Moss - What genes cant do - 2003

What Genes Can’t DoBasic BioethicsGlenn McGee and Arthur Caplan, series editorsPricing Life: Why It’s Time for Health Care RationingPeter A. UbelBioethics: Ancient Themes in Contemporary Issuesedited by Mark G. Kuczewski and Ronald PolanskyThe Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate: Science, Ethics,and Public Policyedited by Suzanne Holland, Laurie Zoloth, and Karen LebacqzEngendering International Health: The Challenge of Equityedited by Gita Sen, Asha George, and Piroska ÖstlinSelf-Trust and Reproductive AutonomyCarolyn McLeodWhat Genes Can’t DoLenny MossWhat Genes Can’t DoLenny MossA Bradford BookThe MIT PressCambridge, MassachusettsLondon, England© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by anyelectronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.This book was set in Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong andwas printed and bound in the United States of America.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataMoss, Lenny.What genes can’t do / Lenny Moss.p.

cm.—(Basic bioethics)“A Bradford Book”Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-262-13411-X1. Genetics—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series.QH430 .M674 2002660.6¢5—dc212001056298To my daughters, Julie and RachelContentsSeries ForewordAcknowledgmentsIntroductionixxixiii123415175Genesis of the GeneThe Rhetoric of Life and the Life of RhetoricA Critique of Pure (Genetic) InformationDialectics of Disorder: Normalization and Pathologyas Process5 After the Gene117183NotesReferencesIndex199205217Series ForewordWe are pleased to present the sixth volume in the series Basic Bioethics.The series presents innovative book-length manuscripts in bioethics to abroad audience and introduces seminal scholarly manuscripts, state-ofthe-art reference works, and textbooks.

Such broad areas as the philosophy of medicine, advancing genetics and biotechnology, end-of-life care,health and social policy, and the empirical study of biomedical life willbe engaged.Glenn McGeeArthur CaplanBasic Bioethics Series Editorial BoardTod S. ChambersCarl ElliotSusan Dorr GooldMark KuczewskiHerman SaatkampAcknowledgmentsThe following individuals contributed to the realization of this workand have my everlasting gratitute: Mina Bissell, Paddy Blanchette, JeffBotkin, Nancy Burke, Candace Brower, Andrew Cooper, CarolineDamsky, Mary Davis, Alexis Kurland Deeds, Eric Kurland Deeds, BertDreyfus, Brian Eden, Arthur Fine, Paul Griffiths, Joseph Heath, DavidHull, Kuni Kaneko, Karin Klein, Elizabeth Lloyd, Ed Manier, ThomasMcCarthy, Paul Millea, Leslie Mulligan, John Opitz, Susan Oyama,Beverly Packard, Gordon Parry, Bill Ramsey, Bob Richards, Kate Ryan,Phil Sloan, John Stubbs, Suzanne Tronier, Steve Watson, Steve Weinstein,and Bill Wimsatt. Extra-special thanks go to Angela Alston, CarolynGray Anderson, David Depew, Steve Downes, Sabrina Haake, GlennMcGee, Bob Perlman, and Harry Rubin.

A portion of this research wassupported by funding from the ELSI program through the Center forGenetic Science in Society at the University of Utah.IntroductionThere can be little doubt that the idea of “the gene” has been the centralorganizing theme of twentieth century biology. And biology, especiallysince the inception of its molecular revolution of the 1940s and 1950s,has become increasingly influential in academic venues, including philosophy, public life and policy, medicine and the health sciences generally, and in everyday self-understanding. More recently the promises andprospects of new biotechnology to cure diseases and offer novel reproductive options, and correlatively to win or lose fortunes on the stockmarket, both further magnified by media attention associated with theHuman Genome Project, have brought the gene into even greater publicprominence.

The selection of my topic was motivated by the high stakesthat our understanding of biology has come to have on a variety of levels.Intellectually, in its impact on the humanities, arts, and human sciences;ethically, in its formative effect on human identities and our underlyinginterpretation of what it means to be human; and socially, with respectto the defining, normalizing, and pathologizing of human difference. Thetitle What Genes Can’t Do is meant to recall What Computers Can’tDo by Hubert Dreyfus and to suggest, by analogy, my aspiration toinfluence a powerful social-technical trend by way of a philosophicallyguided, empirically argued critique.Philosophically speaking, what I hope to provide is a platform uponwhich new naturalistic lines of thought can interweave biological andsociocultural threads at a very fundamental level.

