James Watson Interview (page: 5 / 9) Discoverer of the DNA Molecule	Print Interview

You've gotten into controversy with the Japanese over the Genome Project.

James Watson: They have the money to do it, and everyone will benefit when it's done, so why not help get the job done, in sort of a selfless fashion? They find it very hard to change course. They're actually getting into it, but I make a great distinction between individual Japanese scientists -- I have great respect for them -- and cultural traditions. Some cultural traditions in our country are terrible, and some in Japan are terrible. I don't know why we have to be polite about the Japanese, they're not very polite about us. They go around bowing and giving presents, but that's just their culture, that doesn't mean they like us.

What finally brought it to the point where you said you wouldn't share the results with them, unless they contributed more?

James Watson: I think that's reality. We have two very different cultures. We're all products of the Judeo-Christian thing, where we help the underdog. You go to the Far East, they don't know that concept at all in China. They don't know what charity is. You help your family, that's it. You know, we wanted to make the heathens Christian, they don't care about the heathens. I think there's a real distinction culturally. I don't think we should be taken advantage of because we have this Judeo-Christian heritage.

What is your concern about the right to genetic privacy?

James Watson: Our concern is that, if people knew you were predisposed to die of Alzheimer's disease at an early age, no one would want to give you a job, or they wouldn't want to give you insurance. So you should also have the privacy of not knowing about your future if you don't want to know it. I think we should know the future only if you can do something about it. I'm not particularly anxious to know the future if I can't intervene. Through the Genome Project, I think we will be finding ways of intervening, which will make human life better. And the quality of life will be improved. But we've got to be careful as we go along.

Because there are threats to the individual?

James Watson: Yes. I think genetic knowledge has predictive power, and sometimes it's statistical. "You have an increased probability of coming down with cancer."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In the case of cystic fibrosis, if you have the gene, and you've got both copies bad, you're going to have the disease. You'll essentially know it soon after you're born. This knowledge, particularly the predictive part of it, should be tightly controlled and probably should only be obtained when you can do something with the knowledge. It shouldn't just be obtained because you want to see the future; it should be obtained because you want to make the future better.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

If an insurance company takes some of your blood to look at your cholesterol, also wanting to scan your genes to see if you're predisposed to any of 20 different genes, if you found any of them that looked like a predisposition, they could say, "I don't have to give you insurance. The law doesn't say I have to insure you. I'll find someone that looks healthier." There have been a few isolated cases of this already, but not enough to affect many people. But as the knowledge becomes more prevalent and the costs of the tests go down... We want the tests to go down because we don't want to drastically increase the cost of medical care, but you've got to be careful that the use of this knowledge is really thought through. It's got to be thought through not just in one summit occasion, but you're probably going to have to think through almost every different case, for the different consequences for the people. Sometimes we'll want to limit it, and in other cases it doesn't make any difference.

Deep down, we've got to have the principle that, as an individual, I control whether someone else looks at my DNA. It shouldn't be someone else's choice. There are complexities to it. For instance, you could get yourself tested and discover that you were at risk for a disease, and so you could go out and take out a large life insurance policy. That will protect your family. If you knew this, and your insurance company didn't, then that's penalizing the other people who get insurance, because the rates will have to go up. How you're going to handle all these cases is going to be complicated. We'll spend, this year, about five percent of the money of the Human Genome Program on what we call an ELSI program: ethical and legal and social issues that are coming from this knowledge. I think the amount we spend will increase because, as we get more knowledge, these ethical consequences are going to be greater. We've got to think of the people who may be damaged by this knowledge, not think of who might be benefited, but those who might be damaged, and really work to see that we don't create a paranoia among some people, that their innermost secrets are going to be revealed -- things other people would know that you don't even know about yourself. It's beginning to be very creepy, and we've go to prevent genetics from acquiring this creepy feeling.

Sort of a Big Brother feeling?

