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Originally published in 1989.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691603803 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #996 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 9.80(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Gene Hunters
Biotechnology and the Scramble for Seeds
By Calestous Juma
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Calestous JumaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04258-9
CHAPTER 1
Genetic Resources and Socio-economic Evolution
US President Thomas Jefferson once said that the greatest service that could be rendered to any country was to add a useful plant to its culture. This statement underscores the importance of genetic resources in socioeconomic and cultural evolution. Economic history has often focused on technological development and ignored the role of genetic material in economic change. This chapter presents a brief overview of the role of genetic resources in socio-economic change and prepares the ground for subsequent analyses of historic botany. The Jeffersonian view of the world was based on a detailed understanding of the prevailing development in the US at the time. The lessons, however, have not been adequately learnt by most African countries.
This chapter will show that the introduction of new genetic material and the related technological knowledge into the economic system is one of the most crucial sources of economic growth. To illustrate this point, however, requires an alternative epistemological basis for social analysis. Most conventional approaches are based on static notions that are inherently incapable of dealing with socio-economic systems which evolve under conditions of uncertainty. A non-equilibrium systems approach captures the destabilizing effects of new genetic material and the related technology on the socio-economic system.
Epistemology and environmental expansionism
The rise of inanimate technology and the increased use of genetic resources are closely linked. The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture required changes in the knowledge base and the introduction of new technologies. Technology enabled mankind to introduce new modes of interacting with the environment in order to meet nutritional needs. Thus, knowledge and the prevailing material conditions were closely tied together in a non-deterministic manner. The material conditions enabled mankind to formulate a range of institutional arrangements (including traditions, myths, rituals and codes of social behaviour) which embodied some of the rules that governed mankind's interaction with the natural environment. Some of these institutional arrangements, however, acquired autonomy and became a source of instrumental power in themselves.
Knowledge of the botanical and zoological base increased the range of options available for providing nutritional needs. At this early stage of socio-cultural evolution, mankind was already showing the tendency to expand and influence the natural resource base. The decision on whether to seek control over the natural environment differed from region to region. While the American Indians, for example, adopted an ecological cosmology that avoided the need to drastically transform and control the environment, Western thought is associated with various forms of expansionism and control. One of the earliest forms of expansionism was the application of genetic resources to expand economic activities and control other human beings, a narrower domain of social behaviour that can be referred to as genetic imperialism.
Modern historians have mainly presented a truncated understanding of expansionism, often emphasizing the recent events associated with the political and economic expansion of Western Europe and the creation of colonies. Much of this has been based largely on the materialistic interpretation of the world. In order to understand the historical role played by genetic resources in social change and economic expansion, it is necessary to examine the broader philosophical basis for expanionism in a non-deterministic manner. It is understood here as the view that the role of mankind is to extend control over the rest of nature. This view is well articulated by Aristotle who conceived of a divine hierarchy over which a supreme being, God, presided and the rest of the creatures followed in a descending pecking order. Humankind, more specifically man, ruled over all the creatures below him — women, children, koala bears, snails, phytoplankton and rocks.
Aristotle flourished during the era of Alexander the Great, a significant period in Hellenic imperialism. That his philosophy should reflect such thinking is not surprising. Aristotle may have influenced his pupil, Alexander, but the extent of that influence is uncertain. Aristotelian scholasticism carried all the major elements of expansionism. He argued that the conquest of 'natural slaves' was right and therefore war against barbarians was justified. His thoughts later became central doctrines of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in which the natural environment existed mainly for the purposes of meeting human needs. Christianity became inherently expansionist in practice and philosophy.
The view that humankind was supreme to all other life forms was strongly advocated by the Catholic Church. When some residents of Rome planned to organize a society to protest against the slaughter of bulls for amusement and sport, Pope Pius IX refused them permission on the grounds that animals had no souls and therefore did not deserve man's moral sympathies. Although St Francis of Assisi provides a counterpoint to the mainstream Catholic worldview, the church still remains antagonistic or indifferent to nature. With this kind of belief, all expansionists needed to do was to be convinced that other races were inferior and they could therefore justify their exploitation and even extermination.
The philosophical strand of Judaeo-Christian thought was consolidated by other notions that led to the mechanistic world in which genetic expansionism flourishes. One of the earliest advocates of expansionism was Francis Bacon. He saw the rise of science as a major source of power and tools for the control of nature. Bacon stressed that for all their pompous claims, the Greeks has not performed any experiments which led to improvements in the human condition. For him, the main goal of science was to endow human life with new discoveries and powers. He advocated the search for objective knowledge which would enable mankind to have control over all natural things.
