Read Present at the Future Online
Authors: Ira Flatow
Present at the Future (29 page)
I wanted to know from Dr. Goodall what was left to be discovered. Were there perhaps any undiscovered large ape species? I was unprepared for her answer.
“You’re talking about Yeti or Bigfoot or Sasquatch. You’ll be amazed when I tell you that I’m sure that they exist. I’ve talked to so many Native Americans who’ve all described the same sounds, two who’ve seen them. I’ve probably got about thirty books that have come from different parts of the world, from China, from all over the place. There was a little tiny snippet in the newspaper which says that British scientists have found what they believe to be a Yeti hair, and that the scientists in the Natural History Museum in London couldn’t identify it as any known animal.”
In this age of DNA analysis, Goodall is hoping that living cells might exist on the sample. “There will be. And I’m sure that’s what they’ve examined and they don’t match up.” Goodall remains hopeful and confident that if this sample does not yield viable DNA, someday a hair sample will be found and prove that Bigfoot really does exist, a belief she has carried for years.
“I’m a romantic, so I always wanted them to exist. There are people looking. There’s a very ardent group in Russia, and they have published a whole lot of stuff about what they’ve seen. Of course, the big criticism of all this is where is the body? You know, why isn’t there a body? And I can’t answer that. And maybe they don’t exist, but I want them to.”
Besides its use in finding Yeti, Goodall says DNA technology has changed primate research.
“That’s been very exciting because the one thing we never knew for sure, although sometimes we could guess, is which male fathered which infant. And with DNA profiling techniques, which can now be done from fecal samples—you don’t even need hairs—we now are beginning to identify the fathers. That means that we can look at the relationship between a particular adult male and an infant and find out if there’s any special behaviors which seem to indicate that in some way they know. Now we don’t know yet, but it’s fascinating. Sometimes our guess is absolutely confirmed. We found an example of incest, which is very rare. So it’s a fascinating new field for us.
“One of the most fascinating areas for research is cultural differences between different populations across Africa or even different neighboring communities. And of course, it’s still controversial as to whether chimpanzees can have culture, but I define it very simply as behavior that’s passed from one generation to the next through observation, imitation, and practice. And tool-using behaviors differ quite markedly across the species range in Africa. Sometimes it’s due to different environments, but very often it seems to be due to the young ones seeing what the older ones do.
“Now we’ve just begun to skim the surface of these differences, but even as you and I are speaking, chimpanzees, along with their cultures, are being wiped out right across Africa. From about two million a hundred years ago, to the very maximum two hundred thousand today. And that’s more likely to be one hundred fifty thousand spread over twenty-one countries, mostly in tiny, isolated fragments where there’s no possibility for long-term survival because the gene pools aren’t big enough.”
And they’re dying out why?
“They’re dying because of habitat destruction, as human populations grow. They’re caught in wire snares set for other animals, but they catch the chimps and gorillas, for that matter, and they either die of gangrene or lose a hand or foot and can’t compete very well reproductively. But the worst threat for chimps today is the commercial bush meat trade, and that is the hunting of animals for sale in the big towns. Not subsistence hunting, which has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years, but this has happened because the logging companies have made roads into the heart of the last great forests of the Congo Basin. Hunters go along the trail, they now have transport, they shoot everything, they load it on the truck, they take it to the towns, where the elite will pay more for it than chicken or goat.
“And it’s not sustainable at all. And it gets worse because you’ve got your logging camps, two thousand people or more, the loggers and their families, who weren’t there before. And now the Pygmies, the indigenous people, are paid and given weapons and ammunition to shoot for the logging camps, and that’s not sustainable either. The logging camp moves, the Pygmies have had it. They’ve lost their culture. They may have trees standing from sustainable logging, but they’ll be dead forests.”
Don’t the indigenous peoples understand the cycle? “There’s nothing they can say about it. They don’t want the loggers to come in any more than the people in Ecuador want the oil pipelines to
come in, but what can they do when big-business interests are put before the interests of the people living there?”
So it’s just a short time before we lose the chimps. “We’re working very hard to do something about it. The United States government, through the State Department, has put quite a large sum of money into a Congo Basin project. And best of all, President Bongo of Gabon, which has the largest area of unlogged forests, has just taken twelve areas away from logging concessions.”
Goodall is also worried about the state of the environment closer to home. She says that the fight against terrorism is threatening to overshadow environmental concerns in the United States. “Well, it has. It does. Look at the drilling for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. It was blocked, but now probably it’s going to be going ahead although in somewhat modified form. But directly after the eleventh of September [2001], it was very clear to me as I traveled around the country that people were reluctant to admit that they cared about the environment in case they would seem unpatriotic. And fortunately, gradually, people are coming out of that mind-set because, you know, if we let the planet continue to deteriorate, we really are in a very, very bad state. And if we continue to let that happen, then the terrorists finally will win, because for our great-grandchildren there will be nothing left.”
Celebrities tend to get noticed; they draw the media. So does Jane Goodall now see herself as an effective spokesperson for the environment?
“I do spend a lot of time talking to young people, but also people from all walks of life and all ages. And one of the remarks that’s so often said to me after a lecture, people come up and they say, ‘You have reinspired me to do my bit. You have made me feel that my own life is more worthwhile. I feel that I’ve been just sitting doing nothing. Now I want to do what I can.’ So until there’s a groundswell of people prepared to accept the tough decisions that may affect their purse to some extent, then we’ll never get the right legislation.
