Governments, popes and presidents should not try to control the use of genetic knowledge, the man who began the DNA revolution said yesterday.
James Watson, who with Francis Crick in Cambridge, 50 years ago this month, deciphered the double helix of DNA, said he would let people choose the characteristics of their children if it could be done safely.
”We are the products of our genes. No one else is going to take care of us or give us rules for how to behave, except ourselves,” he told an international conference in Lyon, France.
”I am against society imposing rules on individuals for how they want to use genetic knowledge. Just let people decide what they want to do.”
Professor Watson, 75, still active in science and still characteristically provocative, argued for parental choice. They should decide whether or not to give birth to a child with Down’s syndrome – or, in future, one with enhanced genes, he said.
”Anything – a short child, a tall child, an aggressive child … We don’t know how. I’m for using genetics at the level of the individual. Nothing like what happened in Germany [under the Nazis], or when we sterilised people because they had mental diseases. It is best to let people try and do what they think is best. I wouldn’t want someone else to tell me what to do – as long as you are not hurting someone else.”
Since the launch of genetic modification, there have been alarms about enhancement of future babies. ”Enhancement means making better,” Prof Watson said. ”I’d have liked to have been born brighter. Our whole civilisation has been giving people the right to try and improve things. Occasionally you get very conservative governments who want to stop all improvement. I think it is human nature, the drive to make things better.”
He also thought that environmentalists were wrong on genetically modified food: ”They should be worried about that Chinese virus. That’s a real thing.”
Prof Watson, with Crick and Maurice Wilkins of King’s College London, won the 1962 Nobel prize for physiology and medicine, and was instrumental in launching the human genome project. Last night he closed a day of celebration by Nobel laureates of the DNA anniversary with forthright comments.
He said President George Bush’s ban on embryo stem cell research was extremely harmful, but he was less dogmatic on Europe’s ban on reproductive cloning, because the technology carried risks. As for multiple cloning, ”any woman who cloned herself would be creating a great deal of trouble for her daughter”.
Sir Paul Nurse, a British geneticist who won a Nobel prize in 2001, disagreed with Prof Watson’s libertarianism: ”I would rather see a great social and political debate rather than simply putting information out there and letting individuals decide.” – Guardian Unlimited Â