Montana State University |
Montana State University |
Connecting: From Sex to SETI
by Carol Flaherty
11/01/99 BOZEMAN, Mont. - From sex to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, humans link together to live and learn.
That sounds pretty basic, but since our learning has compounded for thousands of years, no individual today can know it all. That means each day we choose whether or not to learn about whatever mysterious black box is in front of us at the moment.
That also means we need to both cut ourselves some slack and keep ourselves open to learning. If the only time you turned off the O.J. trial was while prosecutors explained DNA evidence, you were not alone. But there are more interesting reasons to learn about DNA than O.J.
DNA sounds more foreign if you say "deoxyribonucleic acid" and more revolutionary if you say "genetic engineering." But genetic change is at our core. Each of us is the outcome of a relatively uncontrolled genetic experiment, which in my case resulted in mingling Mom's blue eyes and Dad's big feet.
The truly amazing thing is that some of my DNA is identical to that of a butterfly, identical to that of Brussels sprouts and bald eagles. However, because some of my DNA is different than a butterfly's, I flit to a rose on two feet instead of two wings. DNA can also distinguish among individuals, which is why it can determine a child's parents or whose blood was on a pair of leather gloves.
Once scientists learned that life has an overall pattern with just a few genes determining whether we are plant or animal, the wildest and most useless combinations became possible, like a tomato plant that glowed in the dark because it had a fire-fly gene. The most awesome and wonderful things also become possible, like plants that produce human insulin for diabetics and doctors who can anticipate and minimize Alzheimer's disease.
People's reaction to genetic engineering often varies with the engineering technique.
Take your daily bread, for instance.
For thousands of years, farmers selected wheat seed that was larger, slowly engineering high-yielding wheats.
For the last 100 years or so, cereal grain breeders would merge two plant varieties by shaking the pollen of one that survived a drought over the head of another with bigger seed, trying to get a wheat that would provide more bread even after a drought.
In the last 10 years, while scientists have continued to use the old way, they increasingly have gone into cells to make sure the genes they want are moved. Learning to identify and insert a specific gene is difficult, but inserting one that has been identified and moved before is said to be as easy as following a cookbook recipe.
People have accepted foods created by shaking one plant's pollen onto another to make a hybrid, but when the essence of the pollen (a gene) is inserted directly into a cell, some distrust the outcome.
Genetic outcomes are difficult to anticipate. Both scientists and consumers need to question how and why new genetic techniques are used. What is the goal? What is the cost? What is the degree of safety?
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal August 12 said that we are able to feed twice the world's 1950 population on the same acreage as before because of improved crops, preserving about 15 million acres that otherwise would have been plowed. But a few weeks earlier, headlines described the death - in a laboratory - of many monarch butterfly larvae that ate genetically engineered corn pollen spread on milk thistle. The impact on monarch larvae near genetically engineered corn fields is not yet known.
If you could grow all our food using no herbicides because a crop had the long tap root of a weed, would you? More importantly, should you?
Our estimation of what is right and wrong often change when the stakes go up. We may be against genetic manipulation until some day in the future when only a cloned kidney will save our child's life.
Though we don't know the outcome of field work with corn pollen and the monarch butterfly, many people are working on the question. The answer should come quickly, because we are linking together to find it.
When we team up, not even the sky is the limit.
I wonder what we would learn from DNA research if the SETI project ever succeeds. SETI is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence using signals gathered by the world's biggest radio telescope.
If you use SETI's free screensaver (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/), it gathers a tiny bit of radio telescope data for your computer to analyze for signals that suggest intelligent life "out there." The next time you are connected from home to the Internet but take a break to see what the kids are doing, the SETI screensaver would use the computer's free time to send its analysis back to SETI.
If searching for little green men is not something you want to be taxed for, then you have to love the SETI@home project. In the 24 hours before I wrote this column, nearly 1 million people let SETI@home use their computers.
If we find ET, finding whether DNA is a universal way of storing life's designs would be very interesting. Though the universe is infinitely variable, I'm betting we find that underneath it all, we're the same.
Send questions or comments to Carol Flaherty, MSU Communications Services, Bozeman, MT 59717: carolf@montana.edu.
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