The Baconian appeal to rationality and expansionism was furthered by René Descartes who sought to reduce all phenomena to mathematical expressions. The Cartesian world was precise and followed neat mathematical laws. With Baconian rationality one was able to identify the mathematical laws that governed the behaviour of all phenomena. The Greek view of the world as a series of chaotic events and decay was deemed irrational by Descartes and therefore dismissed as false. With the Cartesian method, the world could be reduced to separate entities which represented the whole; the behaviour of the sum of the parts was equal to the functioning of the whole. This mechanistic view of the world, which received new impetus from Galileo and Bacon, was now on its way to theoretical dominance.
Descartes compared human beings and animals to clocks composed of springs and wheels. A combination of the mechanistic view and the need to accumulate experimental knowledge led to the disregard of compassion towards animals. He defended vivisection and other cruel experiments conducted on animals in Paris and believed that the crying of animals was no more that the creaking of a wheel. Like Pope Pius IX, he saw no reason why animals deserved human compassion. Science and religion worked closely to promote expansionist attitudes.
It was Isaac Newton who consolidated the mechanistic world view in his Principia in 1687. He also presented a methodological synthesis of the opposing empirical, inductive method represented by Bacon and the rational, deductive method of Descartes. Newton was a strong believer in God and creation. Since God had no beginning and end, his worldview was equally timeless. What mattered for Newton was the existence of some form of equilibrium in which separate entities existed. The entities remained in balance through their mutual attraction. Gravity was the ultimate force in the Newtonian universe. It was constant and was the most fundamental of all laws. Newton's world was thus a mega-clock that worked according to some grand design — God's handicraft. The world was also reversible since it was in equilibrium and timeless. The equilibrium could be disturbed by the attraction between the constituent entities but the divine relentlessly returned to equilibrium.
Because of being timeless, Newton's worldview disregards history since events occur instantaneously and can be analysed through comparative statics. In addition, this mechanistic worldview is deterministic since all that happens is already predetermined in the initial conditions. In Newtonian systems, spontaneous emergence is severely curtailed and things change through linear progression. The Newtonian synthesis has given us a seemingly orderly world without surprises. Every entity has a predefined place in a larger constellation. And as in Aristotle, entities are defined by their fixity of form and their boundaries are clearly marked. Their positions are predetermined and do not easily change. If there are any changes, they are predictable. There is a strong causal relationship in the Newtonian worldview; for every effect there must be a discernible cause. One of the aims of research is to identify the cause-effect correspondence. In most cases, researchers look for single causes.
This mechanistic worldview has had a major influence on the development of world agriculture. Let us examine in detail the impact of Cartesian-Newtonian metaphors on botany, genetics and agricultural production. The pursuit of Aristotelian scholasticism led to a strong need to classify plants so as to understand more fully their potential contribution to human needs. And since the external form of plants was presumed to be static and discernible, an analytical method that could capture their key features could be used for classification. The belief that plants were created by God in the form they existed made it seemingly easy to classify them according to their distinctive morphological features. This mechanistic and reductionist programme was implemented by Swedish botanist Carl von Linne, popularly known by his Latinized name, Linnaeus.
The method of Linnaeus was simple, neat and appealing: one simply counted the pistils and stamens in a flower to establish its position in God's divine arrangement. With further calculation, the Cartesian part of the programme could easily be achieved and plants could be classified and neatly organized on shelves. In a few years after the system was introduced, most of Europe abandoned previous attempts to classify plants and adopted the method of Linnaeus. Like most heroes, Linnaeus succeeded in synthesizing and rationalizing existing methods of classification and analysis. His binomial nomenclature was already in use when he came to the scene. But why did Linnaeus' method prevail over the previous attempts to classify plants? The answer lies in the rise of genetic imperialism.
The clear-cut Cartesian nature of the method was extremely appealing to the scientific community. Linnaeus blossomed during the era of abstraction and reason. His method also conformed to the growing need to base botanical studies on herbarium specimens as it was becoming increasingly difficult to deal with a large body of botanical information, some of which was on plants from all over the world. It should be noted that by then imperialist countries such as Britain were already sending botanists and plant collectors to all parts of the world and the accumulated stock of specimens needed to be classified. Classification was therefore necessary if the empire was to utilize some of the plants in its expansionist designs.
