Readings

Matt Ridley from The Genome

In the beginning was the word. The word proselytized the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called the human brain that could discover and be aware of the word itself.

'As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of organic life.’ Asked the polymathic poet and physician Erasmus Darwin in 1794. It was a startling guess for the time, not only in its bold conjecture that all organic life shared the same origin, but sixty-five years before his grandson Charles’s book on the topic, but for its weird use of the word ‘filaments’. The secret of life is indeed a thread.

The filament of DNA is information, a message written in a code of chemicals, one chemical for each letter. It is almost too good to be true, but the code turns out to be written in a way that we can understand. Just like written English, the genetic code is a linear language, written in a straight line. Just like written English, it is digital, in that every letter bears the same importance. Moreover, the language of DNA is considerably simpler than English, since it has an alphabet of only four letters, conventionally known as A,C,G and T.

In the beginning was the word. The word was not DNA. That came afterwards, when life was already established, and when it had divided the labor between two separate activities: chemical work and information storage, metabolism and replication. But DNA contains a record of the world, faithfully transmitted through all subsequent eons to the astonishing present.

From Frankenstein By Mary Shelley

But these philosophers who hands seem only to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible have indeed, performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places.

Life and death appear to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

Sermon

“So much has been done,” exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein – “but more, far more, I will achieve. I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.”

With these lofty words, the scientist of Mary Shelley’s often-misinterpreted book begins his fearsome adventure into the creation of life. Assembling parts of dead bodies the doctor builds a single human form and harnessing a raw pulse of electricity, brings it to life. He dreams of defeating mortality and of comprehending the fundamental language of life. As he labors alone – fevered – haunting graveyards and avoiding the companionship of the living, a monster is indeed created – it is the doctor himself. And the unsightly creature he vivifies is no monster but a newborn giant – hungry, lonely, yearning, ignorant, rejected and abandoned by his creator.

Mary Shelley set out not to write a Gothic thriller but to ask, as science and revolution ran wild in her world:

How woman and man could best serve the cause of freedom – which struggled everywhere around her

How we could, as Annie Dillard says, aid and abet creation – which was so challenged

And how we could be wise and just expatriates of the garden of blissful ignorance – loving and respectful citizens of the world.

These questions have not gone away – and never will. The world today is filled with bloody terrors that clothe themselves in the rhetoric of revolution and religion. And science is reaching up into the other tree – the tree of life and drawing down that other fruit on whose account we were banished – “lest man become like one of the gods.” The serpent was an honest messenger -- therefore we must be wise as serpents. And here it is -- St. Patrick’s Day – when the snakes were driven out of Ireland – it is a day I like to celebrate because I respect the Irish ability to find any good reason for a party – but I also celebrate the snakes – for they spread the truth – they speak the truth.

The moral questions at the heart of life never go away. One apple is not sufficient to sustain generations. We are the heirs of the garden of wisdom and healing. We live on the mind’s sharp edge between good and evil, the body’s longing for this world, and the heart’s passion for life. Our religion arose because those who came before us believed that we were divine and wanted us to take seriously our glory, our wisdom, and our frailty. When Reverend William Ellery Channing -- in the same years as Mary Shelley was writing -- spoke of our celestial inheritance – he meant both our power – almost godlike – and our deep moral responsibility.

Today his words of a celestial inheritance sounds even more far-seeing as we can see in our own atoms the stuff that stars are made on – the spectrum of the cosmos. And now we can see in the intimate cells of our bodies the very history of this world – our connection with every person on it – and the story of our sufferings and our joys.

Frankenstein said that he would unfold the mysteries of creation. But he unfolded instead his own shortsightedness and narrowed heart. I can unfold one of the mysteries of creation. You can’t see the details from here but this is the human genome – the archetype of life – the thread of which we are woven. It is a wonder! When I read about the debates over whether views of creation other than evolution should be taught I want to shout – is your god so tiny as to care? Will you also teach of the Popul Vuh, of Enkidu, of Brahma and wheel of life and death, of Pan Gu and Hun Dun, of the Great Spirit, of Izanagi and Izanami, of the Dreamtime? If you speak of god let that god be larger than one single religious story of creation – let those stories stand aside as the great metastories they were. And let the god you evoke be minute as the genome and more complex – let that god be great as the cosmos and as full.

