The Field Museum of Chicago recently paid more than 7 million dollars for the fossilized skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex named "Sue" - a small price tag for neutralizing the dual threats of would-be buyer Nathan Myrhvold and potential stomper Godzilla. Since dinosaurs fascinate most people over the age of two, it's not too surprising that these ancient remains are now unburied treasures. But in the past, the dinosaur images that made the earth tremble - from flesh-ripping caveman-killers to idiot purple endomorphs - owed more to marketers than paleontologists. Then along came the billion-dollar Jurassic Park franchise. Its theorizing about the terrible lizards (or is that birds?) might've neither crawled nor flown past peer review, but its influence unearthed a groundswell of mass appeal for bare bones.
And suddenly, academics, porn starlets, and attentive schoolchildren alike were united in their refrain of "It's not the size, but what's inside that counts." DNA, in a rare instance of a scientific entity penetrating the pop culture miasma, emerged not as a bit player but the unlikely co-star of the Jurassic junta. Thanks to Crichton and Spielberg, additional blips of molecular biology like "polymerase chain reaction" and "introns" started popping up at the collective cocktail party, along with old standards like "clone" and "recombinant." An educated American adult can now better explain how one might reconstruct the chromosome of an allosaurus than, for example, why it gets cold in the winter.
It's difficult to explain what intrigues us so much about genes. Crichton's slight morality tale about tinkering with nature, kept from being so didactic that it would scare away customers, missed the point anyway. We aren't afraid of spawning nightmare creatures, any more than we fear killing ourselves through the rabid gormandizing of Marlboro Reds, Johnny Walker, and Jack-in-the-Box Chili Cheese Curly Fries. The source of our interest and vague unease is more likely a function of our ambivalence toward the array of stupid genome tricks, and the associated ethical fine-tuning.
For instance, we really like the middle-tech imprecision of fertility therapy, to the point of celebrating those who succeed in producing ever larger litters of genetically similar children (will Diane Sawyer abandon her annual trip to the Dilley sextuplets now that the McCaughey family managed seven?). But cloning, which might achieve nearly the same ends, is objectionable. The infamous Dolly sheep-cloning episode provoked fits of denial and litigiousness; but nobody was too bothered by the real purpose of carbon-copy transgenic animals, which is to serve as hormone factories for the pharmaceutical industry. Similarly, repairing genes in an individual to cure disease is OK; but tweaking the germ-line, which makes genetic changes that can be passed on to offspring, conjures images of a Gattaca-like future. Apparently we're a bit worried about our individuality, but few can muster a Rifkinesque outrage about biotech in general.
The recent contemplation of our genes is probably a remnant of the concern with viruses that began in the 1980s. But HIV, its relationship to sex, and its exploitation of our genetic material beg to be pondered metaphorically. Although smug would-be eugenicists often try to cast the genetic code as a symbol of fate - the hand that we're dealt, as it were - it makes most people uncomfortable to let the genotype code for anything more than the phenotype. An indication of the prevailing attitudes can be seen when genetics encounters the law. DNA sequences in criminal trials are seen as incontrovertible evidence of a person's presence at the crime scene (barring tampering), but frequently fail as proof of guilt. In Oregon, laws passed to prevent the abuse of genetic information by insurance companies and the like make the genome the private property of the individual. The message is something like this: DNA is our body, not our soul.
The upside to this is that we have less of a problem selling our bodies. Once the Human Genome Project has completed its task, we'll all have a basis for assessing our genetic uniqueness and profiting from it like supermodels and professional athletes, bartering our best features for those of others or an equivalent cash payment. If you think selling your genes sounds even more outrageous than reaping a fortune from a pile of bones found on the back forty, you're probably right: by the time you get a chance to plot your dig, some biotech company will probably already have patented your subterraneum jackpot. But with a little luck, you might still hold the movie rights.
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This article appeared originally in Suck.
