|
PRO-LIFE advocates, if they were intellectually
honest and consistent, should be standing up for all forms of life
rather than just for human life.
On August 16, in this paper, a
well-known pro-lifer said that a human fetus has “rights” that a
porcine embryo does not have. This risible notion was made in
support of a strident campaign against the Reproductive Health Bill.
There’s no basis, other than
overweening arrogance, to the belief that human beings are unrelated
to the other creatures on this planet, including to the billions of
Escherichia coli that live in our guts.
The interconnectedness of life is
the underlying theme of contemporary life sciences. As the French
biologist, Jacques Monod, famously said, “What’s true for E.coli
is true for the elephant.”
This is the subject of a
fascinating book by Carl Zimmer, Microcosm: E. coli and the New
Science of Life (Pantheon, New York, 2008).
Zimmer covers most of present-day
biology, as he relates E.coli to almost every aspect of biotic life.
Among the things that we learn
are how E.coli have sex, help each other during periods of stress,
and defend themselves against “enemies.”
Until Joshua Lederberg and his
collaborators discovered it, biologists did not believe that
microbes could have sex. Lederberg showed a method of bacterial
copulation by which E. coli exchanged genes.
Their social life is complex.
When food is scarce, members of an E. coli community signal each
other to enter a “stationary phase” in order to improve the
changes of the entire colony to survive.
In the microbial world, as
elsewhere, conflict is a fact of life. To defend themselves, E. coli
produce chemical weapons that kill or repel their competitors.
Charles Darwin himself admitted
that evolution “act[s] with extreme slowness.” If we were to go
only by the fossil record, there are periods of “punctuated
equilibrium,” to borrow Stephen Jay Gould’s terminology, in
which nothing much seemed to have happened, but laboratory
experiments with E. coli have shown adaptations in time scales short
enough to be observed that confirm Darwin’s predictions.
When parents in Dover,
Pennsylvania sued the local school board over the teaching of
intelligent design as part of the science curriculum, E. coli played
a key, if not a crucial, role.
The advocates of intelligent
design said that the flagellum, a tail-like organ, was a structure
too complex to have evolved by natural selection. Expert witnesses
for the plaintiff demonstrated how it was possible for a flagellum
to have evolved from intermediate structures even if it did not
function for bacterial locomotion, thus discrediting one of the main
arguments of proponents of intelligent design against the theory of
evolution.
Biotechnology was a direct
offshoot of research on E. coli. By inserting animal genes into E.
coli, methods to produce insulin and other drugs in quantity were
developed. By inserting E. coli genes into pigs, breaking down
phosphate-bearing compounds in manure becomes possible, a solution
to phosphate pollution that causes algal blooms that deplete oxygen
in fresh water lakes and rivers.
As Zimmer explains, most of the
discoveries that involved E. coli confirm the universality of
biochemistry.
However, in studying the
divergent behavior of genetically identical microbes, Zimmer was
moved to warn “those who would put human nature down to any sort
of simple genetic determinism.”
He hopes that the politically
fraught debate on genetic engineering will produce “a deeper
understanding of what it means to be human: not as an inviolable
essence but as a complex cloud of genes, traits, environmental
influences and cultural forces.”
Opposition to biotechnology and
indeed to most of the recent discoveries in the life sciences
remains alive and disruptive.
Will Zimmer’s warning and hope
be heeded? Perhaps not. Biotechnology has become such an economic
force that a reasoned and balanced response to it and to the
biosciences has become difficult.
All that Zimmer could offer is an
epigram: “Through E. coli we can see the history of life, and we
can see its future as well.”
opinion@manilatimes.net
|