Richard Dawkins wrote: “ Evolution is an enchanted loom of shuttling DNA codes, whose evanescent patterns, as they dance their partners through geological deep time, weave a massive database of ancestral wisdom, a digitally coded description of ancestral worlds and what it took to survive in them.” Our weaving of DNA tells of journeys from one hemisphere to another, through icy cold and of scourging sun, in disease infested woods, in times of meeting and parting, of plenty and of starvation – of adaptation and settlement. A sacred true scripture of earth time.

I am sure that this lyrical beauty was not what Gregor Mendel envisioned as he studied peas and other plants. I am sure that he was searching for order – for the patterns and sense of life – as a religious man this desire for order must have moved him. Much later Francis Crick and John Watson were more certain of the cosmic beauty of the double helix of DNA they had discovered – Watson, late in the process of discovery and testing said, “Happily, we had lunch, telling each other that a structure this pretty just had to exist.”

Since that time the exploration of DNA has been pretty steady. But not always pretty – it is a fullness of life that is encoded into our genes. There are diseases that are genetic or chromosomal in origin – suffering embedded in the strands of our being. They touch every one of us. In the color of our eyes, the loved ones we have lost, the conditions we inherit, the mysterious mutations we suffer. Hidden deep in the threads of our lives – in the person next to you -- are mysteries, realities unfolded and waiting to unfold – realities of wonder and sorrow. Every one of us here is this complex weaving – and has encountered the frayed edge of this tapestry of life. Of this, as I speak with you today, I am keenly mindful. In some ways, we have learned just enough to suffer with more awareness. But there are hopeful signs.

We have mapped the human genome, well, in concert thousands of people mapped the genome. I won’t assume that you know anymore than I did when I began this topic early in the year. Perhaps you will understand better if I tell you that I’m still a little edgy about my microwave oven and that my first semester in Physics made me despair – well the professor was terrible. Yet, I found that I could teach myself complex math so that it became a late night meditation for me. But this learning curve about the power of the genome is almost staggering. When I first began to read Ridley’s book on the Genome I had that learning block – where the words have to be read over and over and then, suddenly it opened up – clear and exciting – my world – my body – our future. Of late this news of life it has been dwarfed by the acts of cruelty that have rocked and continue to rock our world. Don’t be fooled by the sleight of hand – there is power afoot – and whether it bodes good or evil is in our hands – at this time. Life and the dream of healing is as much late breaking news as is death and war.

