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The Jedi knight of Date Common Thread John Sulston and Georgina Ferry Bantam? 17. 99, pp 310 On the walls of London's National Portrait Gallery hangs one particularly unusual work of art: rows of glistening transparent beads are spread out in a cloudy matrix and enclosed inside a silver frame. It is the only painting in the gallery that does not feature the face of its sitter. This is conceptual artist Marc Quinn's depiction of geneticist John Sulston, and is created from Sulston's own DNA (derived, it transpires, from semen helpfully provided by the sitter, and subsequently replicated in bacteria). Installed last year, it was the gallerys first non-representational portrait, though it is important for more reasons than that.
For a start, Sulston has done more than any other scientist to unravel the secrets of our DNA, the stuff of our genes and the blueprint of the human race. As head of the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, he led the UK arm of the massive international project that unravelled, in startlingly swift time, the three billion units of the DNA code that determine our intelligence, stature, temperament and vulnerability to disease. Using that code as a starting point, scientists are now unravelling how DNA defines us. A portrait made from the very code that defines John Sulston is therefore singularly appropriate. The anonymous nature of Sulston's portrait is also rather fitting for it would be hard to find a man who remains so utterly and beguilingly self-effacing. Not for him the Rolex watches, penthouse flats and lavish ostentation of the rest of the biotechnology industry, but a lifestyle of motorbike travel, until a crash nearly killed him, and social intercourse in the pubs of Cambridgeshire. (Indeed, such has been his love of the latter that he was once accused of staffing his &# 163; 15 million research centre with a disproportionately high number of barmaids.
Sulston claims he merely prefers practical competence to paper qualifications, though the explanation sounds thin. ) Sulston is, in short, an unusual fellow, and an impossible one not to like and admire, not least for his powerful defence of the publicly funded international Human Genome Project three years ago when it came under sustained and ferocious attacks from US biotech leaders who wanted to carve it up and turn it into their own multi-billion-dollar private enterprise. Had they succeeded, our own genes would have become their personal fiefdom. It was Sulston who argued, more effectively than any other scientist, that should our DNA be rigorously patented, as these companies planned, academics would have to pay fortunes in royalties just for the privilege of trying to achieve a new understanding of the human condition. Sulston's version of this near disaster forms the core of The Common Thread (written with, or more precisely, as told to journalist Georgina Ferry). And given the authors famed geniality, it makes surprisingly angry reading, with most venom being reserved for US entrepreneur Craig Venter, leader of big businesss onslaught on the genome. He quickly became known as the Darth Venter of genetics, which presumably makes Sulston its Ben Kenobi.
Yet Sulston only graduated to this role in the most unlikely manner. He was originally, of all things, a worm researcher and had led a pioneering project to unravel the relatively puny DNA sequences of the genome of the tiny nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans. (Genome is the collective name given to a creatures entire complement of DNA. ) By chance, it turned out to be the perfect credential when scientists began thinking of doing the same thing for humans, and were looking for a leader for this massive endeavour. Conceived by Nobel laureate Jim Watson, the Human Genome Project was to be biology's answer to the Apollo moon programme, and evolved into a grand transatlantic enterprise, backed by the US government and, in Britain, by the Sanger Centre with Sulston as head, and the Wellcome Trust as principal backer. Armed with the exact make-up of every human gene, scientists would be able to generate new medicines, dovetail drugs to suit every individual on Earth, unravel the complexities of the mind and understand our physiology as never before, it was argued. The programme was trundling along nicely, with hundreds of automated sequencers spewing out data 24 hours a day, seven days a week on both sides of the Atlantic. Then Venter backed by ABI, the very company that had made its fortune selling DNA equipment to public project scientists entered the ring in 1998, accusing project scientists of slackness and inefficiency.
He would complete the project within three years, as opposed to the scheduled six years, Venter announced. The projects researchers should simply stand aside, he informed them. It was like asking them to walk into the sea and drown, Watson later told Sulston. Venter wanted to own the whole genome the way Hitler wanted to own the world.
The trouble was that the projects US scientists, as government officials, were not allowed to fight back and criticise US industry even if these researchers felt big business was telling lies about them. So Sulston, as leader of the British project, became the reluctant champion of science for the people, and the exposer of businesss deliberate muzzling of the truth. The strength of the industrial lobby in Washington means no public servant can make statements that imply criticism of a commercial company, and of course, things are not greatly different in the UK, he points out. In the end, compromise was reached with Venter and Celera on one side, and Sulston and his US counterparts on the other, publishing their first draft of the human genome exactly a year ago. It was hailed as a triumph for both state science and private enterprise. Yet, as Sulston points out, Venters version was largely made up using the results of the public project.
He merely topped these up with some data of his own and then sold on the package to others. The public version was, of course, free. Only the penetrative, unremitting power of Celeras PR prevented this truth from being appreciated, Sulston claims. Thus the most ambitious attempt to understand human nature ended in bitter and uncompromising acrimony, which is perhaps not surprising given our species track record with other endeavours, from the Manhattan Project to the Moon race. Certainly, it is a grim tale, told in commendable straightforward no-frills style by Sulston and Ferry (though their depiction of how details of the human genome were finally revealed in The Observer by this reviewer could have done with some basic fact-checking. ) On a more positive note, The Common Thread also reveals how strong is Sulston's commitment to the idea that public responsibility is the greatest of all virtues. It is not the dogma of a sandal-wearing Lefty (as he is often depicted) but the deep belief of the archetypal English radical.
And, as with so many of his predecessors, from Paine to Cobbett, our nation is much the richer for his existence.
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Research essay sample on Human Genome Project Common Thread
