilt. "It surprised us. And that program was only a hundred instructions long. The human genome, in twelve-point Roman, is several thousand printed pages. The linked biosphere___"

"This strikes me as a strange argument for an arch-empiricist to be taking."

"Names will never hurt me," Dr. Ressler laughed. "I could do without the 'arch,' I suppose."

"We can learn about things by breaking them into parts?"

"That's the only way I know of to learn about things."

"But it sounds as if you're describing some impenetrable big picture. Some transcendent sum that evades final analysis."

"I wouldn't put it that way. Life is an immense turbulent system. Small changes produce large swings in outcome."

"Are you saying that even a complete understanding of the working parts can never predict how they fit together?"

"I'm saying we don't have anything close to a working understanding of any of those parts. A year and a half ago, two fellows at large state schools, using one of those miraculous syringes you mentioned, injected the gene for rat growth hormone and a promoter into a fertilized mouse cell. Their mighty mouse made the cover of Nature. Only: nobody knows how the mouse DNA took up the injected gene. It's hard to condone commercial applications of work where the basic mechanism isn't understood."

"Unfair. How can we possibly go after a breakdown of 'how' without first mapping out 'what?'"

Ressler was delighted that Todd, despite his lack of formal training, felt equal to the argument, even this deeply in. "Suppose the fault is not in what technology can tell us, but in what we are willing to hear from it?" Hope: the life cycle's lethal enemy.

I worked steadily on the jigsaw, a dozen times aching to jump into the dialogue, but knowing better than to risk involvement. Franker argued from a position of urgent altruism. He wanted to believe that by eliminating the blind, backsliding, short-interest, error-driven, groping element from the spark — the code at last rendering itself self-knowing, literate, able to grasp and correct the insensate message it has for eons posted forward to its later by-products — life might reach the verge of a new relation, cross the threshold of liberty. Dr. Ressler, for private reasons, put Franker's hope through the burner.

"Check out Chargaff's piece in Nature. Half-dozen years old. 'Have we the right to counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years…? The world is given to us on loan.

We come and we go__' This, from the fellow who first revealed the base ratios in DNA."

"Hey lady," Todd called me. "Verily this man's citations."

It felt good to be spoken to. "First tell me where this tree branch with the two nubby end things goes."

The men came over to the table and began worrying the puzzle with me. Frank looked for spaces where particular pieces would fit, Ressler for pieces that would fit particular spaces. They were both infuriatingly good.

"Do you have an ethical problem with it?" Todd asked casually.

"That depends, I suppose, on what part of the 'it' we're concerned with. Perhaps some genetic engineer somewhere is embarking on eugenic nightmares, but that's another matter. I guess I'd say that I have no more moral qualms with ordinary gene transfer than with hybrid corn."

"Where in the world is the problem, then?"

Ressler shrugged. " 'Where in the world,' indeed. The field is only a decade old. In a little less than three years, the government has granted a dozen patents on new forms of life. Patents! There's even talk of copyrighting segments of identified genome."

"OK, then. What part of recombinatory research would you legislate against?"

"That's just the problem. Legislation is too late. Legislation is about commerce, rights, equity. Once you need to pass laws about science, you've taken a wrong turn."

"Galileo muttering 'But it does move,' under his breath, just after recanting?"

"Exactly. Of course, the state is right to prevent any process it thinks might harm the public interest, just as it takes action against phosphates in freshwater lakes,"

"So what bothers you about genetic engineering?"

"It's not science. Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery. It might, from time to time, spin off an occasional miracle cure of the kind you dream about. The world we would know, the living, interlocked world, is a lot more complex than any market. The market is a poor simulation of the ecosystem; market models will never more than parody the increasingly complex web of interdependent nature. All these plates in the air, and we want to flail at them. 'Genetic engineering' is full of attempts to replace a dense, diversified, het-erogenous assortment of strains with one superior one. Something about us is in love with whittling down: we want the one solution that will drive out all others. Take our miracle superstrains, magnificent on the surface, but unlike the messy populations of nature, deceptive, thin, susceptible. One bug. One blight__No; the human marketplace has about as much chance of improving on the work of natural selection as a per diem typist has of improving Bartlett's Familiar Quotations."

"But does recombination research necessarily mean selling the field into the market? We have this incredible leverage, this light source, mind. The ability to work consequences out in advance. Shed the stone-and-chisel, save ourselves—"I could make out his humanist's evolution: cell, plant, animal, speaking animal, rational animal, laboring animal, Homo fabor, and ultimately: life as its own designer. Something in Franker too, voting for wonder. But wonder full of immanent expectation.