Daniel Kevles

Nothing in contemporary science seems to trouble the public more than genetic engineering. Despite the cloying sentimentality that Steven Spielberg has introduced into Jurassic Park, the film expresses the sharp scepticism about the benefits of manipulating DNA that forms the moral core of the novel by Michael Crichton on which it is based. In the novel, Ian Malcolm, the conscience of the tale, remarks as he lies dying from a raptor attack (in the film he doesn’t die; only villains die on Spielberg’s screen): ‘Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power.’ According to a recent poll, a substantial majority of Americans believe that the risks of genetic engineering outweigh the benefits.

In 1944, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who had earned a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the invention of quantum mechanics, published What is life?, a remarkable book in which he argued that vital processes must obey the laws of physics but could probably not be reduced to them. In micro-physics, order tended to give way to disorder; the behaviour of single atoms could be predicted only in statistical terms. In living organisms, the genes governing heredity and development seemed to consist of a particular arrangement of atoms. Yet, in essential respects, offspring resembled parents; order produced order. The apparent disparity between atomic and life-cycle events led Schrödinger to contend that a ‘new type of physical law’ – not a ‘super-physical’ but a ‘genuinely physical’ type, consistent with known physical laws – must prevail in living matter.’