In 1749 Linnaeus had written an academic thesis, The Oeconomy of Nature, which became a popular text in Europe and America. The book reiterated the Judaeo-Christian view that nature existed to meet the needs of mankind. His worldview was clearly Newtonian. The mechanistic and static nature of Linnaeus' work is captured by Worster: 'Essentially [the book] presents a thoroughly static portrait of the geo-biological interactions. All movement takes place in a single confined sphere, planetary in scope. Like the classical Greek naturalists, Linnaeus allows only one kind of change in the natural economic system, a cyclical pattern that keeps returning to its point of departure.' According to Linnaeus, species are constantly circulating in the economy of nature with the precision of clockwork. In order to keep the system rational, God has set limits to the geographical range of each species and assigned its peculiar food. He conceived of a divine demarcation between the species and did not concern himself with variability within species.
According to Linnaeus, man must exercise his expansionist responsibility:
All these creatures of nature, so artfully contrived, so wonderfully propagated, so providentially supported ... seem intended by the Creator for the sake of man. Everything may be made subservient to his use; if not immediately, yet mediately, not so to that of other animals. By the help of reason man tames the fiercest animals, pursues and catches the swiftest, nay he is able to reach even those, which lye hidden in the bottom of the sea.
Linnaeus' thus conformed to the Baconian ideal. With the application of science to the study of botany, mankind was able to utilize the natural endowment to fulfil his needs. As his experimental knowledge grew, so did his capacity to control and utilize nature. By doing so mankind would have realized his imperial objectives. In a rather Machiavellian fashion, the end would justify the means; the rise of human welfare, as measured by the accumulation of material wealth, would vindicate the instrumental and utilitarian ethos.
The utilitarian approach adopted by Linnaeus was also consistent with the prevailing managerial practices of British industrialists. Nature was seen largely as a storehouse for raw materials for industrial and agricultural production. This view greatly influenced the thinking of economists such as Adam Smith and led to economic theories which assumed that natural resources were inexhaustible. In addition, Newtonian equilibrium notions led to the view that pollutants and waste released into the environment would gradually dissipate as the system returned to equilibrium. The costs of ecological damage were treated as factors external to the units of agricultural and industrial production. This legacy has led to extensive environmental damage and the naive unwillingness to adopt environmentally-sound development strategies.
Linnaean thought was very popular among the Anglo-Americans. Upon his death in 1778, his books, papers and herbarium sheets were bought for £1,000 and shipped London by James Edward Smith at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks, a leading advocate of the use of genetic resources for the expansion of the British empire. In 1788 amateur botanists formed the Linnaean Society to promote Linnaeus' work. The mechanistic view of botany that Linnaeus promoted faced new challenges from Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859. The theory of evolution challenged the view that species were a product of God's handiwork and did not change through time. But Darwin's concepts were easily incorporated into Linnaean thought. It was botanical business as usual.
The mechanistic and reductionist approach in the biological sciences was given renewed impetus by the discovery of hereditary factors by Gregor Mendel. Although Mendel published his work a few years after Darwin's Origin of Species, it went unnoticed until 1900 when it was rediscovered. The view that there were 'units of heredity', later called genes, was consistent with the reductionist Cartesian philosophy. The genes, according to Mendel, did not become diluted through progeny but were preserved; they did not change their identity but only recombined. With the rediscovery of Mendel's work, the discipline of genetics, as William Bateson called it, was born. Genetics became the ultimate realization of the mechanistic and reductionist programmes in the biological sciences. It was believed that every gene corresponded to specific traits in a linear way. The understanding of the functioning of the whole system was subordinated to the imperatives of genes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Gene Hunters by Calestous Juma. Copyright © 1989 Calestous Juma. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- Acknowledgements, pg. ix
- Abbreviations, pg. xi
- Glossary, pg. xiii
- Introduction, pg. 1
- 1. Genetic Resources and Socio-economic Evolution, pg. 6
- 2. Explorations in Historical Botany, pg. 37
- 3. Genetic Resources and World Agriculture, pg. 76
- 4. Branching Points in Biotechnology, pg. 108
- 5. Life as Intellectual Property, pg. 149
- 6. Germplasm and Kenya's Agriculture: A Case Study, pg. 179
- 7. The Way Ahead: Policy Options for Africa, pg. 208
- Appendix: Institutions Conserving Genetic Resources, pg. 240
- Bibliography, pg. 249
- Index, pg. 273