Science journalism and biotechnology
Gonzalo Herranz, department of Bioethics, University of Navarra.
lecture Delivered in Pamplona, 3 May 1995, 12.15 pm.
In II conference on The Information Society. Scientific journalism and new information technologies.
III. Biotechnology and new information technologies
What can a doctor, interested above all in ethics, say to future journalists about the relationship between two privileged fields of modern technology: the technology of living beings, some say life technology, and information technology?
There is much to say. At its heart, I hope to show, at its core, biotechnology is just another application of information theory and internship .
I will start by giving an overview of biotechnology:
What it is, what it can do, how it will change our lives and our thinking.
From this we can deduce the obligation of the scientific journalist (ethics is already here) to know about biotechnology and to reflect on it, to make it known to the public so that everyone, understanding the problems it poses, can be in a position to intervene in its regulation and applications.
Finally, I will describe the relationship between biotechnology and new information technologies: their mutual influences.
I. Biotechnology. What it consists of, what it can do, how it will change our lives and our thinking. 
Biotechnology (BT) is the practical, applied arm of molecular biology (MB), the discipline "star" of today's biomedical sciences. Each, in its own field, occupies a leading position in research, development and the ability to improve the quality of life.
The combined effect of one and the other will be colossal. Someone has said that a revolution is taking place, silently, almost unnoticed, but right under our noses, with richer consequences for science and a more intense impact on people's health and way of life than the French Revolution or the October Revolution had on politics. Without attacking the Bastille or the Winter Palace, without touching the political order, biotechnology is already changing the lives of many people: the food we eat, the medicines and vaccines that preserve our health or save us from disease. All of these will be changed by biotechnology in a radical way. What the revolutions of history have not achieved in terms of social welfare or economic progress, some say, will be achieved by the revolution in biology.
And it depends not only on what molecular biology can do: it also depends on how society is informed of the achievements that biotechnology has already made or may make in the future, on informing everyone of the calculable costs and benefits of its innovations. The ghosts of fear of new applications need to be banished. But it is necessary not to exaggerate the truth or to inspire vain hopes.
How does biotechnology work?
For some years now, a few more than 20 years, biology has had a particular, new idea of living beings. In the reductionist mentality, partial and incomplete, but terribly so internship, typical of the scientific method, they are considered as very complex machines, made up of parts and mechanisms, capable of self-assembling, self-maintaining and self-reproducing under certain conditions.
It is an idea that makes it easier to analyse them using the procedures of Biochemistry and biophysics: separating nuclei, cytoplasmic components, measuring them, observing them, breaking them down. The same applies to macromolecules. All these elements can be studied: you can play with them, subject them to different conditions and relationships, to see how they behave. Throughout all these years, by means of purely analytical techniques, after thousands and thousands of doctoral thesis and laboratory works, we have come to know in infinite detail the constitution of cells, the inventory of their molecules. But, if the thing had remained there, it would not be of much use: it was an accumulation of "dead" or not very lively data , quantitative parameters, which are summary in tables and remain there.
In more recent times, another, more dynamic and active vision has taken over. The new mentality has complemented the mechanistic idea of organisms as machines, that is, as complex assemblies of parts that are drawn on a plane, with the idea that these parts are not only mechanically assembled, but that they intercommunicate, speak an interactive language, are, constitute information systems: molecules are not only, weigh and have form in space: they also "talk to each other".
Today, living organisms are viewed biologically as information processing machines. In a certain way and at a certain level, it is correct to say of each of us that we began as a package of information, formed by the information carried in our nucleus and cytoplasm by the sperm and the oocyte with which our parents one day engendered us and God created us in his image and likeness. Our organism began to build itself by means of its own self-assembly programme, of which we are now beginning to know the language. For this autonomous development , it needed the infinitely valuable and invaluable welcome of our mother's womb, with whom we have maintained a molecular dialogue from the very first moment, and before our affections spoke, a molecular dialogue.
