Biotechnology. Misunderstood.

David Kroll, veteran science blogger, educator and Director of Science Communications at the NC Museum of Natural History is having a hard time convincing someone of the importance of biotechnology and of communicating it to the public. As a scientist working at a biotech company myself, this seemed to be of particular interest to me and it also turned out to be particularly disconcerting. In this case David's correspondent happens to be Ms. Laura Combs, a former state environmental agency employee writing at a blog that seems to discuss diverse topics connected with medicine and the environment. Unfortunately that's not precluded her from inventing some rather strange ideas about the definitions and scope of biotechnology.

Ms. Combs seems to be an engaged citizen who genuinely appreciates the work done by the NCMNS, and that makes her response even more perplexing. The incident started innocently enough with the NCMNS organizing a 'Biotechnology Day' that showcased biotechnology research for the public. I believe this is an exceedingly important endeavor that should be encouraged, especially in the face of the growing importance of biotechnology and genomics in our lives. The presentations were split evenly between people from industry, academia and the agricultural sector; again, an entirely fair split since these three sectors are where the majority of biotech research takes place. 

Unfortunately the inclusion of industry in the museum's events sparked a backlash from Ms. Combs, which resulted in a lengthy correspondence with David and others at the museum. What left me the most nonplussed was Ms. Combs's definition of biotechnology as something antagonistic to the natural world and generally malevolent to humanity. Biotechnology, according to Ms. Combs, was not compatible with the "natural science" that the museum claimed to promote. Leaving aside the fact that the public dissemination of science should include all of science and not just "natural" science, unfortunately this seems to be a common foundational misunderstanding on the part of biotech opponents and it seems to ignore a lot of things, including a starting point in Darwin's great work "The Origin of Species".

Darwin kicked off his thoughts on natural selection in the first chapter of his book by reminding us of the artificial selection done on domestic animals and agricultural plants for hundreds of centuries. Yes, all these people who were practicing artificial selection were doing 'biotechnology' even if they had no knowledge of genes. But the overarching point that Darwin was getting at was that nature also practices biotechnology in the form of natural selection, and has in fact been doing so since the origin of life. This is probably the biggest mistake that biotech opponents make, to think of biotech as a wholly human invention. All of natural selection that involves the selective retention and manipulation of genes and phenotypes is biotechnology. In addition as David notes in his detailed reply, horizontal genetic transfer has been one of the key driving forces of evolution. Again, biotechnology. And perhaps Ms. Combs would like to know that about 8% of our genome consists of genes from retroviruses that were inserted during evolution. Thus, viruses were doing biotech with us long before we started doing biotech with them. The fact is that gene transfer and manipulation have been natural processes that we have very recently started to exploit. That also leads directly to Ms. Combs's criticism about GM foods. She is right in insisting that presentations regarding the benefits of GM foods need to be balanced with their possible side-effects, but she also seems to fall prey to a more basic and flawed belief that GM foods are fundamentally a new, man-made creature in the list of biological species. They are not. Nature has been trying out GM foods for millennia.

As a biotechnology scientist myself I was particularly distressed by the response, since I happen to study a particular form of biotechnology in my research that would not follow Ms. Combs's definition. My company uses the specific base pairing properties of DNA - one of its most amazing and fundamental features - to make drugs for cancer, psoriasis and other disorders. My research which has been pioneered by an academic lab has nothing to do with GM foods, I don't work for Big Pharma, and I am not manipulating anyone's genes. I am using entirely natural processes to help me find drugs for diseases which very palpably affect millions of people every year. In my case, nature is the entity that's allowing me to do biotechnology and I find this fact fascinating. I find it hard to see how Ms. Combs could be against the kind of research I am doing, but the major point as pointed out David is that biotech goes far beyond GM and into many areas of science like detergent manufacture, biodefense and health supplements. What I am doing is just one of its myriad manifestations.

