Life Script / The Misunderstood Gene

...Wiarda is quick to note, however, that these were "conservative revolutions": The elites clamoring for independence simply wanted freedom from Spain, not true freedom for Latin America's lower classes...

...On the few occasions in which he qualifies his argument, he does so to the point of rendering it useless, unwittingly proving the limitations of cultural analysis...

...Other times, an array of effects is discovered which could not have been predicted from what was previously known...

...There, Bill Clinton, a gaggle of scientists, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (present via the wonders of technology) assembled to announce that the Human Genome had been "sequenced" (at least almost...

...Critique would take far more than my allotted space...

...Wiarda, a political scientist from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, purports to explain no less than "why and how Latin America differs from the United States, why its politics, society, and economies are at such variance from the American...

...Not content to absorb one set of institutional and ideological fixtures from abroad, Wiarda's Latin America has cycled through various new foreign political ideologies since the end of Spanish colonialism...

...The bold, courageous, maverick outsider (Craig Venter and Celera Genomics), funded well by self-made venture capitalists, takes on the plodding, inept, traditional community of academic scientists...

...Newspapers and media outlets proclaimed and parsed the news for weeks...

...Howard J. Wiarda's The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition offers an instance of cultural analysis run amok...

...Economic, class, institutional, and dependency elements need to be factored into any explanatory paradigm...

...25 MERE GENES M. Therese Lysaught n June 2000, all eyes were on the East Room of the White House...

...This contribution alone makes the book worth reading...

...Even today in Latin America," he argues, "society seems to be made up of stock types: the oligarch, the priest, the military officer, the bureaucrat, the labor leader, the student, the peasant, and so on...

...genetic manipulation of the life span...

...The first three chapters tell the story of the race to sequence the human genome...

...But was it...

...Apparently, in addition to their swords, horses, and diseases, the Spaniards also lugged some heavy cultural baggage across the Atlantic: ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and medieval Christianity...

...In their place, he proposes a new metaphor that is rich with possibility: that of memory...

...Even Thomas Aquinas was a stowaway, as the Spaniards smuggled his scholasticism and rigid conceptions of social hierarchy into the Americas...

...M. Therese Lysaught teaches in the theology department at the University of Dayton...

...Hubbard, the Harvard biochemist now emerita, is one of the authors of Exploding the Gene Myth (Beacon Press), which explores how the findings of genetic science are used to serve social and political ends...

...He glosses over inequities at home, simply arguing that "a society that is inegalitarian is one thing, but one that is unabashedly so is quite another...

...Spain's principal cultural influences (Greece, Rome, the Bible, Saint Thomas, Saint Augustine) and its key historical experiences (the seven-hundred-year occupation by the Moors and the gradual reconquest of Spain) produced a unique political culture, markedly different from that of the rest of Western Europe...

...Wiarda frequently reminds readers of the valuable service his book provides by disabusing them of Latin American stereotypes they've picked up in New Yorker cartoons or in movies like Bananas and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...

...Nicholas Wade, a science writer for the New York Times, believes that this was a turning point in the history of civilization, marking the moment that Western medicine began to emerge from the "dark ages" of surgery and chemical poisons...

...By the mid-nineteenth century, the region's intellectual and political leaders had embraced positivism, which derived from the writings of French philosopher Auguste Comte and emphasized order, group rights over individual liberties, and a society in which all members knew their correct place or "station...

...26 Morange seeks to correct common misperceptions or outdated understandings of what genes do...

...This confounds...

...Too often to count, Wade promises that "over the next decade," "in a few years," "in two years," one biotech company or another will have created an application that will change the face of medicine as we know it...

...But that is not to say that cultural factors alone explain national development...

...Perhaps, but defining a position as true doesn't make it so...

...Deep down," the author tells us, "the oligarchies of Latin America do not believe that Indians and people of African descent are fully equal...

...Yet the only service—or disservice—that Wiarda gives readers is an intellectual rationale for all the old Moon over Paradorstyle stereotypes...

