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EMBO reports 5, 3, 226–229 (2004)
doi:10.1038/sj.embor.7400104
The gene and its place
An interview with Steven Rose, neurobiologist and director of the
Brain and Behaviour Research Group at the Open University, UK
The interview was conducted by Holger Breithaupt and Caroline Hadley.
Caroline Hadley
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EMBO reports (ER): You have been a longstanding critic of the way
genetic research is used, particularly as a tool of social control. What are
your worries in this regard?
Steven Rose (SR): I think that we see the increasing use not just
of genetics, but also neurogenetics, to propose biochemical or genetic
solutions to what I would define as social problems. If you take the current
classifications of psychiatric disease in the American Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual (DSM), you see things called conduct disorder, oppositional
defiance disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They're turning a
problem of a person's relationship with others or society at large into a
medical one. There are children who are disruptive at school or are a problem
for their parents, and on the basis of the school report, the parents' report
or the psychiatric report, you decide that these children have a disease, and
you call the disease Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and you then
provide a drug, Ritalin, in order to "control" the child. Now it's
not that Ritalin is not effective in sedating an over-active kid, it certainly
is, but it's turning a complex social relationship into a problem inside the
brain of a child and therefore inside the genes of a child. That disturbs me
and I can see that it is symptomatic of a problem that is becoming more and
more prevalent with the increase in genetic knowledge, with its attempts to
find individual solutions to problems rather than to seek public health
solutions.
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"We need to develop proactive methods of
discussing potential technological advances before they become an unstoppable
technology."
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ER: With that in mind, do you think it's time for an Asilomar
meeting on neuroscience?
SR: I'm not sure if Asilomar is the right format. We need to
develop proactive methods of discussing potential technological advances before
they become an unstoppable technology. At the moment, the directions are driven
partly by the technology, partly by the interests of the pharmaceutical
companies and partly because of this huge new interest in biodefence. You have
to engage civil society at a much earlier stage than we're able to do at the
moment and in Europe we are much better placed to do this than in the United
States.
ER: Why?
SR: Because we have a tradition of the involvement of civil
society. We don't have a situation as in the United States where the federal
government can legislate but private companies can do almost what they like.
The sense of society as opposed to individual consumer rights is still greater
in Europe, especially in continental Europe.
ER: What would you like to come out of such a debate on
neuroscience? Would you like to see a certain form of neuroethics emerge?
SR: There are a number of issues, which the development of
neurosciences, genetics and information technology are bringing together and I
think they need to be discussed in a format which enables us to make
predictions about the way things might be going and try to influence their
directions. I think that it has not just to be in the form of Asilomar, a group
of concerned neuroscientists, or in that case molecular geneticists, getting
together. We need to develop the sorts of processes which some of the
Scandinavian countries have pioneered, of citizens' consultative fora,
citizens' juries and so on. In Britain, there's just been that in the context
of GM, and the overwhelming popular response was that we don't want it, thank
you very much indeed. The response to this was a letter written by a
hundred-plus "scientists" saying the public has been misled.
They've called foul because it gave them the answer they didn't want. Now the
problem, of course, is that many geneticists and molecular biologists have
interests, they have shares, they have directorships, they are involved in
companies, they have patents and so on. One of the things that's happened is
that the whole nature of the way that science, particularly biology, is done
now is an irreversible shift towards Big Science.We've become a science with
huge interests. The idea of going back to the disinterested world of small
science is a pipe dream. Therefore we've got to find ways in which the
interests themselves come onto the table along with people's viewpoints so that
we go for greater transparency and recognize that the scientist is just one
player in a much more complex world.
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"...the whole nature of the way that science,
particularly biology, is done now is an irreversible shift towards Big
Science–we've become a science with huge interests."
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ER: Why is there such a tendency to use genetic explanations for
social problems?
