Now Delphic Boat

[Guest guest]

I've tried to get Michael to lecture to our profession, unsuccessfully. But I do quote him a lot in my own seminars and classes.

Z'ev,

Michael Broffman is a remarkable fellow who seems rather unconcerned for how the medical profession around him comprehends his actions ... or does not.

 

I've now read The Delphic Boat at your suggestion. Thank you. It's a history of genetics that I've lived through. The book is a good read for the public to grasp somewhat of what's been happening in the field of genetics for better or worse. I had hoped that Antoine Danchin would have persisted longer with some of the philosophical issues. He's really the mathematician and technologist as well as the apologist for our little foray in to twisting the tuning, so to speak, of Life. I'm both appalled by the science as well as exquisitely fascinated.

 

Danchin's a bacterial geneticist ... the Chair of bacterial genetics at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. My area of genetics research was the human X chromosome of which all living humans have at least one per cell. My assignment was to determine in 1989 how the X chromosome globally shut down in a random mosaic fashion in female cells so that each cell would have the correct dosage of only one active X chromosome. Being a born heretic, I decided to consider bacterial DNA mechanisms of global shut down since they were already understood. They use histone H1 in heat-shock shut down of global regions of their DNA. Histone H1 happens to be the largest of the histone proteins in human chromatin. For that reason and a host of other reasons too numerous to mention here I figured that histone H1 should be the regulatory protein that caused all condensation of human chromosomes. I proposed an NSF grant study with materials and methods in 1990. My part of the research was theoretical and ended with receiving the grant moneys. I prolonged my masters to 1992 to get credentialed in five areas of biology (A & P/immunology/cell bio. protein targeting/molecular development/genetics) plus the engineering certificate. In 1992, Adrian Bird the chairman at Stanford University made the same proposal for research confirming the soundness of my approach. I've read in the text books since then that histone H1 has become considered the regulatory molecule for chromatin condensation. That was gratifying.

Sorry to go on. I was hoping Danchin would wax a bit more philosophical, but then that would be me, not him. I'm part Greek and part where Zeus comes from, Bulgaria, and have an avid interest in such things as the Delphic Oracle. Danchin is much more of a mathematician and technologist. He's also a Frenchman and quite correctly pissed by how America handled the detail of patents. Did you understand that part?

You know it took the Frenchman Tocqueville to point out the fallacy of the American Constitution regarding the "pursuit of happiness". Any literate philosopher can tell you that pursuing happiness is an oxymoron. Happiness is a state of interior homeostatic harmony. Pursuit indicates that one is not there or that one is looking outside of the homeostasis for its harmony. One can not arrive at happiness through pursuing anything outside of its homeostasis.

So even someone as dry as Danchin has the powers and sensibilities to perceive that patenting life forms was and is an abomination. He is not removed from French hubris, but he is indeed removed from American hubris. American scientific hubris has already caused every corn genome in North America to contain the Starlink recombinant gene. There is no such thing as GMO free grains and soybeans in America. Some European companies claim to have GMO free grains, but there's plenty of evidence now that pollens travel the winds of the earth, and no where will be free of GMO free species. Although only for those species that have undergone genetic engineering. But by now that's a lot.

The Delphic Boat is a better read in it's final and all too short chapter on morality. I only wish he had addressed the larger philosophical questions. He asked "what is life" as if Pasteur himself had answered it. Indeed Pasteur invented the germ theory upon which so many "disease states" have been characterized.

He did address the correct social, political and moral question about the economics of patenting life. One of my friends in the genetic engineering graduate certificate program was a newly minted lawyer seeking to specialize in patent law. He also graduated as a genetic engineer with me in 1992. As we can see from today's economy, he picked the right area of patent law. Patenting life is the new economic horizon of Western medicine. Dare you appease that beast with double blind studies in proof of Chinese medical efficacy? Good luck. Of course, if anything can ride the Dragon, it's Chinese medicine. It has survived many centuries worth of thresholds. But let the WM researchers run the double blind studies. You know Italians had to reinvent Chinese noodles and call them vermicelli.

Emmanuel Segmen