ABSTRACT
In the year 2000, the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium completed its report, describing the genetic composition of the species Homo sapiens. Rather like the relation of a fictional character to those real people who have passed through its author’s life, the human genome was a composite extrapolated from information obtained from fifteen different members of the species. The scientists seemed to have intensified their labours in the last year of the century, submitting the completed book of life – comprising some three billion entries – well ahead of schedule, to coincide with the global festivities marking the human entry into the new millennium. Journalists could not resist the apocalyptic appeal. Even the Observer, a respectable broadsheet not normally enamoured of the sensationalist subheading, carried a banner across its front page on 11 February 2001: ‘Revealed: the secret of human behaviour’. Furthermore, and demonstrating just how far Western democracy had moved on from the elite science and shrouded mysteries of Bacon’s laboratories in that first scientific utopia, The New Atlantis [1627], the very next edition of Prospect magazine offered unfettered access to this blueprint of all human life. Piled neatly on the newsagents’ racks, alongside the bulky shrink-wrapped classical-music glossies, the heavy-metal magazines and the PC guides with their complimentary disks, every copy of Prospect also carried a free CD-ROM. This was a disk carrying the recipe for the human species. Like the voices of the long-dead divas and the up-and-coming rock starlets, the ‘code of life’ had now been digitally remastered and made available at the click of a mouse. Incapable of resisting the symbolism, I bought it. After a century that had witnessed the worst intra-species violence, tribal bloodshed, and political conflict in its entire history, maybe this latest scientific grammar of creation might spell out who we are and what are our purposes on this earth. Surveying the disk in its shiny plastic wallet and trying hard to resist the millennial hype, I thought about those famous words of Charles Darwin which had provided the conclusion to The Origin of Species some 150 years previously:
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and history.