“I do know that when talking to people who perhaps think very differently, the only chance you have of getting them to think in a different way is to touch the heart. And if you’re strident, if you start accusing people, if you point fingers, then you immediately see the eyes glaze over and you know that you’re not getting across. I think that so much of what goes on that, in my view anyway, is a mistake is due not to any kind of criminal intent but simply because people honestly haven’t understood. So I feel that that’s my job. My job is to help people understand and to think about the future. I mean, just imagine what this world would be like if we went back to the old tradition of the Native Americans, who said every major decision has to be made with the question ‘How will this affect our people seven generations on?’ [in mind]. Even if we could just say two generations on, even one generation on, it would be helpful.”
Meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals.
—U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION, DRAFT REPORT, DECEMBER 2006
In 1996, a fetching newborn lamb named Dolly made headlines and magazine covers around the world. She looked nothing like the ewe that gave birth to her, because Dolly was the first animal cloned from an adult cell.
Dolly went on to mate and give birth to six healthy lambs. Though she suffered from illnesses, such as arthritis and lung disease, normally associated with much older sheep, she was such an amazing accomplishment that when she died in 2003, many people around the world who had never seen her in person felt that loss.
Today, of course, animal cloning is almost common. But Dolly’s creation triggered fiery debates over human cloning that are still very much alive.
Ian Wilmut is an embryologist and professor of reproductive
science at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He was a member of the team at Scotland’s Roslin Institute that cloned Dolly back in 1996. He is opposed to cloning human babies, but he says he’s a passionate advocate of what he calls a restricted form of human cloning.
“It’s amazing to think that it’s already more than a decade ago that she was born. And a lot has happened, but I think there’s a lot still to come. Using this technology to try to understand human disease, to develop new treatments for them.” That’s one of the immediate benefits, says Wilmut. Looking farther into the future, perhaps “being able to use it to stop the birth of children with inherited disease. I think there are a lot of things which I would encourage people to think about and to be optimistic about this technology and what it can offer.”
Now that scientists have successfully cloned a variety of animals, people are beginning to talk about the possibility of cloning people. After all, it’s not unreasonable to expect that parents might desire to have a clone of a deceased young child, tragically lost to them. But Wilmut remains cautious.
“The application that I’ve never supported is the idea of producing somebody who is a genetically identical twin of a person who is here. To me, it would be acceptable to produce embryos from which you could get cells and to produce a baby in which you had corrected a genetic disease. But it would not be a clone of somebody who was here already. It would be, if you like, a clone of an embryo. And it’s being done for a different purpose. So it’s very important all the time to say exactly what you have in mind.”
Is it possible that there might be a rogue scientist somewhere in the world who might attempt to clone a human being? Some have claimed to be able to do so….
“I think it is extraordinarily unlikely. The people who’ve talked about this in the past have been advertising themselves but actually not doing anything. And I think this is a fear which is greatly exaggerated.”
Would it be possible to create a united, international front against cloning people?
“I think that would be preferable. But given the different cultural histories, it may not be easy to achieve it. And so I’d be quite content to see each country preparing its own regulations. And it is, of course, very disappointing that [the United States] hasn’t done it. The United Kingdom, where I work, has some of the most liberal approaches to this. But it is very tightly regulated, which I think is entirely appropriate.”
But how can regulation stop someone with the knowledge and tools who desires to ignore the boundaries of accepted behavior? Wilmut doesn’t believe it inevitable that some scientist will create a human clone. “No. It might happen. But I think it depends on how we behave. It is, of course, possible for societies to come to different conclusions. But a perception that we should have is that there are disadvantages to most technologies. What’s key all the time is for societies to discuss things, to be informed about, and then to prepare regulations.”
EXPECTING TOO MUCH
Sometimes, technologies are oversold—that is, when they first break into the news, we hype them as saviors, as disease cures to the point that when they don’t produce results quickly enough, we think of them as failures. Has cloning been overhyped?
“I think in the short term, perhaps it has. There are different time scales. People doing research have to be optimists to follow that way of life. And it may be that inadvertently we do oversell things. But in the long run, no, I don’t think it’s been oversold. There’ll be a lot of things [that] come from this area of research.
“There are people who out of religious beliefs regard an embryo as a human being. Because of that, they can’t morally condone the use of embryos in basic research, in cloning, or embryonic stem cell research.
“I understand that to some people what we’re suggesting is deeply offensive. And of course, I accept that there are different points of view. In terms of working with embryos, I would wish to be sure that they understood exactly the stage of development that we would be working with. The embryo is smaller than a grain of sand. The micromanipulations we carry out with very sophisticated equipment and very skilled colleagues [occur] weeks before the time when there would be the beginnings of a nervous system.
“To me personally, the key human characteristic is being conscious, aware, being able to form intellectual relationships with people, something which, of course, would happen much, much later in the life of a developing person. But until the point when that begins to occur, which is sometime after the stage we would take cells, I think this is a potential person but not yet a person. And that’s the reason why, to me, it’s an acceptable thing to do.”
Wilmut’s work has been with animals. And he believes lots of advances are still to come. Probably not as dramatic as cloning humans but still quite worthy of scientific research. For example, take cows. People take cows for granted. “But let’s consider instead that it is possible to change cows so that they could not be susceptible to mad cow disease. It may be possible to change cows so that they would be resistant to foot-and-mouth disease. Now, I would suggest to you that those are two objectives which it is well worth considering not only for the benefit of the people who may ultimately consume milk and meat from them but also for [the benefit of] the animals themselves.”
And what if we could get farm animals to not only supply us with meat and dairy products but to also be able to grow spare body parts—hearts, kidneys, lungs—for us too? “One project, which a couple of groups certainly are still pursuing intensively, is the idea of changing pigs so that their organs can be used in people. And there is at least a handful of papers now showing that by making a particular genetic change, the organs are able to cope with blood from
primates, not from human beings, but much better than anything in the past. I think it’s still some way away. There are a lot of challenges still to overcome, but it is something that people are still considering.”