03.02.2000

Genetic research

Patenting our health

The 20th century saw huge advances in technology which transformed the lives of working people in the developed countries. In the new century the focus of this process of change will shift from technology based on physics to biotechnology - the understanding and manipulation of living matter.

Genetically modified organisms are already on the market, and in a few decades the techniques which produced Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, in 1996 may revolutionise medicine by enabling replacements for failing or diseased organs or tissues to be grown in the laboratory from a patient's own cells and then transplanted into them.

The cornerstone of the new science is the Human Genome Project, a cooperative venture begun in 1990 and involving state and charity-funded laboratories in the US and Europe in research to identify and map the 100,000 or so human genes. These genes contain the inherited code for the proteins which make up our bodies and regulate its metabolic processes. The aim of the Human Genome Project is to identify the position of genes on our chromosomes, and for each gene to determine the exact sequence of its DNA nucleotide elements. The intention is to establish the role of each gene in our biological processes and the structure and function of the enzyme, hormone or other protein it may produce.

This knowledge is already used to develop diagnostic tests for a range of genetic abnormalities which give their carrier a higher than average chance of developing diseases, including blindness, heart disease, schizophrenia and a long and constantly growing list of cancers. This week the discovery was announced of a gene carried on the x-chromosome which, when inherited in a particular form, increases by 50 times the chance of developing testicular cancer, a type which can be treated very successfully if detected early. A programme of mass screening for the gene, to identify and alert susceptible men and focus regular testing for early signs of cancer on them, should in the long term be cheaper for the NHS, and more effective in spotting the cancer and enabling it to be cured, than attempting to regularly test all men for the disease itself.

In 1994 the University of Texas Health Center at San Antonio discovered a gene, now called BRCA1, linked to breast cancer. Women with a faulty version of this gene, in which the sequence of DNA bases is abnormal, have a higher than average risk of developing the disease. Some mutations in the gene produce an 80% chance of contracting breast cancer - five or six times the average. In 1995 scientists in Britain employed at the Sanger Centre and the Institute of Cancer Research identified another gene, BRCA2, mutations in which also caused an increased risk of breast cancer. Women with relatives who have suffered from breast cancer are now regularly tested to see if a defect in one of these genes, passed on from parent to child through the generations, may have caused the cancer. Many women who have found they carry a defective BRCA gene have chosen to have their healthy breasts removed to prevent the development of cancer in later life.

Genetic science can offer less drastic therapies for diseases caused by inherited gene defects. Cystic fibrosis is caused by a change in one nucleotide in a single gene. Sufferers are already treated by inhalation of aerosol sprays of genetically modified cold viruses containing copies of the normal form of the gene, which are introduced into their lung cells by the virus and alleviate the symptoms of the disease.

As with every technological advance since the first factories destroyed the livelihoods of home- based weavers during the industrial revolution, biotechnology is not without disadvantages for workers. Employers in the US are already starting to discriminate against employees and job applicants on the basis of their genetic make-up, and some health insurance companies insist on genetic testing and impose higher premiums on people with a genetic predisposition to disease. There is also the likelihood that genetic therapy and life-enhancing treatments based on biological science may be available only to the rich and privileged. However, as with earlier technologies, overall the advances in genetics have the potential to improve the lives of working people - given the active social factor of class struggle in its manifold forms. In our view it is a hopeless mistake to seek to halt scientific development, or to want to return society to one based on earlier types of technology. The goal of the working class should be to bring the new science and the procedures which are developed from it under democratic control, and ensure they are used to improve the health of all rather than to make profits for the few. The working class must certainly resist the privatisation of the genetic information carried in the cells of human beings.

The scientists involved in the Human Genome Project make all their findings freely available and pool their knowledge. However, the nature of capitalist business is that no practice or process will continue for long unless profit is derived from it directly or indirectly. The US corporation Celara has already leapt ahead of the Human Genome Project in the race to complete the mapping and sequencing of human genes. It claims to have completed 90% of the human genome and predicts it will have the whole sequence fully worked out by the end of next year. Its declared aim is to sell this information to other researchers.

A Salt Lake City firm, Myriad Genetics, has gone a stage further in turning human genetic material into a capitalist commodity. It has patented the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The legal ownership of these genes gives Myriad Genetics a monopoly on screening for the cancer-causing forms of the two genes, and, according to reports published last month in The Guardian (January 17), Myriad Genetics now plans to extend this monopoly to Europe. This threatens the work of 15 publicly funded British laboratories, which currently carry out the screening at half the cost of the Myriad Genetics method. In the US the result of the monopoly is that genetic screening is now only done at labs licensed by Myriad Genetics, which sets the price of the test.

According to The Guardian reports, the Wellcome trust, the charitable foundation which provides funds for the Sanger Centre, intends to challenge attempts to patent genes by companies such as Myriad genetics. But a European Union directive, which will become part of British law this year, accepts the principle that genes can be patented.

An important part of the working class fight against capitalism must include opposing the attempts by corporations like Myriad Genetics to make profits at the expense of workers' health from the ownership of information such as genetic sequences.