When we were children, we thought our parents were taking care of things. Sometimes they were. As adults, we like to think that there are some very wise people, usually older than we are, taking care of the planet and us. As a result of this wishful thinking, a lot of people make a living under the pretense of doing just that.
It would be naive to think that individuals working in government agencies charged wtih taking care of us, or even in nonprofit foundations with lofty names, are altruistic toward us. The aren't sharing our genes. They aren't our parents. They are attending to their own biological imperatives and their own personal needs. Only when "ours" and "theirs" overlap do we get attention.
Once in a while -- wartime, for example -- we all pull together. The general and the troops all have an equal and obvious stake in avoiding annihilation by the enemy. In peactime it doesn't happen often that strong pressures for individual biological success -- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- overlap with pressures for survival of the group.
No one is looking out for our best itnerest. Not the church, not the president, not even Mother Teresa -- Christianity, Green Peace, and all the other Green Things not withstanding. We're on our own as always.
This is not new with the twentieth century. The constitutional government of the United States of America was set up with the notion of having checks and balances in government. The framers of thta document were practical and aware that we cannot count on having philosopher kings or presidents who always act in the best interests of the country. We need two or more governments working in parallel, competing for control within a civil system to prevent a government from getting out of control and having to be displaced in an armed insurrection. It's the best we can do under the circumstances, and it has worked pretty well. But there are new problems.
What has happened in this century is that the world has become increasingly complex. Many functions of government have spread into highly technical areas that are impossible for concerned outsiders to monitor continually.
The National Institutes of Health is one such monster. The Environmental Protection Agency is another. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hires people who advance their careers by telling us about the hypothetical effects of sulfate aerosols, as though there were a real, scientifically sound connection between sulfate measurements and the weather in the next millenium. The Patent Office is another bureaucratic mess. The Federal Reserve Board is a tawdry sepsis. No one who works there has to worry too much about interest rates.
How can we bring the spirit of checks and balances into the massive arms of an enomrous bunch of faceless bastards working, or sometimes just enrhcing themselves, doing God knows how many technical tasks?
When Congress passes a law that is not in keeping with the contemporary interpretation of the Constitution, the Supreme Courty usually understands what is up and overrules it.
When the National Institutes of Health makes an announcement through one of its many spokespeople, who checks out the credibility of that statement?
Checks and balances are hard to come by in a scientific establishment that is supported from outside by a populace unskilled in the scientific arts. I know it's going to be a hard and inefficient answer. Compared to a benevolent monarchy, having three branches of government was also inefficnet. And I know that as long as it achieves a better life for us here in the colonies, we will put up with it. We are optimistic people really, and we are not in a hurry to go anywhere else. I don't know exactly what the answer is, but I know that the answer is not to believe, "Trust us. We're here to help." It never has been.
I'm my naivete, the world was a safe place until 1968. I thought it was watched over by an elite group of people with great wisdom who had proven themselves and were entrusted with protecting us and the planet. I hoped that I, a conscientious twenty-two-year-old who loved to learn and teach, would someday be a member of that group.
In the early weeks of 1968 I submitted an article I had written to the foremost scientific journal in the world, Nature, published in London. I called it "The Cosmological Significance of Time Reversal" and congratulated myself on its cleverness. It was a description -- from my own experience and imagination -- of the entire universe from the beginning to the end.
It was one of those intuitive things that needed to be expressed as a tentative hypothesis, on account of my limitation experientially to the right now and my somewhat limited experience as a cosmologist. I was a second-year graduate student in biochemistry at Berkeley. I had read a lot about astrophysics and had taken some psychoactive drugs, which enhanced my perceived understanding of the cosmos. Not very good reasons to think that an international journal of science would want to publish my views for the edification of their very knowledgeable readership.
I was accepted. I received a flurry of letters from all over the world requesting reprints. At first I was elated by the response. Nature Times News Service circulated an article beginning, "It sounds like the wildest science fiction. But an American scientist seriously suggests that half the matter in the universe is going backwards in time." Some lady in Melbourne sent it to me with a letter asking for my autograph. Later in the article they referred to me as "Dr. Kary Mullis of California University." I began to be a little concerned. Something was definitely amiss in the world of science.
I was not a doctor. I was still a student, only hoping to be come a doctor. Who had promoted me to doctor? Why would the news services pick up the story and print it all over the world in the papers? I was not really an experienced astrophysicist. What did I know about the universe?
I grew up. I lost that long-abiding feeling that there were older, wiser people minding the stores. If there had been, they would not have allowed my first sophmoric paper on the structure of the universe to be published in the foremost scientific jouranl in the world.
Years later I invented the polymerase chain reaction. I was a professional scientist, and I knew what I had discovered. It was not the speculations of a kid about the universe and time reversal. It was a chemical procedure that would make the structures of the molecules of our genes as easy to see as billboards in the desert and as easy to manipulate as Tinkertoys.
PCR would not requires expensive equipment, and it would find tiny fragments of DNA and multiply them billions of times. And it would do it quickly.
The procedurew ould be valuable in diagnosing genetic disaease by looking int oa person's genes. It would find infectious diseases by detecting the genes of pathogens that were difficult or implssible to culture. PCR would solve murders from DNA samples in trace materials -- semen, blood, hair. The field of molecular paleobiology would blossom because of PCR. Its practitioners would inquire into the specifics of evolution from the DNA in ancient specimens. The branchings and migrations of early man would be revealed from fossil DNA and its descendant DNA in modern humans. And when DNA was finally found on other planets, it would be PCR that would tell us whether we had been there before or whether life on other planets was unrelated to us and had its own separate roots.
I knew that PCR would spread across the world like wildfire. This time there was no doubt in my mind: Nature would publish it.
They rejected it. So did Science, the second most prestigious journal in the world. Science offered that perhaps my paper could be published in some secondary journal, as they felt it would not be suitable to the needs of their readers. "Fuck them," I said.
It was some time before my disgust with the journals mellowed. I accepted an offer by Ray Wu to publish in Methods in Enzymology, a volume he was preparing. He understood the power of PCR.
This experience taught me a thing or two, and I grew up some more.
No wise men sit up there, watching the world from the vantage point of their last twenty years of life, making sure that the wisdom they have accumulated is being used.
We have to make it on the basis of our own wit. We have to be aware -- when someone comes on the seven o'clock news with word that the global temperature is going up or that the oceans are turning into cesspools or that half the matter is going backward -- that the media are at the mercy of the scientists who have the ability to summon them and that the scientists who have such ability are not often minding the store. More likely they are minding their own livelihoods.