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AIso in the future but perhaps more feasible are gene-splicing applications in the fields of animal husbandry and agriculture. Under a contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Genentech is already working on a vaccine against hoof-and-mouth disease, which kills off millions of food-producing animals a year round the world. Geneticists also hope to endow such basic food plants as wheat, corn and rice with the ability to "fix'' or draw their own nitrogen from the air. At present, nitrogen must be provided in expensive fertilizers made from increasingly costly petroleum products. But scientists using plasmids have already cloned some of the nitrogen-fixing genes found in bacteria. And in an experiment at Cornell, a complete set of 17 such genes was transferred from bacteria to yeast, a slightly higher organism. The ultimate goal: to insert these genes in the plants themselves.
Some scientists are already looking ahead to creating bacteria that can help collect scarce metals by leaching (or dissolving) them directly out of the earth, or force out the last drops of petroleum from nearly exhausted wells, or even sift the diffuse quantities of gold in the world's oceans. Like faithful robots, they would work uncomplainingly, without interruption or distraction. All they would require is the appropriate nourishment and the right sort of care.
Not everybody is rooting for the gene splicers to achieve their goals. Were they to do so, they would possess truly Faustian power, not only to make repairs when genetic machinery goes awry, as in such diseases as hemophilia and sickle-cell anemia, but to "improve" the species itself. There may be perils in disturbing a microbial balance that has been billions of years in the making with strange, new man-made bugs. Asks Biologist Robert Sinsheimer, chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz: "Do we really wish to replace the fateful but impartial workings of chance with the purposeful self-interested workings of human will?" Even more dourly. Biochemist Erwin Chargaff notes: "If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even man."
But even Sinsheimer admits there is probably no turning back. The genie is out of the bottle. A great majority of scientists also point out that no gene-spliced monsters, bacterial or otherwise, have yet escaped from the laboratory. What is more, there is a world of difference between splicing a viral gene or two into a humble bacterium and redesigning the complex genes of man, which now seems quite remote.
In any case, as enthusiasm grows for what gene splicing may eventually be able to accomplish, the debate has become moot. Chief Justice Warren Burger himself acknowledged this when he declared, in the 1980 patent decision, that no one will be able to "deter the scientific mind from probing into the unknown any more than Canute could command the tides." What both the public and scientists can do is to ensure that this insatiable inquisitiveness is channeled to serve the common good. So far, the proud record of gene splicers seems to bear out the hope that it will be.
—By Frederic Golden. Reported by Michael Moritz/Los