IT IS 2020. You are watching the latest episode of CSI Miami. Horatio and the team have a murder to solve. The murderer has conveniently left a DNA sample behind. In fact, since a single strand of the molecule can now be detected and analysed, he could hardly avoid having done so. Not so conveniently, he is not on the database—wishy-washy civil libertarians having prohibited the collection of DNA records about the unconvicted.
Never mind. Horatio pops the sample in a state-of-the-art sequencing machine and out comes a picture of what the suspect looks like—or, rather, a series of pictures of his likely appearance at five-year intervals from age 15 to age 50. Cross-reference these with Florida's driving-licence database, and the team has its man.
Not, perhaps, a nail-biting plot. But it is a perfectly plausible description of the future of crime-fighting. For in this and many other ways, the development of genomics means there will soon be no hiding place.
As Stewart Brand, an American futurologist, memorably put it, "information wants to be free," and one of the lessons of the new biology is that it is all about information. DNA databases are a good illustration of that, and of the conflicts and paradoxes the new age of genomics is creating. Everybody likes the idea of the guilty being caught and punished. Universal DNA databases would assist that process. Yet many resist the logical conclusion this points to.
One reason they do so is an understandable fear not so much of what governments might do with the information now as what they might do with it in the future. DNA is more than just a reliable biometric (though not necessarily, if the price of making it continues to fall, an unfakeable one). It is an individual's essence. If anyone doubted that, Craig Venter's experiment of implanting an artificial genome in a cell he calls JCVI-syn1.0 and seeing that cell's daughters march to the new genome's tune should convince them.
Many people prefer to keep their essences to themselves. Few want their weaknesses exposed to public gaze. They may not even want to confront those weaknesses in private (though this motive is often less acknowledged). Yet that is what freedom of DNA information threatens. Disease susceptibility, life expectancy, personality traits, intelligence, criminal tendencies—all may be illuminated by the harsh light of free DNA information. Even if laws against genetic discrimination are passed (as in America with the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008), it is possible to imagine a future in which individuals are dogged by their DNA. Would you turn it over to a putative spouse, for example?
Yet the benefits for medical research—and thus for the health of future generations—of DNA information being free are enormous. And perhaps projects like George Church's Personal Genome Project will show that those who are allowed to volunteer their genes, rather than having them wrenched from them by the authorities, will be inclined to be generous. Moreover, the unknown is often more terrifying than the known. Once the limits of DNA-based knowledge become apparent, some of the fears are likely to evaporate.
So much, then, for DNA freedom. Those who carelessly parrot Mr Brand, though, often forget that his quote actually starts with the words, "On the one hand information wants to be expensive because it is so valuable". And the value of genomics can be enormous.
The gods themselves
On March 29th the Federal District Court of New York ruled on a longstanding American legal dispute. This was a claim by Myriad Genetics, of Salt Lake City, to patent protection on two human genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2. Some versions of these genes increase the risk of breast cancer, and Myriad sells a test that detects these versions. The patents in question, though, are not for the test but for the genes themselves. Myriad claims to own the intellectual-property rights to these sequences of DNA, even though they are natural and found in every human being. The court disagreed.
Dr Venter, meanwhile, is seeking a patent on his newly minted DNA sequence for JCVI-syn1.0. He is on somewhat stronger ground than Myriad, since the DNA in question is clearly an artefact, albeit one based on a natural sequence. Also, bacteria are not humans. Nevertheless, the principle that anyone can "own" an organism's DNA in this way disturbs many people.
What can and cannot be patented needs to be sorted out, for property rights lie at the heart of business. Patent law is supposed to encourage innovators, rewarding them with temporary monopolies but requiring them to place the details of their inventions in the public domain and thus open them to competitors. In this context patenting an artificial genome for a bacterium seems reasonable. As long as the claims made are not too sweeping they need not stop anyone else patenting a different artificial genome. (Patents on how such genomes are made might do so, but that type of exclusivity is familiar territory for patent law.)
Similar rules should also apply to, say, a crop with an artificial genome. Such things both need and deserve to be expensive. They need to be because they cost money to develop. They deserve to be because inventors, no less than authors, singers, actors or any others whose work is easily and cheaply copied, are still worthy of their hire. It should not apply, though, to a natural genome.
Nor, many would argue, should it apply to synthetic DNA if that DNA is then inserted into a human being. Indeed, the question of whether such insertions should be allowed at all is fraught. Once the recipe for humanity is fully worked out, people will want to try changing it. They will, no doubt, plead medical need at the beginning but, as the rise of plastic surgery and the modern debate about performance-enhancing drugs have shown, the medical can easily spill over into other areas.
Since ethical norms vary from country to country, it is inconceivable that no one will try this. If it works, it will almost certainly spread. Thirty years ago the qualms felt by some about in-vitro fertilisation melted in the face of the first gurgling child born using the new technology. The same is likely to happen for the first "enhanced" human, assuming the gurgling is happy.
As long as such changes remain within the human gene pool (wanting children to be as tall, smart and beautiful as the best of their parents' generation), a happy reaction is probably the right one. But what if people want their children to be three metres tall and have blue skin, pointed ears and maybe even a tail? In practice, such "post-human" features would probably arrive gradually, giving people time to adjust to the idea and decide which, if any, were acceptable. Some might be accepted. Most will probably be rejected as monstrous. For, in the end, people usually manage to bend technology to their will, rather than the other way round.
There will be mistakes on the way, and suffering, too. But technology, once invented, cannot be unlearned. Perhaps, then, the last word belongs to Mr Brand. When he set up the Whole Earth Catalog, the venture that first brought him to public attention, he said "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.
