"The Guardian"
Thursday December 27, 2001

The word made flesh 
Today we can read human and ape genetic legacies. In 50 years, we could 
resurrect the past, says Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins

This has been the year the human genome was announced, all but a few last 
details. As an achievement, it ranks with putting a man on the moon. Both are 
triumphs of the human spirit, like climbing Everest ("Because it is there") 
but more so because each is the cooperative culmination of millions of person 
hours of highly skilled work, brilliantly conceived, intricately organised, 
drawing upon the accumulated science of centuries. The human genome is a 
mountain climbed, not by a couple of individuals but by the human intellect 
itself. We can all be proud of our species as it closes in on this summit of 
self-knowledge.

Such projects are expensive, but worth it. They are examples of what we do 
when we live, rather than just work to stay alive. But they also contribute, 
in no mean strength, to the utilitarian business of staying alive.

The medical benefits of the genome project will become increasingly evident 
during our (consequently extended) lifetimes. Over the half century since 
Watson and Crick's discovery, the number of DNA codons that can be sequenced 
per unit-cost (allowing for inflation) has increased exponentially, with a 
doubling time of about 27 months. If the trend continues, a doctor in 2050 
will be able to call up, for the price of a chest X-ray, a genome printout for 
each individual patient. She will then prescribe not an average dose but the 
tailor-made remedy to fit each individual's genes. Enough of practicalities: 
as with the moon shots, the lasting benefits of the human genome project will 
flow not from reaching the narrow goal itself but from learning how to reach 
it. The new skills will be turned towards other goals.

The chimpanzee genome will be sequenced in a fraction of the time taken for 
the human genome, which it closely resembles. The distinguished molecular 
biologist Sydney Brenner has made the startling suggestion that a 
sophisticated comparison of the two might then enable us to reconstruct the 
genome of the common ancestor that we share, the so-called missing link, which 
lived in Africa about six million years ago.

Extrapolating Brenner's logic, our computers should then be able to split the 
difference between the missing link and ourselves, approximating the genome of 
an Australopithecine such as "Lucy", the famous three-million-year-old ape 
woman fossilised in the Ethiopian highlands.

Such speculation is for the future, but it is a future measured in decades, 
not centuries. During the same decades, embryological science and cloning 
technology will also be advancing, and it is not excessive to speculate that, 
by 2050, a reconstructed Australopithecine genome might be used to bring into 
the world a living, breathing Lucy! And, by the same methods, a living Turkana 
Boy (Homo erectus, roughly intermediate between Lucy and us) and similar 
resurrections of the bridges that span the chimpanzee line of descent.

Many of us will be horrified, rather than excited, by such a suggestion. But 
we are not living in 2050. Things will seem different then. Though free from 
irrational fears of "playing God," I admit to misgivings, which stem from 
compassion for the Lucy herself. It seems all too likely that she will be 
victimised and exploited as a tabloid freak show. On the other hand, I see 
positive ethical benefits flowing from the experiment, in the form of changes 
to our own attitudes. The same benefits in moral education would be delivered 
by a successful hybridisation of a human and a chimpanzee. Or from the 
discovery of a relict population of Lucys, surviving somewhere in the African 
bush. But cloning a new Lucy is more practicable, and it would shatter our 
speciesist illusions very effectively.

People who cheerfully eat cows object violently to abortion. Not even the most 
vehement "pro-lifer" would claim that a human foetus feels pain, or distress, 
or fear, more than an adult cow. The double standard, therefore, stems from an 
absolutist regard for the humanity of the foetus. Even if we don't eat 
chimpanzees (and they are eaten in Africa, as bushmeat) we do treat them in 
otherwise inhuman ways. We incarcerate them for life without trial (in zoos). 
If they become surplus to requirements, or grow old and miserable, we call the 
vet to put them down. I am not objecting to these practices, simply calling 
attention to the double standard. Much as I'd like the vet to put me down when 
I'm past it, he'd be tried for murder because I'm human.

Human means special, unique, sacred, of infinite worth, to be venerated as the 
possessor of "human dignity." Animal means to be treated kindly but put to 
human use, painlessly destroyed when usefulness is past, killed for sport, or 
as a pest. A rogue lion that kills people will be shot, not in revenge, not as 
a punishment, not as a deterrent to other lions, not to satisfy the relatives 
of the victim, but simply to get it out of the way: not punishment, but pest 
control. A rogue human who kills people will be given a fair trial, and if 
sentenced will probably not be killed. If he is killed, it will be with grisly 
ceremony, after appeals, and in the face of massive, principled objection. Of 
all the justifications offered for capital punishment, one that will never be 
heard is pest control. It has no place in penal theory. Humans, to the 
absolutist mind, are forever divided from "animals."

A real, live Lucy would drive a coach and horses through this double standard. 
Of course we already know that we are cousins of chimpanzees. But the 
intermediates are all conveniently dead, so it is easy to forget. If we 
succeed in cloning a Lucy and a series of graded, mutually fertile 
intermediates linking us to chimpanzees, what would the pro-"lifers" do then, 
poor things?

At the height of the apartheid idiocy, the South Africans set up courts to 
determine whether individuals should "pass for white." These obscene courts 
sometimes separated brothers, where one happened to be darker than the other. 
The pro-"lifers" would either have to go down that preposterous route, or 
embrace chimpanzees as human. And then, of course, we would be on the slippery 
slope, via gorillas, orang-utans, monkeys and so on, to the entire animal 
kingdom. This will not worry those of us who were never absolutists in the 
first place: who care more for the individual's capacity to suffer than for 
his divine human status. But it shows absolutism up as incoherent.

The silly thing is that it shouldn't be necessary to clone a live Lucy. Anyone 
with an intelligent imagination should get the point from the undeniable fact 
that we animals are all cousins: it is the merest accident that the 
evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct. But the absolutist mind - one 
of the great scourges of humanity - has never been richly endowed with either 
intelligence or imagination. Unfortunately, the absolutist mind needs to see 
the word made flesh. Come back Lucy!

ˇ Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding 
of science at Oxford.

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