SR: There are several different levels at which you can answer
that. On the one hand, if we look at the area which interests me, of behaviour
and the terrain of psychology and psychiatry, these are very soft sciences by
comparison with the other biological sciences. They can't predict, they can't
provide explanations and their definitions are obscure, and so there's always
been a tendency for them to latch on to what is the most powerful technology or
language of the time. Now because gene talk and gene technology are so
powerful, there's an attempt on the part of behavioural geneticists and
evolutionary biologists to latch on to that power. Another answer is that
neurogenetics is intimately tied up with the goals of the pharmaceutical
companies, and therefore they are driving the science forward in particular
directions. You can see that in the ways in which new drugs are marketed. As
I've pointed out, new disease entities are being created in the area of
psychiatry in order to match the things that the drugs do.
And then even beyond that there's a much deeper problem in the
biological sciences in general. Biology is a latecomer to the hard sciences in
the history of the development of Western science—physics and chemistry
came first. The ideal of science as portrayed by philosophers was
physics—hard science, where you had theories, you had facts, you did
experiments, made predictions, and you could fit everything together with
rules. Many biologists want their science to be like that and yet it isn't.
Biology is messy, it's contingent, it's highly complicated and therefore much
more interesting, of course, than the narrow frameworks of physics and
chemistry. But the power of molecular talk is very seductive because it seems
somehow much closer to the hard sciences. What I think has happened over the
course of the past 50 years is that organisms have almost vanished from the
discourse of biology. An organism has become a tool with which you understand
or probe the gene. I've even heard people talking about behaviour as a tool
with which to probe genes. What I would like to do is to put the organism
rather than the gene back at the centre of the discussion, the organism in its
rich interactions with the environment. What becomes important then is the
whole developmental life cycle, in which genes are a part. In that sense I want
to put genes in their place within biology and within the discourse of
power.
ER: So you don't believe in systems biology, the attempt to
understand an organism by analysing its genes using huge-scale computation?
SR: I understand the problem that the geneticists have. The
discourse of genes was always the discourse of single genes, of Mendelian
genes: we will have the genome, we will have the code, we will have the book of
life. Now we've got 20,000 or 30,000 genes, and people say we need proteomics
to map the distribution of proteins within the body. It may be that proteomics
is simply a smart way of talking about biochemistry—and I'm in my heart
and soul a biochemist—but it misses the crucial feature which all
biochemists understand, and that is the dynamics. The definition of 'life' as
the readout of the genome is thus in contrast to what we were being offered by
the great biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins' definition of life as a
'dynamic equilibrium in a polyphasic system'. It is dynamics that we have to
get back into the system. What Stuart Kaufman and other people have been
talking about in terms of the stability of a system being located in the
complexity of the system, not in its individual components. We do not need a
detailed understanding of particular transcription factors, and the pathways of
ERKs and ELFs and all the rest that go on before you even get gene activation.
I think what we need to understand are the functional changes that are taking
place within a system.
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"What I would like to do is to put the organism
rather than the gene back at the centre of the discussion, the organism in its
rich interactions with the environment."
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ER: Why are simplistic claims still being made about genes being
linked to behaviour? Why are they rarely corrected even when proved wrong?
SR: I think there are different, but related reasons. Sometimes
you find the claims corrected but they're corrected very quietly, and no one's
interested in negative results. Look at the number of times the schizophrenia
gene has been discovered. You do see those simplistic claims being made,
particularly in the context of behaviour, but generally molecular biologists
don't understand behaviour. They don't understand that there is no one such
thing as aggression, violence, or even memory. Another problem is this real
philosophical and conceptual problem about bridging levels. We're sitting here
at exactly the same time as 30,000 neuroscientists are meeting in New Orleans
(LA, USA). You will see at least 30,000 posters being presented ranging from
the molecular to the imaging to the information technology and modelling
systems and they do not speak to one another. They live in different universes
of discourse though they still think they're studying the brain. We can't
bridge these different languages, and to go from the gene to the behaviour is
bridging even more gaps of complexity. But gene talk is powerful talk. You can
talk about monoamine oxidase genes [influencing aggression] and you'll find
that in US courts of law, people will try to have a gene test to show they
weren't responsible [for a crime], it was their gene that was responsible. My
son is a criminal defence lawyer and I asked him if he would ever use a plea of
this sort and he said "Well, yes, if I thought it would
work."
