The Secret of Life

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So many opportunities, so many cliffs to jump off--a new frontier of ethics, politics, religion and commerce. Centuries of philosophical arguments about free will are now twisted like that DNA strand. Are you truly free to be a size 6 if gluttony is in your genes? The nature-vs.-nurture debate changes when scientists find a gene that makes you shy, makes you reckless, makes you sad. For families haunted by generations of loss to cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease and sickle-cell anemia, prenatal testing may spare them a future as painful as the past. But if we can screen embryos for curses, should we also screen for gifts? Do you want to know if your child will have perfect pitch or violet eyes? Would parents love their children differently if they designed them to order?

Issues of privacy and knowledge arise every day, particularly as researchers develop tests that spot diseases for which there are no cures. Can it really be kept a secret from your boss or your insurance company or your future spouse that you carry a gene that predicts you will develop Alzheimer's by age 45? Would you want to know that you are likely to develop Huntington's disease if there is still nothing doctors can do to stop it from destroying you?

It is not only our genes we are learning to play with. What if we could create mosquitoes, those flying hypodermics, that instead of spreading malaria spread a vaccine protecting humans against it? Back in 1965, scientists fused mouse and human cells. Today whole animals are being patented; pigs are bred with human cells in hope of finding a source of organ transplants for the 70,000 people on waiting lists in this country alone. And that raises the question: If an Australian biotech company creates a creature that is part human, part pig, what law would apply to it? Should a company be allowed to patent a cloned human embryo, then market its cells to help fight disease? What if the embryo is made of human DNA planted in a cow's egg?

The first insecticide was made from powdered chrysanthemums in China nearly 2,000 years ago. Now biotech companies test bananas that contain a hepatitis vaccine and tomatoes that fight cancer. Dow makes a kind of corn that can turn into biodegradable plastic. Other companies have field-tested a cross between a flounder and a tomato to see if a fish gene can help a fruit stay fresh in freezing weather. The U.S. and the rest of the world are locked in a fight over how much to tinker with and how much to tell about what is now inside what we eat.

If the flip side to all this promise is the challenge that comes with it, perhaps it's a good thing that we may have a long time to weigh the answers. The more scientists learn about the way we age, the more they wonder why we have to. Our skin replaces itself every two weeks, our bones every seven years or so. With the help of the code book, maybe scientists will one day turn our bodies into repair shops, learn how to control the genes that break and those that fix, so that our lives, like the immortal molecule Watson and Crick deconstructed 50 years ago, go on and on...