I promise not to overwhelm you with scientific detail – but this is our moment to comprehend and help to determine the course of a genome-mapped future. What does that mean? It means that we are rapidly mapping the fundamental structure of our genome – a gene is a portion of the overall genome – the genome is like a general, generic, family portrait – a portrait of the human family. It is writ into every cell in our bodies and contains multitudes – thousands of genes that determine thousands of human conditions. Or really it is like a map – a huge map – if you could spread it out there would be the whole country – the world and all the roads and towns, the schools, and hospitals, the parks – you get the idea – if you could just spread it out – but then it would be huge – like the size of Rhode Island. And there you are alone in the driver’s seat and the map is all folded up in tiny folds – and you need the route around Morristown, New Jersey. The traffic is thick and the trucks roar over you. The good news is that finally someone knows the bigger picture – but there is no way to use it very easily yet. And just like a map of the world that is all neat with vast blue oceans and a nice rectangular shape and the US upright with Texas at the bottom – we are deluded if we think that … the world is flat and easy to cover because the map is. So it is with the genome. It is curled tightly within us – complex and twisted – carrying all we need to know – sort of…The genome is made of strings of genes – each one determining different traits – like the ones for gender, or brown eyes, or cycstic fibrosis or for Sickle cell – well it’s not really fair to say that there is a gene for Sickle Cell. When the gene stops working – that is when the danger begins. And there are differing degrees of danger – some cases are severe and some milder, some treatments help at least for a while some – are ineffective. The interesting thing about this gene is that if you could remove it – if you really could speed down the highway, unfolding the map and find the very tiny town and the hospital in that tiny town, the jiggling of the car would prevent you from keeping your focus and really pinpointing it – and then if you went there – what would you do? Leaving aside the many unkind things that have been said about New Jersey – the State where I was born – in Morristown, in fact, -- if you change something about the route who knows what sort of bottle neck you might cause down the road? Will there be a bridge out suddenly? The interesting thing about the non-functioning gene that leads to sickle cell is that it also guards the bearer against malaria – as long as it is only inherited from one parent – if it is inherited from both you may be free of malaria but the other thing may kill you. The genome is an integrated circuit – and while we can begin to see it we don’t fully grasp the relationship of one part of the circuit to the others – we just know that the relationship is vital. My brother in law who works as a genetics counselor, uses another analogy – that DNA is like a full bowl of long and tightly coiled pasta – slippery with olive oil. And there’s pepper sprinkled on it and one particular piece of pepper that you want to find in this giant, slithery, bowl of long and tangled noodles. If you start early enough in the process of the formation of life – like when there are only four or eight cells and strands or maybe – risotto? Anyway, you might stand a chance – but even there the pasta is a mess. If you could take the noodles out and stretch them you could find it – it would still be dizzyingly hard – and it would, of course, kill the cell… and, of course, the pepper is really all over the pasta – like every cell in our bodies carries the map of DNA. So, even if we could find it in one strand in one cell there would be billions more.

It is both glorious and humbling – first we can isolate enough DNA to read a portrait of a person in it – to discover if they have Huntingdon’s Chorea or Cystic Fibrosis – but we cannot isolate that gene and fix it -- it is untreatable – and even if we could fix one – there would be a billion more waiting for us. And we might hurry to eradicate or treat something that is only a predisposition. Further, since these strands of DNA are interlinked we don’t really know the impact of interrupting the flow of information down the strand – I mean suppose your architectural vision is somehow connected to some other gene which has a relationship that runs through the non-functioning gene and you would lose .. who knows.

Learning so much – that we are part of vast and ancient family tree – but as Kaye McSpadden reminded me – we are closely related to the fruit on it as well – we share fifty percent of our genome with the genome of the banana – darned if that’s not the cycle of life – we are almost as closely related to our food as to one another. Perhaps that is, in part, what makes life on Earth so challenging. We eat on a food chain of our own relatives. And then – from a great distance in space perhaps we earthling – trees and animals alike -- do look rather like bananas down here – red, green, yellow, spotted – I like that – it could be that I was early impressed by the lyrics of Frank Zappa – and the mothers of invention – “call any vegetable, call it by name – call them today – call any vegetable and the chances are good – that the vegetable will respond to you.” But, most likely I think I am at home in my intimate connection with the banana because it makes me feel more at home, as one, growing from, rooted in the tree of life, embodied and embedded in this Earth.

I have faith that, like the bananas, we are on an evolutionary path – in response to history and climate and – all of it intertwined – we are evolving. However, I also have faith that, unlike the banana our path will lead us to shaping our own cellular destinies. Of course, we have long begun – with livestock – using test tubes to fertilize the eggs of the finest females with the finest males. Or by doing amniocentesis to ascertain certain genetic or chromosomal disorders. We have begun through the genetic testing of fertilized but unimplanted eggs to discover the presence of disease factors – like Huntingdon’s disease before the egg becomes a pregnancy. And stopping the spread of a disease to a future generation.