But there's a much broader issue. If you go back to the 1960s, there was
an enormous optimism that it was possible to create a more beautiful society
through social and political revolution. People have lost that degree of hope
in changing the world for the better. The best we see is a set of problems that
we need to address to try to prevent things from getting worse. Faced with that
world, you look for solutions at the level of the individual, rather than the
level of society. So, you don't get State eugenics, as in Nazi Germany or
Sweden until quite recently, but what we are being offered is the freedom of
choice, what Hilary Rose calls consumer eugenics. We've moved into a world in
which individual choice is what matters. If I can buy the best school for my
kid, if I can choose the sex of my kid, if I can enhance its potential in some
way, why not? So you create this image of individual choice, and gene talk is
extremely powerful in that context.
ER: How do you feel then about individuals using 'smart drugs' to
modify their brain chemistry?
SR: So far I think that technically speaking most of the
substances that are claimed to be smart drugs don't really work. On the other
hand, my own research has now produced a novel potential therapy for
Alzheimer's disease, a peptide, which does seem to act as a cognitive enhancer,
if it's translatable from animal experiments into the human condition. But now
there is a new disorder in the DSM, age-associated memory impairment or
'cognitive impairment', as they call it now. The argument is that everyone of
my age and even 15 years younger than me is suffering from an irreversible
decline in cognition and memory and that therefore we ought to have drugs to
prevent or reverse the process. Now it's perfectly true that on a number of
diagnostic tests, by the time you're my age it takes more trials to reach an
association, even a reflex association, than it does at a younger age. On the
other hand, the ultimate performance is going to be no different if you just
give me enough time. I think it is characteristic of our society that being
slow, being wiser, being more thoughtful is perhaps not an advantage. So the
drugs are going to be there, and the drugs are going to be used like people
used amphetamines to stay awake and revise for their exams. We need to get to
grips with the entire problem of mood and performance changing agents, whether
it's steroids for athletes or whether it's drugs that help you to stay up and
dance all night or whatever. Society's got itself into a total mess and
confusion about it. Some things are illegal, some things are legal but
prescribed, some things are legal and you can buy them across the counter, some
things are illegal but you can get them on the Internet, and some things are
legal under some circumstances and not legal under other circumstances. We've
got to understand and find ways of incorporating these new mood changers into
our society, ways which don't produce the illegal drug culture which is driving
criminality and gun use across Europe.
ER: You often write for the British press and appear on radio
programmes to discuss these issues. Would you like to see some of your
colleagues be as forthcoming in these debates?
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"The best we see is a set of problems that we
need to address to try to prevent things from getting worse. Faced with that
world, you look for solutions at the level of the individual, rather than the
level of society."
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SR: Well yes, but I think one's got to see that back in the
1960s, when Hilary and I and other people were involved in Britain in the
'Society for Social Responsibility in Science', or people like Jon Beckwith
were involved in 'Science for the People' in the USA, the issues were about
science in general. We thought about what scientists ought to do, as if there
was some universal person called 'a scientist'. Now there isn't a scientific
community, it's deeply fragmented. Most people with scientific training work in
industry, some work in universities or research institutes. I think that
scientists, as any expert in civil society, have a particular responsibility to
make that expertise democratically accountable and available. I strongly
believe that I ought to be able to describe what I'm doing to a class of
six-year olds in a way that they understand, but I don't think I've got more or
less ethical expertise than any other member of civil society. What's more, I
don't have the expertise to talk about developments in areas where I don't have
special scientific knowledge. So we are all lay people in most aspects of our
lives. Insofar as we have expertise as scientists, we have a responsibility to
say, as I'm trying to do in the field of neurogenetics and neuroethics, that
these are things that are happening, these are implications that I see coming,
and I'd like to discuss them in as broad a forum as possible and involve as
many people as possible to produce democratic decisions about the directions in
which things could go.
