John Sulston’s book The Common Thread is his account of the public project that sequenced the human genome. In my posting from a few days ago I outlined three ways in which Sulston’s account informs the intuition that knowledge of the genome should be treated as a commons. I want to continue that line of inquiry today, focusing on the difference between pure and applied science.
Commercial science is rightly driven by commercial goals and in exploring the genome it zeros in on the parts that may have profitable uses and ignores those that won’t.
Two problems arise as a result.
First of all, genome research may yield public goods that have little commercial value, but not if the profit motive is the only engine. As Sulston said in his December 2002 Nobel Lecture, “many of the most important potential applications — for example the neglected diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, found mainly in the poorer parts of the world — cannot be researched through funding for profit: there is no market to repay the investment.”
Second, a present reason to sequence the entire genome is that we have no real idea what will be useful and what will be useless. Once the decision has been made that the sequence is worth knowing, the best way to make sure that the entire thing gets done is to treat the project as pure rather than applied science. Pure science explores the genome, commercial science exploits it.
This distinction matters primarily because, in the absence of a full understanding of how the genome works, it is the habit of commercial science to stake broad claims hoping to strike a rich vein, then sit back and wait. This is what happened with a gene called CCR5, which encodes a receptor on the surface of cells.
Nobody knew what the receptor did when CCR5 was first sequenced, but a private concern, Human Genome Sciences, nonetheless took out a patent on it. Only later did a group of publicly-funded researchers in the United States figure out that a defect in this gene produced resistance to HIV infection. Pharmaceutical companies that wanted to follow up on this promising discovery had to buy licenses from Human Genome Sciences before they could begin to work.
Sulston asks the rhetorical questions: “But who made the inventive step? The company that made a lucky match to a randomly selected [gene]? Or the publicly funded researchers who identified that in people resistant to HIV the gene was defective?”
Note, by the way, that the choice to be made is not between commons and commerce. We can easily have both. CCR5 should have been in the public domain, whereupon plenty of commerce, perhaps more, would have followed upon the description of its sequence and the growing understanding of its functions.
If one must choose between open-ended basic science and goal-driven applied science, the latter is an inferior discipline for exploring something as complicated and poorly understood as the human genome. It won’t do the job fully, it won’t serve broad public interest, and it will balkanize the territory.
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Lewis Hyde, Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College, is working on a book about “cultural commons.”