Above all, the presentwork hopes to contribute to freeing the “naturalizing” enterprise fromthe unnecessary burdens of preformationistic baggage and thereby betterxivIntroductionto allow for the re-embedding of the self-understanding of human language and knowledge in contingent social and developmental processes.In the course of attempting to get the story right about genes a widevariety of issues are addressed, often in the context of minidialogues witha variety of key contributors, some from the remote past and others fromthe hot-off-the-press present. In order to help the reader ward off thedanger of losing the forest for the trees, I will first offer a brief overviewof the text.The work begins with a wide-ranging historical reconstruction andconceptual analysis of the meaning of “the gene” that results in definingand distinguishing two different genes.

Each of these can be seen as anheir to one of the two major historical trends in explaining the sourceof biological order: preformationism and epigenesis. The preformationist gene (Gene-P) predicts phenotypes but only on an instrumental basiswhere immediate medical and/or economic benefits can be had.

The geneof epigenesis (Gene-D), by contrast, is a developmental resource that provides possible templates for RNA and protein synthesis but has in itselfno determinate relationship to organismal phenotypes. The seeminglyprevalent idea that genes constitute information for traits (and blueprintsfor organisms) is based, I argue, on an unwarranted conflation of thesetwo meanings which is, in effect, held together by rhetorical glue. Beyondthis historical, conceptual, and rhetorical inquiry the bulk of this workthen concerns itself with an empirically up-to-date analysis of the celland molecular basis of biological order and of the pathological loss ofthe same.In each of these chapters I structure my analysis with the idea in mindthat the conflated view can be held empirically accountable.

I do notconjure up straw men to represent that position but rather use whatI take as the most historically influential formulations of the gene-asinformation-for-phenotypes position as my points of reference. In thefirst instance I use Schrödinger’s early and highly influential thermodynamic argument for why a solid-state “aperiodic crystal” must be thecore of biological order.The task here is really twofold: first to recall that Schrödinger had areal argument for the promotion of his famous hereditary code-scriptmetaphor and second to indicate how and why we can now see that hisIntroductionxvargument was mistaken.

In the second instance, that concerning disorder, my principal point of reference is the somatic mutation hypothesis.Albeit in evolving forms, some version of the somatic mutation hypothesis has dominated cancer biology throughout the twentieth century. Imean to show how a bifurcation in the understanding of cancer commenced with the “phylogenetic turn” that took place at the beginningof the twentieth century and resulted in an ongoing dialectic betweengenetic determinists at the center and developmentalists at the margins.I have reconstructed the history and fortunes of the somatic mutationhypothesis program in part to give shape and philosophical meaning tothe recurrent challenges that have been brought forth from the margins.Philosophers of biology have hitherto steadfastly avoided the topic ofcancer (almost as if talking about it could make it catching).

But in considering the loss of organismic order (and the corresponding emergenceof malignant order) philosophically charged questions about the distinction between normal and pathological come quickly to the fore.Carefully considered, the research trajectory of the somatic-mutationhypotheses when confronted by its own empirical shortcomings providessome of the most cogent evidence against the conflated preformationistview from which it arose.With this somewhat bare-boned structure in mind, I will now trybetter to prepare the reader for some of the winding curves and vistasthat come up along the way.

A main objective of chapter 1 is to accountfor how a putatively misguided notion of the gene could have possiblyarisen and in so doing to clarify just what is conceptually at issue. Myprincipal strategy is that of reconstructing the conceptual pathway to ourcontemporary genes as a highly contingent transformation of those basiclife concepts which held sway during the nineteenth century.

Telling thisstory is complicated by the need to debunk two pervasive myths aboutthe life sciences—namely, that real biology only begins with Darwin andthat the conceptual ground of genetics owes its existence to some chancyrediscovery of the work of Mendel.The particular bone I have to pick with these myths has nothing todo with the giving or taking of scientific credits but rather with their roleas impediments to a coherent conceptual history of our most basic biological concepts. With respect to the nineteenth century, I have benefitedxviIntroductionespecially from Lenoir’s analysis of the role of a distinctively neo-Kantianteleological heuristic in guiding the central stream of early nineteenthcentury morphology and physiology.

Where I have taken some initiativeis in analyzing the conceptual path whereby the holistic notion of Kantand Blumenbach, that of a stock of Keime und Anlagen, becomes reformulated, under the pressure to accommodate Darwinian processes ofvariation and selection, into an agglomeration of parts. It is in this transition, and in large measure as a kind of conceptual side effect, that theholistic potential and thus the adaptive agency of the living organismwas lost to the invisible hand of natural selection and, further downstream, to “selfish” genes.