And after we are born, we have a molecular conversation with the world, from agreement with genetic instructions that are written in a highly complex language of molecules that act as chemical messengers to modulate our reactions on a myriad of levels. The absorption of oxygen in the lungs and of food in the gut, getting drowsy at naptime, or getting anxious in the face of a difficult status , are all physically based on a language of molecular mediators emitted and received by our cells.
This idea that life is about the language of molecules, about information, explains why biologists have set out not only to systematically unravel it, but also to force cells and organisms to modify it. When you learn a little of this language, of the language that is spoken inside a bacterium or a cell, you can not only listen to what they say, but also intervene in it, use their language and mooify their words to make them speak the language that interests us. This is where BM and BT are born.
To simplify, just as a tape recorder can reproduce a real conversation or a tricked conversation, we are today capable of making an epidermal cell capable of sintering a substance that was thought to be exclusive to liver cells, of making a mouse produce cat hormones, a bacterium become a generous producer of insulin or growth hormone, or a leukaemic cell become an astonishing interferon factory.
The whole secret of this amazing art is based on a few ideas:
- that the composition and structure of proteins is encoded in the DNA of genes. So an adage has been coined: one gene, one protein. Proteins are the structural factors from which cells are built and which determine the difference between cell types: skin cells have keratin, muscle cells have actin and myosin, and so do all the others.
- that the mechanism by which these proteins are produced is "blind", i.e. it copies mechanistically, depending on the DNA nucleotide sequence presented to it. It does not matter whether the DNA is intact or has been modified by mutation; whether it is native to the cell or the species, or comes from a virus that has managed to integrate its genome into that of the host cell, or has been put there by ingenious procedures at laboratory.
- in fact, the latter procedure is at the basis of all so-called recombinant DNA biotechnology. Foreign DNA included in the genome of a cell is expressed as if it were part of the native, original genome. Just as a duck egg is hatched in a broody hen's nest, and a duckling hatches out of it and not a chick, the cell into whose genome a piece of foreign DNA has been inserted hatches it as if it were its own. We can create yeasts that produce materials unique to mammals, molecules vastly distant evolutionarily from their own and original ones. Just as a motorcycling enthusiast is able to give the engine of his machine the turbocharger of a racing car or the horn of a big rig, we can force a bacterium to produce a very sophisticated substance that certain human cells produce.
The great thing about biotechnology is precisely that: biochemists, geneticists and biophysicists have managed to build new assemblies, cells and organisms with the loose parts of the biological meccano that have never existed before. And surprising things have begun to emerge.
What does biotechnology do?
The achievements of BT are already formidable: "smart" vaccines, trained bacteria capable of producing drugs, hormones or metabolic mediators of high biological value: erythropoietin, haematopoietic growth factors for leukocytes and macrophages, plasminogen activator, factor VIII so that haemophiliacs are not at risk of disease, cytokines, interferons, vaccines; cultivated plants resistant to pests, frost, or drought, able to grow in nitrogen-deficient soils, or endowed with higher nutritional yields; animals that have been given genes that give them special abilities, such as increased growth, or resistance to disease. There is already talk of transgenic animal farms, with cows producing milk enriched with biological substances that protect against certain diseases, or piglets whose hearts can be transplanted into children. I read yesterday that the first transplants of such hearts have already been carried out on monkeys.
Gene therapy can cure serious hereditary diseases, some cancers and perhaps, in a few years, AIDS.
But it is not only her: agriculture and the food industry are already benefiting from the achievements of BT. Things like the following are already being done:
- introducing genes into cultivated plants that contain pesticidal substances: either by preventing parasites from reproducing or by poisoning them with agents that do not harm animals or humans.
- modify bacteria to prevent them from acting as initiation points for ice crystals and thus prevent tomatoes from freezing.
- produce plants designed for arid areas, or of a size more suitable for intensive cultivation.
- I referred earlier to transgenic animal farms: cows capable of excreting antibodies or protective substances against infection in their milk. It will not be easy to get any animal to produce milk identical to that of a woman, but genes for the most significant components of human milk can be transferred: bottles will be filled with milk that is very little different from mother's milk. There will be egg-laying hens with very low cholesterol content, and meat-producing animals resistant to environmental infectious factors or able to metabolise sawdust. Transgenic animals and plants resistant to endemic pests that too intensely damage agricultural production in third world countries are expected to become available soon.
