Peter Forbes

Craig Venter’s synthetic bacterium has so far been presented in terms of stark opposites: the prospect of miraculous new synthetic organisms to clean up the earth, versus the scientist playing at God. The reality is more prosaic. Venter has laboriously synthesized, by purely chemical means, a one-million-base-pair bacterial genome, inserted it into the empty shell of a cell and the result has reproduced itself quite happily as a working bacterium: a “synthetic” life form. This is only impressive to those who could never quite believe that DNA was “only” a chemical. There isn't a biologist in the world who didn’t believe that a chemically synthesized DNA would be identical to a “natural” one. Venter’s feat is rather like copying the text of a Shakespeare play by hand, giving it to a theatre company, and being surprised that it comes out sounding the same.

Venter’s aim is to create useful new synthetic organisms. But exactly this kind of genetic engineering has been commonplace on an industrial scale for decades. The first great breakthrough was synthetic human insulin for diabetics in 1982: the insulin gene is inserted into the common or garden intestinal bacterium E. coli and the bug churns out insulin which is harvested in huge quantities. This has been the standard method of making insulin ever since. Venter’s experiment does not take us any nearer creating the organisms he says he wants: biofuel bugs, artificial photosynthesis bugs, CO2 scavenging bugs etc.

What Venter has done is similar to, and less impressive than, the cloning of Dolly the sheep. In Dolly, the genome of a higher organism, a mammal, was inserted into an empty cell and developed into a full-blown Dolly sheep. Venter’s bug is just a bug. We have known since Dolly that complete genomes inserted into sucked-out cells function perfectly normally to create the organism specified by the genome and not by the original host cell.

And if we are worried about playing God, think again about Dolly. Sheep, cattle, pigs, chickens and our crops are not natural at all, they were genetically modified, and profoundly so, by breeding experiments conducted thousands of years ago by the first pastoralists and agriculturalists. We have been changing the genomic population of earth on a vast scale for thousands of years.

 A final point. As with all cloning, Venter had to insert his synthetic genome into an existing cell, the genetic contents of which had been sucked out. At present, no one knows how to synthesise all of the components of a working cell from scratch, although this may one day be possible.

DNA is superstitiously regarded as the key to everything – the blueprint. This is wrong. Life is a collaboration between the rather passive coding properties of DNA and the dynamic self-organising properties of chemicals such as the lipids that form the walls of animal cells, or the proteins that spontaneously self-assembly to create fibrous structures and lock-and-key shapes for enzymes.

The only part of Venter’s work that did make me smile was his incorporation of an encoded message into the genome. Any researcher cracking this watermark code will find an email address to write to to claim their prize. This is cool but again it won’t surprise any biologist. DNA is just a string of letters written on an architectural molecule: In 2006 Paul Rothemund, a young US biologist, made the cover of Nature magazine by creating synthetic DNA smileys. You can write really any structure you like on DNA. You could inscribe a Shakespeare sonnet in a genome if you were so minded.

Venter’s coup is a huge success in terms of publicity. If it helps him achieve his ambitious and worthwhile ends, fine. But don’t let us get too excited about this over-literal and redundant experiment.

Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds on BBC1 last night featured bioinspiration. Three key subjcets - the Lotus Effect, spider silk and gecko adhesion - were featured. All first appeared in The Gecko's Foot (2005), still the only popular science book on the subject. Bioinspiration is set to be a key element in the new technologies that will fill the gap left by industrial collapse and the banking implosion.

The sale of Cadbury to Kraft in the middle of a recession, following the loss over many years of a good proportion of our industrial companies, has prompted much hand-wringing but one crucial consequence of these sales has not entered the debate.

We are about hold national elections. This country is a democratic nation state: the assumption being that the nation is a unit that has some control over its own destiny and that the political parties will compete to offer their vision for the future direction of this entity.

