Cover, Our Transgenic Future
Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change is not a companion piece to As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, which I reviewed earlier this week. As Gods meticulously and rather dryly traces the history of genetic engineering and recounts the cultural and political responses to it. Rather, Our Transgenic Future takes a first-person, exciting, and highly informed gander at the scientific and ethical questions that genetic engineering presents. It does so by focusing on US Military-funded research that spliced the genetic material of two separate animal species.
The result was goat milk that contains spider silk protein that can be spun into a fiber. Spider silk has a tensile strength five times that of steel but it retains flexibility. Goat-produced spider silk, therefore, has potential commercial applications in fashion and in military wear. It is this “goats + spiders” transgenic partnership that fascinates author Lisa Jean Moore, the Sunni distinguished professor of sociology and gender studies at SUNY Purchase and that provides her with a lens through which to examine ethical questions about genetic engineering in general. In Our Transgenic Future, she writes in a self-reflective voice about that partnership and its implications. The effect for readers is as though she is bringing them along with her as she puzzles through information again and again at the very moment that she acquires it. She asks herself, What is the economic drive? What are the laboratory and farm processes? How do the goats fare? How about the spiders? What are the ethics of procreative commodification of a non-natural animal product? What are the risks to the individual species and to the world?
Moore claims that her ease with the tough stuff of reporting on trans-Ness (her term) results from aspects of her personal life and identity. She is a “white, cisgendered, queer but heterosexual” woman who bore her own children by artificial insemination and who is partnered with a younger, transgender man. Ok. Makes sense. Regardless of why, though, her narration is delicate, respectful, and wonder-filled — except for in the Preface and Introduction, which are both weighed down by political and sociological verbiage. I’ve read (and written) enough of that in my life not to want to swim to the top of any more of it. Dear readers, don’t let those sections put you off. The writing gets genuinely fun and eminently accessible once the chapters begin.
In four chapters plus a Conclusion (inventively titled “Knowing You’re a Goat”), readers tag along on Moore’s interviews and adventures. We are there, it seems, and there is a good place to be as she conducts fieldwork interviews in Florida at a spider lab and in Utah where the goats are raised. She interviews spider goat scientists and follows different teams at the Florida lab as they try to invent a variety of uses for the genetically engineered silk. She wonders about the possibility of mass-produced products and about the calamities that might ensue should the genetically altered goats escape into the wild from their temperature-controlled buildings. She even lets us in on a moment when she learned from her college-student daughter a bit of necessary biological science. Spider silk milk is fundamentally different from normal goat milk because of the presence of an extra protein. Morris wanted to understand why spider silk itself can’t easily be synthesized in a lab. Why bother with goats? Her daughter’s major is biology. Moore reached out to her by text and then copied and pasted the Q&A into the book.
“Lisa Jean Moore: Two questions: What is the relationship between DNA and protein? And why is it difficult to directly synthesize a protein from chemicals? Why do you need a biological system? Like a goat or E. coli?
“Grace Moore: DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which gets translated into proteins. So the protein- coding regions of DNA, when activated, get turned into proteins. The chemical synthesis, I am not as sure about, but I imagine it is because it is hard to do the translation step (from RNA to protein) without ribosomes, because as far as I know, no one has made ribosomes outside of a living organism. The ribosomes are the point at which nucleic acids are translated into amino acids.
“LJM: So the book I am reading says you need a cell to make proteins.
GM: Yes, all cells have ribosomes and protein folding is really complicated.”
First, how great is it that the author unashamedly made her need to learn some basic biological science so clear? How great is it that her daughter is so good at explaining? And how great is it that her readers get to learn this important bit of biology in the very way that the author learned? (Oh! Here’s a DO NOT PANIC note for readers whose eyes glaze over at the terms DNA and RNA: Going forward in life, you don’t need to remember all of the explanation you just read. Just grab ahold of the first sentence, remember the bit about ribosomes, and run like hell.)
I admire Moore’s honesty about her own biases and points of ignorance. I admire her sense of adventure. And I envy her ability to use words inventively. She describes her blended family and her own artificial insemination experience as “spliced parenting.” And, yes, as she says, we are all in some measure the number of words we can type a minute. (I used to easily break 100, but I do understand from my increasing number of typos that I am progressively failing as a person as I age.)
Lisa Jean Moore’s Our Transgenic Future is an entertaining, thoughtful inquiry into genetic engineering in general and all of the many ethical questions that it raises.
And, yes, it is here in time for Christmas.
Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change
By Lisa Jean Moore.
ISBN 978-1479814411
NYU Press
$30.00
