Paul Berg

The History of Science is, in part, a history of human beings trying to gain control over their world. in this baffling cosmos of ours, in this daily explosion of light and sound and tactile sensation, trees, mountains, waves on the ocean, rain and wind, turns of the seasons, heat and cold – in all these diverse phenomena burning through our own mysterious consciousness, we recoil from the idea that we are helpless and ignorant spectators of nature, bits of debris tossed about in the sea of existence. We can accept our own deaths more readily than we can accept a life of accidents and forces beyond understanding. We desire meaning. We desire order. And we desire control.

Knowing grants one form of control. The ancient Roman poet Lucetius believed that the idea of the conservation of matter – that matter could not be created or destroyed – would free humankind from the capricious interference of the gods. There are more active forms of control. In Sumatra, women who sow rice let their hair hang long down their backs, so that the rice will have long stalks and grow well. The ancient Egyptians crossbred horses, cattle, wheat, and grapes, to produce animals and food of higher quality. The early Romans built massive stone aqueducts to convey water from one place to another.

Of all aspects of nature, the phenomenon of life is the most complex. And the control of life, perhaps, satisfied most deeply our desire for control over our physical world. indeed, one can view the subject of biology through the centuries as a deepening understanding of the mechanisms and controls within living substance. Just in the twentieth century, following the chapters of this book, one might point to the discovery of hormones, which comprise a chemical command and control system; the discovery of neurotransmitters, the mechanism by which nerves communicate with each other; the discovery of penicillin, the first antibiotic, which gave human beings much more control over infectious disease; the discover of structure of DNA and the mechanism by which genetic information is encoded in each living cell; and the discovery of the design of the hemoglobin molecule and the mechanism by which oxygen, and most vital of all gases, is held and released in the body.

In the long list of endeavors to control living substance, the ability to reprogram DNA, to alter the instructions of life within each living cell, is the most profound. Now, we have become architects of life. By splicing genes together, we have created living organisms that never existed before. We have redesigned the lowly bacterium E. coli so that it produces insulin for ailing diabetics. We have altered the DNA of maize and soybeans to make them resistant to insects and disease. In a flight of fancy, we might even imagine re-creating ourselves – as in M.C.Escher’s eerie picture of a hand drawing itself. In which case, we could be the first substance in the universe to design itself. Such power, perhaps the ultimate power, raises more ethical, philosophical, and theological questions than any previous development in science.

The history of gene splicing, also called recombinant DNA or genetic engineering, is recent. It began with a paper by biochemist Paul Berg of Stanford University and his collaborators in 1972. in his goal to insert new genes into living cells, Berg was the first scientist to splice together segments of DNA from different organisms. He was forty six years old at the time. soon, Berg became aware that he had set into motion a new biology of unimaginable consequences. Eight years later, on the occasion of his Nobel address, he thanked his students and colleagues for sharing with him “the elation and disappointment of venturing into the unknown” ~ Pages 482 / 483