A guest writer looks at genetic engineering

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Genetic engineering change modern medicine tive weedkillers, fungicides to prevent crop diseases and fertilisers.

Biological synthesis of chemical commodities will rely on cheap raw materials (perhaps largely waste such as sewage) and be qualitatively more efficient than present methods in terms of energy.

Risky

Ultimately evolving bacteria to manufacture commodities could be directed towards removing reliance on oil by both economising on energy utilisation and forming an alternative source of organic raw material for our petrochemical based society.

It is possible that the 1970s is witnessing the birth of a new biological industry which potentially could compare with and succeed the development of engineering and chemical manufacturing.

What are the risks and takés them?

Introducing foreign genes into a bacterium and thus changing its characteristics obviously also opens the possibility of creating • new diseasecausing strains.

It has been argued that such germs may be particularly virulent as humans or animal or plant species which become infected may not have been exposed to them previously.

Even it such a pandemic plague amongst healthy people protected by modern medicine is unlikely, certain categories may be at risk from new pathogens.

These include the old, the very young, patients on antibiotic or drug treatments which reduce their resistance to infection and populations already debilitated by disease or malnutrition especially in underdeveloped countries.

For this reason it may be that genetic manipulation raises man's ability to damage himself and his world to a new level.

It is possible that a nuclear catastrophe is limited in its effects compared to the potential destruction wrought by a genetically engineered disease to which no one has any resistance.

It must also be said that for each of these theoretical hazards arising from genetic manipulation, counter arguments have been given against them.

Certainly no damage from recombinant work has yet been shown-though little such work has yet got underway.

The recombination process between foreign and bacterial genes may even occur naturally.

The chances of creating a disease-causing organism are smail. And, say the advocates of genetic experimentation, the physical and biological barriers insisted upon the authorities preventing the escape of recombinant bacteria from the laboratory are sufficient-though the recent Birmingham smallpox disaster should prompt some doubts on that score.

All these statements may be valid and yet it is probably now, at the point of transition from the laboratory bench to the factory floor, that the greatest vigilance must be kept.

This is because it is the experience of history since the industrial revolution that it is not scientific advance itself, but its application in the service of capital that creates new dangers for the individual, for society, and most particularly for the working class.

Weapons

Thus in the most obvious and extreme examples, the engineering and chemical industries of the nineteenth century characterised the First World War as a clash of machines, synthetic explosives and poison gas and raised the slaughter to an unprecedented level.

Research in physics was applied • in the Second. World War to the production of an atomic bomb; and now developments in electronics and rocketry allow the delivery of nuclear weapons with Godlikt precision.

There is little doubt that in the hands of the military, genetic manipulation techniques could similarly develop and refine biological weapons.

But the greatest toll caused by the application of science in industry has occurred and still occurs day in and day out amongst the workers at the point of production.

Observation Indeed the common method for the discovery of hazards from new processes is not laboratory research but the subsequent observation of unexpected side-effects and of industrial diseases amongst workers.

A list of occupational illnesses could be written from Asbestosis on, Is genetic manipulation going to provide a 'G' for this alphabet or is the pattern of capitalist history to be broken at this point?

This is not a matter that can be left for the future.

Already Californian concern called Genetech has been set up and plans to manufacture human insulin.

Fat profits

Now the pharmaceutical and chemical giants (who brought you seveso, thalidomide and the La Roche profits scandal) are lumbering into starting positions for the race to be first into large scale production using recombinant bacteria.

Powerful lobbying will be used to ensure that the government safety regulations in the United States and Britain do not provide a barrier to fat profits.

Western governments are already, under the pressure of loss of profits and employment prospects, being encouraged to ease restrictions.

Failure to do this will ensure that the multinationals export the whole genetic engineering operation, risk and all, from the West to more amenable (and more susceptible) third world countries.

However, most people's gonetic entine products ot (hopefully) be due to the manufacturing process or to the military use of recombinants but with the end products themFertilisation of an ovum selves.

Past experience shows that the choice of products to be made will not be governed by the real health needs of the masses of the world but by the lucrative treatment-oriented markets particularly of the West.

Thus the first recombinant mass produced agent will certainly be human insulin and the first vaccine could well be cholera vaccine.

The media will applaud-but watch out.

ICI, Hoffman La Roche and Du Pont will have no interest in devoting resources to research into the dietary causes and the prevention of diabetes or in helping to alleviate the poor social conditions in which cholera flourishes.

Palliatives

Recombinant techniques in the hands of capitalist industry will be used solely to make palliatives rather than preventives and perpetuate the whole "illness industry" philosophy of Western medicine.

Control over the use of genetic engineering techniques in the private sector is minimal.

In the United States, the National Institutes of Health regulate only the recombinant research which they themselves fund Edward Kennedy's bill to control all genetic manipulation work failed to pass through Congress, so that industry has been given a free hand and only complies with the NIH guidelines on a voluntary basis.

In Britain, the directives of the government-appointed Genetic Manipulation Advisory Group IGMAG) have the force of law.

All recombinant experiments must be notified to GMAG which also exercises control through a system of local safety committees.

The government, employers, trade unions and 'the public' have representatives on GMAG.

But the group operates under the umbrella of the Official Secrets Act and under a code insisted upon by the employers to protect commercial secrecy.

Furthermore although industrial research is regulated commercial production using recombinant techniques is outside the area of GMAG control.

Trade unionists, especially in the chemical and pharmaceutical sector must bring the plans of these industries out into the open and put forward an alternative strategy for recombinant manufacture based on production of commodities for need rather than profit and on the basis of the safest procedures with constant monitoring of the health of employees.

Workers must also be prepared to cooperate internationally and ensure that hazards are not exported to underdeveloped countries.

These policies are unachievable so long as the industry remains in private hands.

They lead on to the need for the nationalisation without compensation, under workers management of the drug and chemical industries as part of the formation of a planned national health service with a new approach to health care. ...* What is certain is that these new and powerful genetic engineering techniques cannot be developed by modern capitalism in anything other than a distorted and destructive manner.

Only a socialist society can make the modified bacterium work to the benefit of mankind. —Mike Peters © 1978 Dayton Daily News

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