Biotech for Dummies

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Not so, say both Cody and the New Scientist authors. Not only is about 10 percent of the genome "virtually impossible to sequence," but "if the molecular drama that constitutes human biology were a movie, the DNA sequence of the human genome would be no more than a cast list—and one written in a foreign language, at that."

Many of the genes that have been sequenced are codes for particular protein molecules, which can be seen as the actors in our drama. But from nearly the same actors—playing different roles, with different scripts and different staging—one can make either a human or a zebra fish. Among the 10 percent of unsequenced DNA, it seems, are countless regulatory sequences that control when and where genes are turned on and off. "Unless and until we know how collections of genes go together," explains Cody, "how they combine to form organisms, whether plants or animals or human beings, we will not know what, really, we are doing when we add a gene to an existing organism, or manipulate the genes in a germline in such a way as to affect future generations."

And if that is true for established researchers, how much more so, one must wonder, for garage biotechnicians, who risk—as Hapgood notes—unwittingly creating new, invasive species. The solution, he says, is for the large biotech firms and the swelling ranks of anti-biotechnology activists to work together, or at least to concede that they have interests in common: "The best bet for the biotech corporations may actually lie in the efforts of their activist-opponents to have huge up-front testing costs imposed on them, albeit with the ultimate goal of stopping them in their tracks" because that kind of regulatory burden would erect, for the amateur biotech researcher, a "cost barrier to entry that is presently missing."

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