...Yet his presentation of the United States is stunningly benign...

...social implications of proposed new developments are not explored...

...And he largely disregards unsavory U.S...

...The centerpiece of his argument is "knockout" experiments...

...Yet the problem with culture is precisely its allencompassing nature, its nearly tautological explanatory power...

...Here he rehearses the many fascinating possibilities that are the stuff of newspaper headlines: gene chips enabling genomewide diagnostic scans...

...Indeed, he endorses the stereotypes...

...regenerative medicine (via embryonic and adult stem cells and cloning...

...Ultimately, The Soul of Latin America may reveal as much about cultural self-perception in this country as it does about the cultural traditions of our neighbors to the south...

...He rejects computing metaphors that liken the genome to a program and linguistic/textual metaphors that compare it to an instruction manual, information, or "the book of life...

...Nationalism and Marxism soon followed as the region's ideological trends du jour, enduring in moderate form to this day...

...the hero is competitive capitalism in its new biotech garb...

...It is not only the story of Mendel, Morgan, Mueller, and Watson/Crick...

...In other words, the culture Latin America inherited from Spain proved to be a curse from which there is no escape...

...Through the discovery and subsequent conquest of the Americas, "these traits were then transferred to Latin America, in which setting they not only persisted for centuries but actually received a new lease on life...

...To understand Latin America today, Wiarda contends, we must first consider the cultural and intellectual traditions that Spanish conquerors brought to the New World in 1492...

...This ear for the conceptual allows him to mount a convincing critique of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory as well as other questionable extrapolations from genetic findings...

...With a protein modified, researchers can study the role it plays in the development and functioning of an organism...

...Moreover, since the end of the cold war, intellectuals around the world have decried the spread of American movies, music, and food as an insidious force that destroys local customs and warps the hearts and minds of global youth...

...and ethical concerns are mentioned only to be dismissed...

...I will mention only three points...

...First, the book lacks an interpretive or analytical framework...

...Instead, the tale is all too familiar...

...Too many times, he refers to the body as "human clay" and the genome as the human "parts list," "the program," the "human instruction manual" which will enable scientists to "fix the human machine and in time to correct most—perhaps all—of its defects...

...He begins with a history...

...Carlos Lozada is associate editor o/Foreign Policy magazine...

...This shift in focus allows Morange to critique the dominant metaphors used to talk about genes...

...Nations and peoples behave differently simply because they are different...

...Cultural explanations are intuitive, straightforward, almost comforting...

...Interestingly, gene therapy receives little space in this book...

...Closer attention to the history of that field over the past decade should cool any premature prognostication...

...cures for cancer...

...So do chance, accidents, geography, and perhaps, sociobiology...

...For Morange, a professor of biology and the director of the Center for the Study of the History of Science at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, sequence data give us important information about the genome but cannot provide the most useful or interesting information, namely, how genes and organisms function...

...Morange analyzes the assumptions behind deterministic claims, offering a scientifically more nuanced and balanced account of how genes actually contribute to these outcomes...

...Wade valiantly tries to make the story interesting...

...It was, as far as one could tell, A Big Deal...

...fill in the blank with the disease or trait of your choice...

...After laying out history, Morange moves to a series of chapters in which he presents the case against the notion of genes "for" diseases, cancer, development, aging, longevity, death, behavior, sexuality, personality, intelligence, and morality...

...soil only revived the notion that a conflict between Western and Islamic culture—a "clash of civilizations" as Huntington might call it—will be the defining struggle of the twenty-first century...

...Light bulbs flashed...

...And the recent terrorist attacks on U.S...

...Think Ayn Rand meets scientific triumphalism...

...If Wade exemplifies the hype about the implications of genetics, Michel Morange provides the antidote...

...What did this really mean...

...Mired as he is in dusty historical treatises, Wiarda would do well to visit his local twenty-first-century video store and pick up Traffic or Amores Perms to learn how most movie-going gringos perceive Latin America these days...