But now the ethical dilemmas begin to appear everywhere. There are countries where female fetuses are aborted. At a gay pride march a group wears a t-shirt that says “Thanks for the genes Mom!” I worry about the mom’s who’d rather not be thanked – who would test and change – if possible some queer gene if there is one – and we would lose Rosie O’Donnell, Cole Porter, Oscar Wilde, Leonard Bernstein, Adrienne Rich, Michelangelo, Jane Adams, Alec Guinness, the sound track to half the Disney films – especially Beauty and the Beast, some of this congregation, and a goodly portion of my family.

A food scientist friend of ours Barry – decrying the tight control of crop types said, “God abhors a monoculture.” Alike as we are, we are nourished on our differences as well.

And then – we are made finer by our help to one another – is that how we survive to the next evolutionary place? This map, this scientific endeavor might leave you feeling all powerful – or perhaps unsettled – after all if our past and future are in our genes – where is our free will – simply in how we manipulate our genome? Nope – it turns out that chance and all the usual intricate interconnections still hold true. We are indeed part of an interdependent web and will never be large enough to rule its destiny or to absolutely shape our own. There has never been and will not be an absolute God – not even ourselves. But, I know that we will shape destiny. We will grasp the tools and re-form life and destiny. It will take time has taken time – but the moment of budding is now – this is the time to determine the direction of this science – and we, as moral persons – as persons of reason and faith, of science and art, of justice and compassion – we are wanted and needed in this time. I want to watch cell divide and humans unite in the service of life and goodness.

I am convinced – after much reading and study that the yearning to alleviate suffering runs strong in the Human Genome Project. I feel relieved when Ridley says – “Human beings are an ecological success” – I feel proud – but then he says – “ the human species is by no means the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle. Natural selection is simply the means by which life-forms change to suit the myriad opportunities afforded by the environment and other life forms.” This is humbling yet profoundly theological statement: the world was not made and cannot be shaped for us alone. I am relieved to know that the world’s largest bioethics program is run through the HGP – ELSI — studying ethical social and legal issues. But that does not check it off our list of concerns. We will take time to continue to unfold the map and then to shape our world – but we will do it – there is so much suffering to be alleviated – so many children who come in broken. Therefore, I want us to shape our world carefully – cautiously – humbly – waiting to learn more about the interconnections – acting in compassion and not in greed. Who should own the patterns of life, who should control the resetting of life’s thread? Who should profit and by how much? How do we free scientists to pursue the study they love and the share the insights they discover? Who defines the moment and nature of life? When does a life form have inherent worth and when does it not? Who judges when only a god could judge well and our gods have a poor track record. In truth, for all the hopes and ideals of the Matt Ridley’s, the Francis Collins’, and my brother in law there will be those who will exploit and misuse this newfound truth and will unfold evil – some by mistake, some in greed, some in intentional hatred and bitterness toward life. There will be mad scientists and lost creations. This power that we are exploring and beginning to is, indeed, god-like and fraught with risk. It is for that reason that I ask us each to pick up a book – that’s the easy step – or talk to a scientist – that’s a little more daunting – to educate ourselves to be equal to this shift that is unfolding around us. Let us be wise as serpents exploring and speaking the truth and be gentle as doves. Then let us use our voices and our power – our education and knowledge to ask the tough questions and help to shape the future of this science – not as scientists but as global citizens. From the words of Francis Collins, of the Human Genome Project, I am heartened. In an interview about the process of seeing a new gene identified he said, “these moments of discovery become moments of worship.” Yes – for the roots of the word worship have to do with shaping that which is of worth – and it must be indeed an act of worship to work with the thread of life itself – the thread of worth and to envision the mending and making whole of that thread and its web. As Unitarian Universalists we claim a bridge between science and religion that the book of life is being writ anew everyday and we claim that sacred scripture is written not only in books but in our hearts – and now we find it, as we might have guessed, in our precious bodies and our connections with all of life. May we be worthy indeed by shaping ourselves into those who grow in wisdom and compassion, by leading our world in ethical directions – may our every discovery be an act of worship – a miracle of simple worthiness -- goodness -- an act of shaping a common life that may heal and sustain us and our world. Let us worship in Silence and reflection.