The Hindu : 50 years after DNA's discovery, controversy still rages

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 03, 2003

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National

50 years after DNA's discovery, controversy still rages

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore March 2. Fifty years ago this week, an exciting word-of-mouth whisper bounced across the world's scientific community: The chemical structure of the core genetic material of life — deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA — had been discovered.

On February 28 1953, an American biologist, James Watson, and a British PhD student, Francis Crick, both working at the Medical Research Council unit of Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, U.K., moved to the nearby Eagle pub to announce to colleagues over a pint of beer that they had stumbled on the blueprint of all life. The formal announcement came in a joint paper in the April 25, 1953 issue of the journal, Nature - the first time they suggested that the structure of DNA was in the form of a double helix.

As preparations begin, to mark the 50th anniversary of one of 20th century's most important scientific breakthroughs, controversy refuses to go away - both about those who got the credit (and shared a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962) and about the ethical implications of work in this frontline research arena. In a television documentary on DNA, to be shown on Britain's Channel 4 later this week on March 8, Watson, now 74, and president of the New York-based Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, will be seen making a controversial statement that low intelligence is mostly an inherited disorder that could be tackled by gene therapy.

New Scientist reports him saying: "If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease... . The lower ten per cent who really have difficulty in elementary school... I'd like to get rid of that". He adds: "People will say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great". Many fellow scientists have already condemned his suggestion that genetic engineering should be used to tinker with human traits.

But the controversy in the coming weeks is expected to go much further. This year will also see the publication of The Third Man of the Double Helix by Maurice Wilkins, another scientist at the Cavendish Laboratory whose own research provided the stimulus to Watson and Crick and who went on to share the Nobel Prize with them. He was appalled when the more famous duo wrote the 1968 bestseller, The Double Helix, because he felt they gave scant credit to the contributions of others and hogged all the glory. In particular, they never made any mention that the clinching evidence for the double helix structure of DNA came from an X Ray taken by a fellow researcher, Rosalind Franklin. She died, unheralded, in 1958, but a book published last year, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox, restored credit to the woman whose crucial role in the discovery of DNA was brushed aside by a male chauvinistic scientific community for half a century.

Subsequent research has confirmed that the molecule of human life contains trillions of cells, each of which consists of 46 chromosomes, about 2 metres of DNA, about 3 million sub units and some 30,000 genetic codes for the proteins that perform the core functions. Cracking, cloning and separating these codes has kept the scientific community busy for 50 years.

Key landmarks include the birth in 1996 (and death last month) of the sheep Dolly, the first cloned animal. When the same techniques were allegedly used to clone human beings with a series successful births being claimed earlier this year by a company called Clonaid, there was widespread revulsion and much scepticism. Over 20 nations, including India, have banned research in such ethically sensitive areas, particularly the cloning of human stem cells.

However the global quest to map the human genetic code - the Human Genome Project - is being actively progressed by international consortia and a first `rough draft' published in 2001 concludes that the human has about 30,000 distinct genes, and that 99.9 per cent of these are identical in all humans: the first scientific evidence that claims of racial superiority based on colour or race are all humbug.

Vast computational resources are required for such studies and India may yet emerge as a leading centre. With the December 2002 commissioning of the indigenous teraflop supercomputer `Param Padma', the number crunching capability is already there and with the announced networking of 10 institutions in India in an I-Grid of 10 teraflop computing power within the 10th Plan, a national thrust in biotechnology and bioinformatics may become possible.

Biological data bases have already come up at Pune University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore and these are being networked with 44 sub centres, nationwide. Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics has come up at Hyderabad, spun off from research on DNA and genetics done at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB). In the second half century of the DNA saga, India may be ideally poised to leave her own distinct footprint in the pathways of progress.

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