Unfortunately, this kind of valid debate about the definition or pros and cons of biotechnology is undermined by Ms. Combs insinuations about the penalties paid by Big Pharma and their unethical practices. Ms. Combs seems to erect a classic straw man and points out the huge fines paid by Monsanto, Pfizer, Bayer and others for false labeling, bribes to doctors and other transgressions - and nobody's supporting these practices - but what on earth do these fines have to do with the scientific evidence for or against GM foods? This listing of pharmaceutical evils is completely tangential to the science of GM foods and smells suspiciously of guilt-by-association. In her emphasis on including equal time for critics of biotech, she also suggests the name of people who seem to be bonafide supporters of the vaccine-autism link. It's one thing to have a balanced debate, quite another to give voice to critics whose arguments are chiefly fueled by emotion and incomplete evidence rather than reason. 

Finally, she is not impressed by the inclusion of academic presentations in the museum's events because she says that universities "receive significant funds from industry to support biotechnology research". That part is especially amusing since the biotechnology revolution was launched almost entirely by academic scientists like Fred Sanger, Paul Berg and Hamilton Smith as an offshoot of basic, curiosity-driven research about the natural world. And a moment's research would have convinced Ms. Combs that the scientific underpinnings of biotechnology have been almost entirely taxpayer funded...by taxpayers like herself.

I am not singling out Ms. Combs for her objections and I do respect her general support of the museum and her regular visits to it. But she seems to have started a minor campaign on her blog to discredit the museum's attempts to help the public to understand biotechnology. This is disappointing. David has responded in as much detail as possible to her emails, and anyone who knows him would be aware of the tremendous and admirable work he has done for years in support of the public understanding of science; it would sound ludicrous for those of us who know his work to hear the allegation that he does not appreciate the merits of a balanced scientific debate. 

What I would like to say to Ms. Combs is this; biotechnology has been with us since the origins of life, and recombinant DNA is only the latest incarnation of a process that started billions of years ago. To say that biotechnology is at odds with the natural world is to completely ignore the biotechnology that nature has always practiced and to proclaim that man is not a part of nature. But more importantly, whether you like it or not, biotechnology and genomics are poised to enter the public discourse in ways that we can't even imagine yet. Genomic medicine is on the threshold of impacting public health and policy in a big way, and it promises to create new drugs for major disease and new diagnostics that will allow us to detect diseases like cancer earlier. Like other scientific developments, discoveries in the next few decades will make us confront novel social and moral issues. It's all biotechnology, knowledge that's based on the fundamental workings of the biological universe, and it will be upon us very soon. And as recent progress demonstrates, it will inevitably be developed by both academia and industry. 

Would it have unintended consequences? Of course it would, like every other technology. But that is precisely the reason to publicize it as widely as possible, to make sure that the public is aware of the most cutting-edge research in the field. If you are suspicious of biotechnology, then you should be the first one to make sure that museums all around the country organize biotechnology days to discuss, debate and present. About the worst thing you can do about a topic which you don't trust is to advocate that it should not be discussed in a public forum.

The bundle of non-truths that's Deepak Chopra

You can always trust Deepak Chopra to put a positive spin on pseudoscience and casually pummel straw men and misrepresent facts while he is at it. His latest favorite concerns experiments done by Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier (the co-discoverer of the AIDS virus) who has ventured into highly questionable scientific territory by trying to demonstrate that DNA can imprint its "memory" on water even at great dilutions, which basically boils down to pushing homeopathy. Unless supported by massive evidence, there's no need to take Montagnier's results seriously for now. But as usual for Chopra, this is a resounding victory of what he considers to be the "inconvenient truths" of science. And as usual, Chopra's greatest achievement is the remarkable number of strawmen, non sequiturs, misguided conclusions and plain misrepresentations he manages to include in a single article.

Chopra starts by extolling what he sees as the "fraying of science at the edges" done by scientists themselves.

