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Holism and GE
Genetic Engineering from a Holistic Perspective
If we use holism as an organising principle for understanding how ecosystems
work, can it give us an insight into the impact of GE technologies?
South African General and statesman Jan Smuts founded the concept of holism
in 1926. Smuts declared the following principles of holism; 1) Nature
only functions in whole within wholes; 2) Nature has no parts; and 3) The
whole is greater than the sum.
Smuts warned the scientific community that nature would never be understood
by studying its parts. This statement challenges the entire paradigm
that science is founded on, that if we can understand the parts of a complex
situation, eventually we will be able to manipulate it and foresee the outcomes.
Sceptics of this fundamental assumption are now saying that natural systems
may be so complex we may never understand them. If a teaspoon of water
can hold over a billion organisms, will we ever have the capacity to understand
every relationship that each organism has with the rest?
Many experiments illustrate the difficulty scientists have in predicting
the outcomes of manipulating the environment. Take for example the
seashore ecology experiments of Californian scientist Robert Paine.
He removed the main predatory starfish from a section of beach containing
15 different species. After one year only eight species remained.
Scientists delight at the ways they can describe the interconnectedness of
all the different species and how one influenced the demise of the rest.
However from a holistic perspective the situation becomes unsettling.
Instead 15 starfish, view this as a population. Removing one species
caused the entire whole population to collapse. Not only did it influence
the starfish but all the other species in that ecosystem they were not studying.
The extent of the impact was unpredictable and even then only confined to
a single year.
Professor Dick Richardson from the University of Texas offers an insight
on GE and holism from his many years in genetics research, some of it at
a molecular level, and teaching courses in genetics. Professor Richardson
is a certified Holistic Management educator.
First, the field of genetics
has advanced so rapidly in the past decade that now we are discussing fundamental
questions of "what, really, IS a gene". Sewall Wright maybe 60+ years ago
defined a gene "as the hypothetical unit necessary to make sense out of breeding
experiments." It STILL IS a hypothetical unit, and what we now have
are regions of DNA that regulate molecular activities, some of which are
involved in the process of making proteins.
Genes no longer are discrete units with a beginning and an end that are separate
from beginnings and ends of other genes. Functionally, a gene may overlap
another gene, yet in the region of overlapping code, code entirely different
amino acids so that the two proteins would not be recognizable in the area
where their genes overlapped. Sometimes two genes may share a beginning
and have different ends, and sometimes they may share common ends and have
different beginnings.
The part of a particular gene may code for several proteins, depending on
which tissue or organ where the gene is active. A gene for an antibody
protein may code for 100's of thousands of different proteins, with permanent
changes that eventually code for one in one cell lineage, and another in
another lineage, etc. for all the antibodies we ever will make.
The stuff in the newspaper, and the things that are patented by companies,
are to a large extent hypothetical, although they do work to code something
consistent in test conditions. Nevertheless, we don't know what they'll
do when the diverse conditions of the living organism are involved, much
less what the diverse conditions among organisms will create.
Genetic engineering is very much analogous to the early days of nuclear energy
when we thought we had a wonderful tool to do all sorts of things.
Our enthusiasm today for genetic engineering is, I believe, a measure of
our ignorance combined with wishful thinking in most cases. In some
cases, I think the enthusiasm is justified. How do we tell the different
situations apart??
On a related level, the "working environment" of genes in an organism is
very much like an ecosystem, and actually the organism is created with an
interplay between the genes and the ecosystem. A cell is a "holon"
(or "whole" within another "whole") and a tissue is another holon, and an
organism is another, and so forth until we get to the universe. (Maybe
beyond the Universe there are others, but so far we don't have any scientific
models for "way out there"!)
When a gene is treated as a "cure" it is done so like we treat symptoms in
holistic management. Cure one symptom and create problems, we all know
from holistic management. We haven't had time to track many of the
steps in a cascade of "new diseases" generated from the "cure" of the ones
addressed by finding "the gene" for disease X.
Just as there is no gene for "eye color" but a gene affecting some biochemical
processes, we require other genes to have eyes for there to be a possible
expression of a "gene for eye color". Even without eyes, the "eye color
gene" will continue to function, and produce the product(s) it produces in
the biochemical system, which also makes hormones, pigments, etc.
Now, putting together the above ... what IS a gene, really, and what DOES
a gene DO, really ... and you have some idea of the complexity of the genetic
system. Yes, we can now move genes around among vastly different species
-- microbes to humans, humans to plants, etc. -- but the gene moved into
an organism may NEVER have been "tested" in this new ecosystem of genes.
There are certainly large time delays before some of the effects appear,
which may take days, or generations.
We are, indeed, tampering with mixing holons never before mixed in millions
of years of biological testing. What we do with this new very powerful
tool first and foremost, I believe, is be VERY careful! Monsanto and
other companies, I think, are being VERY reckless! We all will share
the results, good or bad.
Reprinted with the kind permission of Professor Dick Richardson, Integrative
Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, USA.
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