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"I think that scientists, as any expert in
civil society, have a particular responsibility to make that expertise
democratically accountable and available."
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ER: Do the media have a special responsibility here in presenting
science to the public, or is it the scientists' responsibility?
SR: I think both things matter. One of the consequences of living
in this competitive world is you get what I would call 'megaphone' science.
It's tremendously important to have your paper published in a journal with the
highest possible impact factor and it seems to be important for the journals
and for your university to issue a press release about the exciting things that
you've discovered. If you look at a lot of the media headlines, they are direct
translations of the press releases put out by Nature or Science
or the university; the claims of the finding of a 'gay gene' is a very good
example of that. The origin of megaphone science is with the scientists
themselves, puffing up the work that they are doing. And of course the media is
also responsible because they like simple stories, they like to say "a
gene or a drug for Alzheimer's has been discovered" and "there'll
be a drug you can pop next year that will prevent granny getting
Alzheimer's." But they also like to say "scientists claim that MMR
produces autism," which has been very problematic in Britain. So the
press picks up completely maverick—and I would say
irresponsible—statements by people who have some scientific credentials.
But you should not try and shoot the messenger, the problem is the message.
ER: You have also been active in debates outside neurobiology, in
particular in calling for a moratorium on Europe's scientific cooperation with
Israel. Why did you feel this was necessary?
SR: I have a special history, being brought up as a Jew in a
Zionist household, so I had quite a lot of emotional links with Israel. In the
1967 war, I actually volunteered to fight on the Israeli side, they didn't call
me but I was part of a queue outside the Israeli embassy. It took me a long
time before I realized the actual nature of Israeli society, which had
expropriated the people who lived on that land before them to create an
essentially apartheid society. My partner and I also had a long history of
being engaged in anti-racist activities of the sort that you would expect from
someone who's a 1960s radical. In light of the increasingly oppressive actions
of the Israeli government two years ago, we were wondering what civil society
could do about this. Somehow the European research systems regard Israel as
part of Europe. And we thought that this is an extraordinary anomaly. Here is a
country which is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and in
breach of more than 200 United Nations resolutions, so what can we do? One
thing that you can do is to point out this anomaly and, just as there was a
civil society boycott of apartheid South Africa, we could ask for a moratorium
on European research collaboration with Israel under the EU Framework
agreements, and that's what we wrote. It's a very simple letter, circulated to
a few colleagues and friends, and everyone wanted to sign it. So after a week
we sent it as a letter to The Guardian [UK newspaper] with, I think,
something like 120 signatures on it. The French set up a website with a
different version of the call, which then became a call for a boycott, and
suddenly out of this simple letter was a major polarization of people. We
expected that some people wouldn't agree with it, but there was huge pressure
on everyone who had signed the original petition.
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"The idea that you can divorce science from the
social context in which it's done is completely naive."
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ER: Were you surprised about this?
SR: I was surprised at the intensity of it, that was quite
educational. I didn't expect that the EU would fold over and Philippe Busquin
would say "you're right" and "we're going to cancel the
arrangements". But what I also didn't expect was the intensity of the
personal hate mail directed at every individual who'd signed it, or the
pressure to lose public positions or to resign from editorial boards. I'm used
to dealing with political arguments, but that sort of passionate hate says
something about the nature and complexity of the problem in trying to make
Israelis understand that the only satisfactory solution for Israel is to accept
the legitimacy of the Palestinian demand for statehood and the return of the
refugees Israel drove away from their homes and land.
ER: Some of your critics maintain that the basis of science is
freedom, and science should not be a political tool.
SR: It's a ridiculous argument. If you look at the EU Framework
Programme, it is driven by economic and political criteria. This is not free
science, this is science that is directed towards particular goals and if we
call for a moratorium on scientific collaboration with Israel, we are calling
for a moratorium on something which is in itself a political engagement. The
idea that you can divorce science from the social context in which it's done is
completely naive.
ER: Professor Rose, thank you for the interview.
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