In its few years of existence, BT has become one of the most promising sectors of the industry. Large pharmaceutical companies have invested heavily in it. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the proliferation of small biotech companies reached a rapid pace, as did their launch to success or their collapse into ruin. The Tokyo Stock Exchange created a special section for such companies subject. The amount of money that the BT industry is able to mobilise may be equal to that of the rest of the pharmaceutical industry. The requirements of sophisticated instrumentation, high quality raw materials, scientific and technological ingenuity, good fortune to get things right, are ingredients of the biotech business: some scientists by selling their procedures, their patents, or the shares of a small industry became rich overnight. Others went bankrupt and, with their short-lived degree program industrial career cut short, had to return humbly to the university. The history of biotechnology is, together with that of microelectronics, one of the most exciting chapters in the history of modern industry.
Benefits and risks
Alongside this beneficial potential, whose intensity and extent are difficult to calculate, BT offers the possibility of equally unforeseeable risks and damage. We are still at the beginning of the biotechnological adventure (era?), and we do not know how far we can go in the manipulation of bacteria and viruses, of plants and animals, or of human beings, their biology and behaviour.
Edward Yoxen, author of the book graduate The Business of Genes: Who Shall Control Biotechnology? paints a futuristic picture of the benefits and risks of BT, balancing them against each other, with possibilities and realities such as the following: artificial bacteria reducing the viscosity of oil pumped from wells and thereby increasing oilfield yields, versus bacteria living in pipelines and potentially corroding or clogging them. Mass production of therapeutically valuable substances versus mass production of nerve toxins, viruses or highly active poisons. Release of modified germs for the improvement of agricultural production as opposed to others that may cause ecological catastrophe after years. Synthesis of marvellous molecules, such as multi-purpose vaccines, which confer permanent immunity against several diseases at the same time, or multi-action toxins, poisons against which it would be impossible to fight. From health in abundance to biotechnological warfare.
The list of benefits and risks can be stretched as far as doomsday alarmism or the beneficent imagination of earthly paradises will take us. BT, like science, is ambiguous: it all depends on the heart of the man who uses it.
Biotechnology is serious
One thing is clear: it does not only change our living conditions. BT will also change the way we see nature.
The idea of an orderly world, full of diversity, beauty and harmony, from the ingenious hands of God, characteristic of the natural science of the 17th and 18th centuries, imposed on the scientist the obligation to catalogue, classify and reveal the workings of this marvellous chain of life. In the 19th century, the biological world was seen as the scene of evolutionary, dynamic changes, based on the competitive struggle within and between species for survival. It was a nature with tooth and nail, contemporary to the first industrial development , to the class struggle between capital and the working masses, to Americanism in business, to the triumph of the best and the least scrupulous.
Now, BT is contributing to a new image of the biological world. Nature is presented as a system of systems. Organisms function and reproduce as systems governed by their own genes, Structures complexes managed by the programme contained in their genomic DNA. Biological life is being interpreted as the processing of specific information. Concepts borrowed from computer science, systems science, programming and control engineering are increasingly used in biology, presenting in logical diagrams the control of blood pressure, the dynamics of protein synthesis or the production of chemical messengers sent between the components of a cellular system.
But the idea of organisms as programmed systems inevitably leads to the temptation to reprogramme these organisms in order to induce some advantage in them. It is discovered in vitro how a module can be varied in order to modify a function. Intervention, either by modifying or introducing a cellular function module , can multiply or abolish a function already possessed, or create a function hitherto not possessed.
The idea that is becoming widespread and accepted is that human intervention in nature has no foreseeable limits. Not only will natural genes be isolated, multiplied and put to work in unnatural places (in reaction tanks or in genetically modified plants and animals), but new genes will eventually be engineered for advantages hitherto unknown in plants and animals.
The prospect of man's incredible ability to manipulate nature and himself is opening up. One would have to be very foolish or very insensitive not to be concerned about the emerging risks. Biotechnology needs to be studied in depth.
