Doing what comes naturally?

In 1997, on hearing that British scientists had successfully cloned a lamb, Dolly, the American politician John Marchi said 'We ought not to permit a cottage industry in the God business'. The debate continues, but as the geneticist Steve Jones says 'Students accept astonishing things happening in human genetics without turning a hair but worry about GM soya beans'. When it comes to genetic modification, Patrick Holden of the Soil Association takes one view 'Tony Blair and his ministers are operating on a "pollute now, pay later"; policy. Farm-scale trial plots are rather like letting a rat with bubonic plague out into the environment and then seeing what happens'. The Duke of Edinburgh sees it differently: 'What people forget is that the introduction of exotic species like the grey squirrel into Britain has done far more damage than a genetically modified piece of potato'.

The grey squirrel's success might be an example of what the Victorian philosopher Herbert Spencer called 'the survival of the fittest...which Mr Darwin has called "natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life"'. An alternative contemporary reaction to Darwin can perhaps be summed up in Bishop Samuel Wilberforce's question to T. H. Huxley: 'Was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?' The novelist Samuel Butler later pointed out that evolution implied that 'a hen is only an egg's way of making another egg'.

It was Francis Crick who said 'We have discovered the secret of life!' on discovering of the structure of DNA with James D. Watson in 1953, and nearly 50 years later Bill Clinton, announcing the deciphering of 90% of the human genome, said 'Today we are learning the language in which God created life'. The British mathematician Ian Stewart chose a different image: 'Genes are not like engineering blueprints; they are more like recipes in a cookbook. They tell us what ingredients to use, in what quantities, and in what order - but they do not provide a complete, accurate plan of the final result'. Whether a language, a blueprint or a recipe, the physicist J. D. Bernal was probably right when he said in 1929, 'Men will not be content to manufacture life: they will want to improve on it.'

The argument over what is and is not natural has been going on for many centuries - the seventeenth century writer Sir Thomas Browne thought that 'All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God'. The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer took a short view of ethics in science: 'When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.' On the same subject, the politician Adlai Stevenson pointed out that 'There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls'. But perhaps Shirley Williams should have the final word, reminding us of the needs of the end product: 'No test tube can breed love and affection. No frozen packet of semen ever read a story to a sleepy child'.

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