"What delights me about this controversy, which will be won by the skeptics, naturally, is that conventional science is fraying around the edges, and the fraying is being done by scientists themselves. A decade ago, for example, you couldn't find more than a small handful of physicists and biologists who were willing to consider that the study of consciousness was reputable. This year there will be conventions on the subject with hundreds of participants. This isn't because there's been an outbreak of rebelliousness in labs across the globe. Rather, there was nowhere else for the trail to go. You can't discuss memory, either in the human brain or in water, without explaining consciousness"

First of all, science has been "frayed" at the edges by scientists for hundreds of years; it's called scientific progress. One can argue that any new revolutionary result or theory pushes the envelope and tries to redefine the boundaries of conventional science. But this has nothing to do with Montagnier's experiments or the paranormal and only time will tell if these results will challenge "conventional" science. And of course in Chopra's definition, "unconventional" science is new-age mysticism whereas most scientists define it as new but still concrete and validated results that advance our understanding. Secondly, Chopra is just constructing a straw man with his quip about consciousness. He tries to make consciousness sound like some kind of non-material entity whose existence scientists are now being grudgingly forced to accept. That's just plain wrong. Consciousness has long since been thought to be a function of the basic biology and chemistry of the brain. No scientist worth his salt who is researching consciousness believes that it's supernatural or somehow outside the purview of science. If you doubt this, just read noted neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran's latest book to understand how scientists are boldly tackling consciousness; you will find them all using novel but standard scientific tools like MRI and CT scans. The only "rebelliousness" that Chopra talks about is in the fact that we can now actually tackle the problem of consciousness using modern scientific methods. Most scientists think consciousness is a remarkable phenomenon, but only Chopra thinks that it's remarkable because it's paranormal and outside the boundaries of traditional science.

Further on Chopra cannot help but tar the founders of quantum theory, a discipline whose real understanding he completely lacks and which he himself has done so much to dress up in mumbo jumbo and completely misrepresent.

Popular books like The Tao of Physics and God and the New Physics played an enormous role in the general culture. But their impact on professional physicists has been slight and gradual. That's because physics is based on materialism. Anything that isn't a thing, any phenomenon that cannot be measured, doesn't belong in physics. But the solid, material world vanished a hundred years ago, and almost all the quantum pioneers, such as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, either became outright mystics or remained baffled by the radical discovery that the universe emerged from a void"

No. The solid, material world did not "vanish" with the advent of quantum mechanics. In fact if anything it became even more fortified because quantum mechanics helped us understand it better. The predictions of quantum theory were taken seriously only because they agreed with measurements in the material world to an outstanding degree of accuracy. And while some of the founders of quantum theory were great philosophers and interested in "mysticism", every single one of them always emphasized that quantum mechanics is only as good as its compatibility with hard experimental data on material objects. As Bohr himself said, "Physics only tells us what we can say about the world". In fact it is a triumph of traditional "materialist" science that some of the most bizarre predictions of quantum theory like entanglement are now being validated through meticulous experiments. By declaring that the founders of quantum theory became outright mystics, Chopra grossly misrepresents and insults their great contributions to science.

Further on Chopra again wants to convince us that the "wall between science and consciousness has broken down". Again, the wall is probably breaking down but only because of hard scientific experiments that are allowing us to actually study the phenomenon, not because of new-age thinking emerging from pseudoscience. I could go on, but what's the point? Deepak Chopra, in Derek Lowe's words, has been a "firehose of nonsense". He wants to portray every scientific development as some kind of maverick paradigm shift which is forcing scientists to re-evaluate material reality itself. Yes, there are paradigm shifts in science, but they come about because there's massive amounts of actual data, not because some isolated experiment whose results are inexplicable require scientists to believe in the paranormal. Chopra is about as misguided as they get.

Path-y-ological science: Homeopathy and the memory of water

Inspite of its anecdotal benefits, homeopathy has rightly been regarded as dubious science. Especially its strained hypothesis of dilution actually increasing the potency of a drug runs counter to established scientific principles. But anecdotal evidence and good faith continues to fuel the homeopathic establishment. A novel hypothesis to explain the basic principle of homeopathy- the "memory of water"- was long discarded. Unfortunately, it seems to be getting credence once again. The new debate, however, establishes no basis for believing in this fantastic idea...

...Read the rest of my post on Desipundit...