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Sue Hubbell was the author of eight books, including A Country Year and New York Times Notable Book A Book of Bees. She wrote for the New Yorker, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Smithsonian, and Time, and was a frequent contributor to the “Hers” column of the New York Times. 

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Shrinking the Cat

Genetic Engineering Before We Knew about GenesBy Sue Hubbell

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2002 Sue Hubbell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0618257489
Preface

Genetics. A branch of biology that deals with the heredity and
variation of organisms and with the mechanisms by which these are
effected.

Engineering. The science by which the properties of matter . . . in
nature are made useful to man . . .
-- Webster"s Third New International Dictionary

I"d not intended to write another book for publication after I
finished my last one, Waiting for Aphrodite. That book had seemed
final to me, and I wanted to devote myself to other things -- working
in my woodlot, for instance, or building stone walkways around the
house.
But as I worked, thinning out trees here and there,
encouraging those I liked, cutting down those I didn"t, hauling rock
from this place to that, I reflected on my proclivity for rearranging
bits of the world, an activity so characteristic of the human animal.
It is a subject I"ve written about in the past but clearly have not
exhausted.
About that time, stories concerning genetically modified
organisms began to appear in newspapers everywhere. I read them with
interest, not only because they were good examples of our human
penchant for fiddling with materials that are to hand but because all
parties to the furor that erupted seemed to be talking past one
another.
The public, which had forgotten whatever high school biology
it had learned, was saying that something new, terrifying, and
possibly devious had been kept from it, something having to do with
the sanctity of species. The scientists, whose work was built on a
body of genetics research stretching back a hundred years, appeared
startled to find that the term "species" was understood by the public
in such a fixed way. Biologists, for whom "species" had become simply
a useful word, were used to reassigning plants and animals to
different species. They knew that the genetic similarities among
species were far more important than their differences. They saw the
uniformities of biological processes as transcending the separateness
of individuals. Biologists had their own questions about genetic
engineering, questions that weren"t making it into the popular media,
but they understood that manipulating a gene or even putting a gene
from one kind of life into another wasn"t such a stretch. They had
been saying such things for some time, but in words so obscure and
papers so technical that no one outside their particular fields had
heard them.
The corporations that were exploiting genetic research, had
begun profiting from it, and had every expectation of profiting even
more were alarmed by all the attention and turned, as structured
organizations always do, to spin control, which fooled no one and
made the public doubly suspicious.
I knew, perhaps, a little more than the general public did
about genetic engineering, but certainly not as much as the
scientists. I knew, for instance, that we had been fiddling with the
genetic identities of domesticated plants and animals ever since we
had become human. I knew that in the process of that fiddling --
engineering by another name -- we had actually created brand-new
kinds of life, species, if you will, based on but different from the
wild forms that had furnished the raw material -- wheat and corn, for
instance, to name but two. And I knew that to a greater or lesser
degree those new species needed us in order to thrive. The enormous
sums of money being invested in research relating to modern genetic
engineering by agribusiness and pharmaceutical corporations, sums
they believed would be repaid many times, seemed like a new element
in the story. But in truth, merchants and traders from ancient times
onward had been in the business of bringing more desirable, and hence
more profitable, goods from there to here: amphoras of better olive
oil brought higher prices in places where lesser olives grew. Sheep
with denser woolly coats could be sold to advantage far from their
birthplace.
But I had a lot of questions. How had merchants spread the
new plants and animals from one end of the earth to the other? What
was the effect of transplantation on the plants and animals? Could
those species whose unique genetic makeup was the result of our
handiwork live without us? How did all those genetically modified
organisms affect human history? Until recently, the genetic changes
that created new species had been brought about through breeding,
through the isolation and encouragement of genetically interesting
recessive genes and mutant plants and animals, and through the
artificial creation of mutations themselves. From the standpoint of
natural selection, artificial selection speeded up the process of
evolutionary change. Still, species change had been slow compared to
what researchers today can do, with our knowledge of genetic
processes and the tools we have to manipulate those processes
directly. Does the modification of species in the past have anything
instructive to tell us about the moral and ethical questions
concerning modern genetic engineering?
Those questions interested me, so for a time I put off work
in my woodlot and let the rocks lie. To answer my questions, I chose
a few animals and plants whose genetic identities we have tinkered
with to varying degrees and that are more or less dependent upon
humans. In the course of examining our shared histories, I discovered
that our experiments in manipulating species have had unintended
consequences. I"ve answered my original questions to some degree, but
I"ve found a lot of new ones. These relate to an enormous problem
confronting humankind today. For the purposes of this book I will
call it the problem of limits: How do we limit the effects of six
billion of our kind on the rest of the world and avoid making
alterations that harm other kinds of life and change the world so
drastically that we can no longer live in it ourselves?
I am encouraged and hopeful about this large, general, and
occasionally boisterous public debate over genetic engineering. I
believe it is long overdue, and I also believe that it will become,
in time, a way to and a part of the solution of the problem of limits.


Chapter One

"I make thee maister," seid Robyn Hode.
"Nay . . . let me be a felow," seid Litull John.
-- Robyn Hode and Monk, 1450

We, the namers, call our species Homo sapiens, the sapient,
intelligent, wise sort of human. It is the name by which we
distinguish ourselves from all other kinds of life, including those
other species of the genus Homo: H. erectus, those who stood up, H.
habilis, those who made stuff. They, along with the
australopithecines, Cro-Magnons, and other relatives of our fine
selves, managed to get themselves extinguished somewhere along the
line, but we thrived and continue to do so. How wise.
Tens of thousands of years of natural selection acted upon
our ancestors to produce our species of humankind with our
complicated, much-folded brains and clever fingers, attributes that
have allowed us to spread all across the planet and even a little
beyond it. In...