[Ian Murray fwd, Barry Commoner, The spurious foundation of genetic engineering, Harpers. 2/2002]:
``...By the mid 1980s, therefore, long before the #3 billion Human Genome Project was funded, and long before genetically modified crops began to appear in our fields, a series of protein-based processes had already intruded on the DNA gene's exclusive genetic franchise. An array of protein enzymes must repair the all-too-frequent mistakes in gene replication and in the transmission of the genetic code to proteins as well. Certain proteins, assembled in spliceosomes, can reshuffle the RNA transcripts, creating hundreds and even thousands of different proteins from a single gene. A family of chaperones, proteins that facilitate the roper folding - and therefore the biochemical activity - of newly made proteins, form an essential part of the gene-to-protein process. By any reasonable measure, these results contradict the central dogma's cardinal maxim: that a DNA gene exclusively governs the molecular processes that give rise to a particular inherited trait. The DNA gene clearly exerts an important influence on inheritance, but it is not unique in that respect and acts only in collaboration with a multitude of protein-based processes that prevent and repair incorrect sequences, transform the nascent protein into its folded, active form, and provide crucial added genetic information well beyond that originating in the gene itself. The net outcome is that no single DNA gene is the sole source of a given protein's genetic information and therefore of the inherited...''
----------------
Well, and this is just scratching the surface of complexity.
What emerges between the nucleus and cytoplasm of the cell where the above quoted interactions take place is a vastly complex system where it is almost impossible to assign even a precedence of temporal ordering. As the article finally points out later on, DNA arose from out of a pre-existing cytoplasmic-like complex in evolutionary time, and therefore can not now claim absolute authority over it.
Carrol wonders, ``Ian, again, one of your more cryptic or laconic posts leaves me suspended in mid-air. I really don't know that much about Barry Commoner, for one thing, so I don't know how much sting there is in that tail of us mere mortals.''
There is plenty of intellectual sting, since it links up the noted central dogma on DNA to the public policy regulation and laws that created the bio-tech economy and then discredits both in a single blow.
But in a sense Commoner also fails to scream in well proportioned alarm at what I consider the more threatening potential consequences of genetically engineered food, agriculture, medicine, and public health. As the insane free market bio-tech industry continues absolutely unabated in its drive to control, commodify and exploit all the biology it surveys, it also exposes these loosely interdependent systems to catastrophic collapse, in almost perfect parallel to the dangers of monolithic crop production. One pest kills all.
In other words, the real problem with the preforced dependence on genetically engineered food, crops, medicine and reproduction isn't just its potential to introduce ecologically aberrant organisms or bio-active agents into the bio-sphere, but its increased focus of centralized corporate control over what was at one time a much more disorganized and independent patch work and perhaps more dynamically more stable(?) system of political, economic, social, and scientific development.
Oh, never mind.
Chuck Grimes