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Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

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Genophobia

By Jonathan Weiner
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2000, at 1:18 PM ET

Natalie,

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No, McCain shouldn't be using the word "gook," and he sounded less like Luke Skywalker yesterday than he may have imagined: "They're shooting at me from everywhere. Everybody's against me ... all the governors, all the senators. But we're going to kill 'em."

Xenophobia probably is part of our instinctive equipment--along with its opposite, gregariousness. In babies, stranger anxiety sure looks (and sounds) like hardwired, instinctive, adaptive behavior. Maybe it's the same wiring that helps make those Us and Them feelings later on, and maybe those feelings were more adaptive in the caves. Back then, strangers sometimes came not only from other tribes but from other species--Neanderthals are only the most famous of the lost human lines that we'd run into when we went out hunting for berries and antelopes. Those were the days when the Other really was Other. Maybe it's also that same venerable wiring diagram that gets screwed up in cases of paranoia.

All these feelings are easier to turn on than off. I'm thinking of a story about Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, the most dangerous biologist in history, who coined the word "eugenics," and believed devoutly in Us and Them--in the idea that scientists had a sacred duty to help rid the earth of inferior lines of human beings, those whose bodies or minds were less sound than his own. Galton once experimented on himself by walking down the street in London and imagining that every lamppost was out to get him. He gave himself the heebie-jeebies and the paranoia didn't wear off completely for weeks.

On another front, the gene-therapy controversy is in the news every day now. What do you think about this? When the teen-ager Jesse Gelsinger died in a gene-therapy trial in Philadelphia, I was following the progress of another gene-therapy experiment in the same town for The New Yorker (the story ran this month). Since then I've been getting e-mail from molecular biologists who feel that the field is getting unfairly tarnished by one badly run trial, and from other biologists who feel that the whole field is a swamp. I hear there was much argument about this at last week's genetic-engineering conference in Pacific Grove, on the 25^th anniversary of the famous Asilomar conference in which biologists worked out a voluntary consensus on recombinant-DNA research. Today there's a story in (you should forgive me) USA Today about the corrupting and complicating influence of money in high-tech biomedical research, especially gene therapy. I've just read another story on the same subject within the last few days in the New York Times. So many research scientists have a financial stake in their experiments now--how does that affect their judgment when they're dealing with desperate patients in clinical trials? The controversy gets more complicated by the day.

With the discovery of DNA, the science of life lost its innocence--unless that happened with Galton.

Jonathan