But, more than any other country, Britain has largely give up control of its industrial companies, preferring to let foreign companies to own them and to make the big decisions on investment and hiring and firing. Allied to this, financial deregulation in the 1980s resulted in a massive loss of control over the financial sector, something starkly highlighted by the ongoing crisis in which billions of private sector debt (caused by banking incompetence) have been loaded onto the state.

The democratic nation state used to have a clear identity and purpose: it had the monopoly of force within its borders and the right to defend the country from external threats also by force.  These powers were buttressed by the ability to raise sufficient taxation and to exert, if necessary, some leverage over industrial activity, without which the means to fight are compromised. The Labour Party for decades made public ownership of "the commanding heights of the economy" a principal plank of its policy. That clause went of course and the old commanding heights have disappeared. But it is a strange course to have given up control of almost all parts of the economy, commanding or not.

Just before the recession the government on its website crowed: “The UK was the number one destination for inward investment in Europe in 2007”. Globally, it was second only to the USA. Why was this a boast? As the government admitted, this represented mostly foreign companies buying British ones. This is selling the family silver and should not be equated with real investment, ie new economic endeavours or products that are seeking to create or fulfil a new market.

Surely, a nation state that goes to war as often as Britain has done in recent years, on the back of a dwindling industrial base, is a shell of a country? China is thought to be potentially militarily powerful because it has become economically powerful. This rule has held throughout history. Britain once understood this better than any other country but is now standing the rule on its head. The awful thought occurs that the British nation state goes to war so often because that is one of the few traditional powers it has not yet relinquished.

When we vote in May our votes may, if we are lucky, influence events in Afghanistan but they can have no effect on Kraft, Santander, Tata Steel, Nippon Sheet Glass Co (owner of Pilkington),  EDF, Nissan, Alstom, AkzoNobel (who bought ICI), and all the other once-British companies. It has been said, by the City Minister, Lord Myners, among others, that it is easier for foreign firms to buy a company in Britain than anywhere else in the world. Why? Who let this happen and why isn’t this gap being plugged as an urgent priority? Unless we recover some control of the industries in which British people earn their livelihood, the Election will be a hollow charade. How can a country go to war as a supposedly sovereign nation when it is fact largely owned by other countries? The dirty word for the condition we are approaching is helotry.

 

There are currently dozens of popular science books on evolution but a new one has joined the essential list: Nick Lane's Life Ascending (Profile), just out in paperback. With great gusto, Lane delivers updates on 10 key topics from the origin of life to ageing. He brings a biochemist's perspective to bear and I defy anyone not to learn something fantastic from this book, however much they think they already know. If you want an antidote to the Jerry Fodor controversy, this is it. Everyone should take the Epilogue - a homage to Jacob Bronowski and the true spirit of science - to heart.

Yesterday, I published a longish article in the Independent on a new Darwin book: What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. The book is a heavy polemic against the Modern Synthesis or Neo-Darwinism. Their attack is both philosophcial and scientific and urgently required answering. Many biologists feel that the Modern Synthesis badly needs updating to include the welter of data coming from Evo Devo but What Darwin Got Wrong is way off target. 

Inevitably, What Darwin Got Wrong will be heavily blogged. First off was evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. Watch this space.

In 1984 there is always an enemy but it can change overnight. In the real world, post 1989 there was a brief moment in which the Manichaean tendency seemed to have broken down. The communist bogey had lain down and died; Western capitalism was triumphant. Not being totalitarian, it took the West a little while to find a new enemy. In 2001, Nine Eleven ushered in the War on Terror and we were back with a dualist system of antagonistic ideologies. But now I fear a different battle is shaping up: science is sliding into the frame as the demon of the ultra right, especially in America where the tendency towards witch hunts against international “conspiracies” is most highly developed.

It now appears that in the two key subjects –  global warming and evolutionary biology – science is assuming the role in the eyes of the Fox-News, liberal-baiting culture of an Un-American international conspiracy. In its eyes, Copenhagen is an attempt to introduce world government by a sinister band of, probably communist, unelected meddling fraudsters. Evolutionary biology is similarly a global conspiracy against their simple old-time religion.