II. Ethics and Biotechnology
In many advanced countries and internationally, ethical and legal standards have been set to optimise BT applications and reduce risks.
It is precisely here, in the field of informing the public, at training of social awareness of the uses and applications of BT, that journalism, both scientific and informative, will play a decisive role in the future.
There is, at least it is said, but I do not practice it, an antagonistic relationship between journalists, scientists, mediums and ethicists. We all have an obligation to inform the public about the problems that emerge from scientific advances and their applications. The drama and dilemmas of transplantation, of the relationship between mothers and foetuses, of the applications of BT constantly attract human interest and, one would hope, the moral reflection of the public.
I have to say that it is not always a satisfactory relationship. TV news programmes force short interventions, to be subjected to too many cuts. You find yourself saying something that, out of context, makes you look like an intemperate radical or a fool who speaks platitudes. In longer programmes it is already possible to demonstrate a slightly higher I.Q., but there are factors that are not the most conducive to calm and sensitive reflection: programmers need images, movement, faces, to say very important things in two or three minutes, always emotionally charged: statistics cannot be explained: one has to react to a single case, whether very dramatic or very triumphant.
It is very difficult to design good programmes that maintain a general interest, an educational action, and are entertaining at the same time. Someone, one day, will find the solution and TV, general magazines, newspapers will be able to fulfil the task of providing a Education on DNA.
Society needs to "get out of DNA illiteracy". It cannot be disinterested in BT. It needs that specific wisdom, which is not erudition but reasonable knowledge , in order to assume its responsibility in a field on which its future depends so heavily. Journalists have a fundamental ethical and social responsibility here.
Media reporting on LV needs both descriptive objectivity and ethical consideration. It must avoid exaggeration or falsification of data, unjustified optimism, catastrophic alarmism.
Let's do a practical exercise. A few weeks ago, the European Parliament banned patents on components of the human body and has put limits on patents on transgenic animals. Some consider this decision a tragic mistake, which puts Europe at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the USA and Japan.
The Europe of the citizens has spoken through their representatives. What did they know about the decision they took? What do we know? Pressure from industry and scientists, on the one hand, has collided with that of the Greens and other environmentalists.
III. Biotechnology and new information technologies
What about the relationship between biotechnology and new information technologies: what about their mutual influences?
New information technologies allow access for all, including journalists, to the great information highways. More and more bibliography is accessible: the issue of cutting-edge biomedical journals in electronic publishing, the instructions of data which are open to everyone's use and enquiry . Bibliographic notation: access code via e-mail.
Publications and documents that were very difficult, if not impossible, to consult a few years ago can now be accessed without having to get up from our desks at work.
New information technology is creating a new way of working in biomedical science: create the organ, create the function. There is now a fever to share information, to exhibit one's own products in this showcase of global dimensions. From anywhere in the world, one can discuss science, plan and design research, distribute tasks, integrate data, discuss them. One can chat amiably in highly specialised science clubs, and send each other daily reports of the progress one is making in one's work. For the first time, a truly transcontinental, multicentric research can be realised.
Scientific information is being democratised, it is something for everyone, real science for the people.
The struggle over the patentability of the genome has played a crucial role. It was a very important episode in the relationship between biotechnology and new information technologies: Accessible to all.
On the one hand, the idea that everyone has the right to access information available is strengthened, as it is not in keeping with the ethos of sharing to deny anyone justified access to data, or even to intervene, to suggest, to ask questions. This applies to interested colleagues, critical observers, science journalists and ethicists alike.
On the other hand, everyone has a moral duty to know in order to decide: in the future, BT will have a growing political importance, because it will be an increasingly significant part of legislation, economic investment and science policy.
Today, every serious project of research on BT has in its team a man who is well equipped for public relations, for informing reporters. A scientist with the skills of a journalist, or a good journalist with the ability to understand the complex problems of the design of experiments, of the practical consequences of their applications, of the ethical responsibility of all.
For all these reasons, the ethical responsibilities of science journalism are multiple and high. It would be very interesting to design a professional code of ethics for this specialization program.