...Wiarda may well be right in his bleak view of the prospects for democracy in Latin America...

...In their zeal to explain everything, cultural critics risk explaining nothing at all...

...Knockout experiments proceed by modifying a specific gene, which results in either an abnormal protein product or none at all...

...Morange's primary agenda is to debunk genetic determinism, especially the notion that there is a "gene for...

...Thus, for Morange, knockout experiments powerfully challenge the notion of genetic determinism...

...But the pesky question that Wiarda never answers—indeed, he wastes much ink skirting it—is how 24 much weight cultural traditions carry compared to other factors...

...DNA," he notes, "is the memory that life invented so that, at each generation, its active agents— proteins—could be efficiently reproduced...

...Last year, Harvard University luminary Samuel P. Huntington coedited a major volume titled Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, with highprofile contributors ranging from Francis Fukuyama to Jeffrey Sachs...

...Any person interested in genetics should read The Misunderstood Gene...

...The two books under consideration here present different perspectives on these questions...

...To me and to most readers," explains Wiarda, "the continuing importance of cultural differences is so obvious as to be almost irrefutable...

...Wiarda frequently contrasts the racism and social hierarchies of Latin America with the equality and social mobility of the United States...

...But beyond traditional biological reductionism and determinism, Wade has an unwarranted confidence in the ability of genomic technicians to turn the straw of the sequence into gold...

...As he notes, "If molecular biologists had to designate one category of macromolecules as being essential for life, it would be proteins and their multiple functions, not DNA and genes...

...Look at their clothes, their customs, their beliefs—in a word, their culture...

...and genomic engineering...

...Stylistically, it reads like a cross between a book-length newspaper article and a series of press releases for various biotech companies...

...It was more medieval, top-down and authoritarian, statist, and exploitative...

...Researchers like that...

...Second, Wade's understanding of the genome is reductionist and determinist...

...This perplexes...

...While Morange wants to give genes their proper credit, his money is with proteins...

...Although some of Morange's technical material may be difficult for the general reader, this book will correct a wealth of genetic misunderstandings...

...Life Script proceeds in two sections, each of which could stand alone...

...The clear virtue in Wade's tale is brash egoism...

...Latin American democracy today remains "topdown, organic, elitist, centralized, statist, nonparticipatory, patrimonialist, executive-centered, and group—rather than individual—oriented...

...Wiarda depicts Latin American cultural development in remarkably linear terms...

...As a historian of science, Morange also tells the story of the conceptual development of the field of genetics (discussing, for example, the "reification" of genes, their transformation into an object...

...He treats racism in the United States like a statistical aberration, barely meriting parenthetical references, as if America's racial divides were limited to those unfortunate few years during the 1860s...

...policies toward Latin America during the cold war, which did much to retard democracy in the region...

...indeed, explaining this difference is the very purpose of his book...

...new protein drugs and pharmacogenomics...

...Asking what genes do simply means trying to find out how proteins—the structures of which are transmitted from generation to generation—enable the organism to carry out complex functions...

...His book brings to mind the work of Ruth Hubbard, although Morange's rhetoric is more subdued...

...Sometimes, no discernible effect can be noted...

...When he cannot marshal the evidence to support his positions, Wiarda simply speculates on how Latin Americans really think...

...One might call this "biotech determinism...

...Sometimes, if you knock out a gene, it leads to an expected effect...

...With the tale told, Wade devotes the remaining four chapters to medical applications of genetic technology...

...First came liberalism, which served as the impetus for the independence movements of the early 1800s...

...No critique is offered...

...Yet despite the coming and going of various ideological fads, claims Wiarda, Latin America remains unable to shake free of its original political culture...

...His probe of the Latin mind goes deeper: "I am not convinced that those rich, white Latin American aristocrats—although they cannot say so publicly—are even now entirely convinced that Indians, blacks, and lower-class persons really have souls...