It would be easy to pooh pooh this threat. Almost all of the world’s governments and most reputable scientists agree on the broad outlines of the global warming problem. The problem is what to do about it. Similarly, all reputable scientists know that evolutionary biology is the only system of knowledge that makes sense of the vast array of biological data we possess.

But I’m not so sure we can rest easy. The meme for hatred of any international body interfering with the right of Americans to pursue their traditional way of life is very deep-seated. Conspiracy theories can make a lot of headway even when the conspiracy is non-existent and the fear of it mere paranoia. Climate change is different. There really is an international consensus for action. All you need to turn consensus into conspiracy is to convince yourself that the science is fake and that the scientists are fraudsters intent on world domination. Scientific literacy in the western world is now so low that it only takes a few emails to convince a largeish section of the population that their worst fears are true: scientists have bent the data to fit their theory; global warming caused by man-made emissions is a scam dreamed up by power-hungry scientists. QED.

In the modern world, opinion is shaped by gesture politics – a president bowing on U Tube, the words “Nature trick” in an email, count for more than the thought-through, considered policies of Barack Obama or their entire edifice of Western science, on which the ultra-right depend for disseminating their poisonous blogs.   Science now needs an Orwell in the face of this new assault on reason.

One reason that Copenhagen seems unlikely to deliver a binding agreement on carbon emissions is surely that a diktat was expected before the technical means to implement it had been agreed upon. This is Canute leadership: without a credible means of implementation you might as well command the earth to please move a bit further away from the sun.  (Not that this would solve the problem: we would still be faced by destruction of the ocean’s ecosystems by acidification.)

The frustrating thing is that there is now a reasonable consensus emerging on some of the necessary technical measures for reducing CO2 emissions. They will differ for different regions of the world, but that is only common sense, and some areas of the economy are more intractable than others, but to make a start there are a few no-brainers….

Decarbonization of electricity production is the first solution to fall out. Electricity, not oil, is the lifeblood of our way of life. Once that is decoked many other areas cease to be a problem or, as in transport, a solution is readily to hand. Of course, there is a raft of competing renewable sources for electricity but the pattern is beginning to shake out. In countries with natural resources such as hydroelectric power, use them. In hot countries, solar thermal energy is becoming the favourite. This involves large solar arrays in deserts which simply use mirrors to heat water or other fluids to run turbines. This is a proven technology that needs to be scaled up to national grid level. At the beginning of November the German-led Desertec initiative, a £240bn plan to provide Europe with solar power from the Sahara via cable, was announced.Until that is in place, for northern hemisphere countries such as Britain, nuclear is probably the best short- to-medium-term option and here Ed Milliband and the government have got it right.

Electricity can certainly be decoked worldwide by 2050 at the latest. That brings us on to transport. The battle between hydrogen and electric powered vehicles seems to be over for the time being. The hydrogen economy might become viable decades later but as the US Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, says:“Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen car economy?' The answer, we felt, was 'no' ?” The electric car is racing towards viability. Given the pathetic state of the world’s auto industries, governments need to use the leverage given them by the recession to speed the introduction of electric cars.

For medium-to-long distance travel within continents such as Europe and Asia the electric train is the only way; in cities, diesel buses need to be replaced by electric trams and trolley buses.

These are the easy choices. Home heating and cooking, aviation fuel, synthetic chemicals and plastics are harder to call but we need a world forum to share information on the emerging technologies for these sectors. We have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the world’s governments have been engaged in pre-Copenhagen diplomatic foreplay but why in advance of Copenhagen was a world technical body not set up to assess the different technologies: an International Panel for Emissions Reduction Implementation (IPERI)? Our smorgasbord of climate change discussion needs more of the roughage of technical nitty gritty and less of the politicians’ staple: communiqué fodder.