James Watson: Big Brother, yes. We've got to be very open. When I took the job in Washington I suddenly had to have a press conference and without thinking I said, "We're going to spend three percent of our money on ethics." Probably the wisest thing I've done over the past decade. I knew that was important, but I stated it without being forced to do it by someone else. You know, you're only concerned with science and don't care about the poor people who might become part of a genetic underclass. I've gone out of my way to emphasize that we've really got to worry that the genetic underclass exists. We don't create it, in the sense that some people are going to have the bad luck of inheriting genes like ones which will give you muscular dystrophy, just terrible things. We've got to somehow work to ameliorate the consequences.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We'll never be able to do away with all of the consequences of some bad genes, but we're going to work to minimize the effect. The real aim of our project, much of it, is to try and fight genetic diseases. In fighting them, we can't be perceived as making the life of those who suffer from them even worse.

If you knew you were predisposed to a certain disease, you might be able to alter your behavior.

James Watson: You certainly won't smoke. I think that's quite simple, but you don't want to create paranoia, where everyone knows that I'm predisposed, or he or she is predisposed, to 20 things, so you end up by doing nothing in your life. You can't get to that point of paralysis. As we acquire this knowledge, human beings really have to become better educated in what we call human biology genetics. Probably early in life, we've got to teach people about genes, and what they mean to human life, and what sort of facts you really know and what you don't know.

What are some of the practical applications of DNA?

James Watson: The ones we've mentioned all really improve the quality of human life. You're not going to be declared the father of a child if you're not the father. On the other hand, if you say you aren't the father and you are, you're going to be caught. If you're a rapist, the identity will be firmly established. These are good. There is also a danger. It could also reveal fingerprints that you'd been adopted, and you might not know you were adopted, and learning this would have a terrible effect on you. I think we've got to be very careful with these databases of fingerprints, that they're taken only when necessary. These fingerprints can eventually be reduced to a simple bar code, so it could be on your passport. I think this would be going too far. You could discover things about your parents, or who your parents really are, that there's no need to know and you shouldn't. There's going to be a real privacy case there about fingerprints. The legal people who are arguing about it see only the good things. I wouldn't want children in high school just doing a genetic fingerprint of their family .as a project. Those are the sort of things that I suspect. It's going to be done, and then you're going to see that it shouldn't be done. Finally, we'll probably get laws registered. Who can do it for a real reason? If there's no need to do it, why do it?

There has been a lot of discussion on the patenting of the human genes.

James Watson: I think it's somewhat like that. I think their intention in doing it was correct. They just wanted to be sure that someone else didn't patent it. But the concept is almost that someone else could own you. They found the gene mutation for cystic fibrosis at the University of Michigan. They applied for a patent, and I think they will license this patent so that many people can make medical tests of it. And that's fine. But I think they would have been distressed if someone else had had a patent that could have blocked them, because just randomly they were doing it. I think without a function it will create a lot of chaos, as well as make it look like the reason we're working on the Human Genome is greed. "You're just trying to work out the sequence so you can own it." I think you want to work out the sequence to find out more about ourselves.

In the next 20 years do you see our economy and the emphasis on knowledge moving in the direction of biotechnology?

James Watson: Very clearly. If you look at agriculture, the techniques of genetic manipulation are going to vastly speed up the sort of conventional plant breeding processes, or in the case of animal breeding. I think agriculture is going to be dominated by this new technology. I remember the old DuPont slogan we used to hear, "Better living through chemistry." They don't say it anymore, because the public perception is that all these chemicals are polluting the atmosphere. Of course, people have the same fear now about biotechnology, that we will change the ecology of the earth. We were in an era where much of human life was dominated by what the chemists did, starting with the dye chemists about a hundred years ago. We're going to have an era where, essentially, manipulating genes and producing products is going to be a dominant industrial thing. I think it's almost impossible not to believe this. I mean, there's so many things that you can do.

Now we're beginning to see the practical application of these various things.

James Watson: Yes. Look at the Mississippi Delta. Hopefully, the cotton plants which will be grown will be very different than the ones which had been subjected to so many sprayings from pesticides. We may actually be able to control insects better. There are people who say you'll never quite win, but you always have to try and make improvements. I think the utilization of gene technology may very well be the dominant feature of industry over the next century. There's no doubt we can do these things. I think we just have to ask who's going to do it.

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