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BBC News Frontpage | Back to the Future |
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Matt Ridley, Science Writer  Listen |
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Q: What medical discoveries around the corner in the next century?
A: I think one of the most far reaching discoveries in the current century will be the discovery of the genes that cause us to age. Once we've been able to understand which genes those are, and we know they're there, there's no question about it, - we've found them in mice, we've found them in flies - once we've been able to understand them we'll be able to counteract them. Then we will slow down the ageing process dramatically. My great grandchildren might well live a very long time and might not look very old at the end of it. Q: What will the social and economic consequences of that be? A: The social and economic consequences of slow ageing and longevity would be dramatic. Careers would go on potentially for ever and there's no particular reason why people should retire. More than that, I think people would delay having children, because they already delay it pretty well as far as they can, in order to keep their options open in economic and mating terms. If you could quite happily have your first child in your fifties or sixties, then I think a lot of people would do that and that would have a very depressing effect on population growth, in fact population would start to fall very rapidly if that happened. Q: Have we more to hope for or to fear when it comes to health and disease? A: Well if I wanted to be pessimistic about infectious disease in the next century, I could make the argument that, a lot of viruses and other bugs have jumped into our species from animals, and there's good reason to think there are more to come. There are a lot of creatures which we've only just come into contact with at a concentrated level. Moreover, we're living in very crowded cities and we're communicating round the world, we're travelling very far, so the whole globe is now the germ pool as it were for the germs. It is very different from a century ago. But I personally think that we don't need to worry too much because I think we'll keep one step ahead of these diseases and because on the whole, most infectious diseases are getting less virulent, not more virulent. The reason for that is because the virulent ones tend to be the ones communicated by insects, not communicated directly. Directly communicated diseases don't like to lay low their victims, they actually want the victim to be pretty healthy so that he can spread the disease more. Q: But black death wiped out a third of the world and there are many who predict these kinds of things are endemic to civilisation. With the transmission of disease being so much more easy today are we are walking blind into the next century? A: I think its very unlikely that we're going to see half of humanity wiped out by a new plague, because new plagues essentially have to have insects or dirty water systems to carry them around, like cholera or like malaria or the black death, and we've cut off those routes of transmission for bugs. We're left with casual contact transmission and sexual transmission, neither of which can really sustain major lethal epidemics except in the very, very short term and in local conditions. Q: Just give me an indication of quite how dramatic medical changes might be by 2100? A: Somebody looking back from the end of the 21st century will be first of all amazed by how many things we didn't understand. We didn't understand what schizophrenia was caused by, we didn't really understand what heart disease was caused by, we thought it was caused by diet, we didn't really take into account other factors like infection or social pressures and so on. The other thing he will be surprised by is how many things were incurable. Just as we look back at 1900 and say what a lot of things were incurable then, he'll look back and say 'They really didn't have a cure for cancer, they really couldn't do anything about colds, I mean they took endless medicines for them, and also they went off and bought ridiculous quack medicines the whole time. Some of them alternative remedies, some of them not so alternative remedies, which just didn't work, but they fell for them nonetheless'. Q: What effect will our understanding of our own genetic makeup have on medicine? A: The main effect of our genetic understanding on medicine I think will be to individualise, the personalise medicine. At the moment, medicine treats the population, it doesn't really treat the individual, so it gives the same remedy for everybody and it says to everybody 'lower your cholesterol' for example. Now it turns out that that advice is good advice for some people and its actually bad advice for other people because they already have dangerously low cholesterol and they end up very depressed if their cholesterol goes down even further. In the future I think what you will do is you'll go to see your doctor and you'll have on a chip all your genes, and the doctor will literally say 'Ah, for you, with this, when you get this particular complaint, the best solution is this drug;'. For somebody else it might be a different drug. In that sense we'll all at last be treated as the individuals that we are and not as the statistical parts of a population that we seem to be. Q: How will we reproduce in the future? A: I think most of us will go on reproducing the normal way, but I do think that there will be an increasing number of people who will use in vitro reproduction. They will, for whatever reason, reproduce on the laboratory bench. The reason for that is partly because there's going to be an increase in infertility. We know that simply because we're already allowing infertile to breed and on the whole that kind of infertility is heritable, so its bound to increase as a proportion of the population. Moreover, people are going to, people like homosexuals who will want to have their own children, will probably use in vitro techniques as well. Possibly, in the future, people who are wanting to genetically improve or change their children will use in vitro techniques as well. Q: What other choices will rich people have about how to breed? A: By 2100 I think if you're rich enough and you can travel and you want to, you will be able to have your future children genetically modified. Whether that will be legal in most countries I don't know, but I think it will be technically feasible. It will be simple things at first like correcting short-sightedness and before that of course debilitating diseases that you will be able to avoid by genetic modification. That will be pretty uncontroversial. It will get much more controversial when people start doing cosmetic things, when people start trying to make their children more intelligent by genetic modification. The question is whether we'll consider that to be something that's up to them and that we should leave it to the individual, or whether its something that's up to society to take a view and indeed to legislate about. Q: Is cloning viable and if so what might its consequences be? A: I think one of the interesting things about cloning is that you could actually do it in secret. I mean you could actually produce a complete replica of yourself, with the right help from medical doctors and so on, and nobody would know that it wasn't just another baby that you'd had by normal means, because nobody knows what I looked like when I was a baby. By the time it is grown up to my age, it will of course look like me but then I won't look like that either, so I could go through my whole life bringing up my clone and pretending it was just my child and nobody would actually be any the wiser. As a result, I think the temptation for people to clone themselves reproductively, to actually go out and produce a clone, may one day in individual cases, be quite strong. Particularly, you know, for example, a famous Hollywood actress who, who wants to see a remake of the movie that she starred in 20 years ago, or something like that. The psychological effects on a clone of the parent's expectations that the child should behave in the way that they behaved might be very frightening. I think that's something we've got to be terribly concerned about. Q: What does cloning actually mean? A: The fundamental shift involved in cloning is to abandon the idea that there are two parents of each child. A clone literally has only one parent and its genetically identical to that parent, just as an identical twin is genetically identical to its twin. It happens already, I mean a lot of plants clone themselves and if you take a cutting from a plant, that is cloning the plant. Quite a lot of animals do it and some animals do it at some times of the year and not at others. There's a lizard in Arizona that only reproduces by cloning, so its not unknown in the animal kingdom for creatures to clone themselves, but it is unknown for a mammal like ourselves to do it, with the single exception of Dolly the sheep and her successors in the farm world. The problem is, how to reset the ageing clock when you clone an animal so that you don't start, as it were, with your biochemistry already at the age of your parent, so that you would age very much more rapidly. Q: Will there be a moral burden on the parents by 2100 in terms of pre-birth choices for their child? A: I think parents will come under more pressure perhaps to produce perfect children, if you like, and that could be unfortunate. Just as today parents, particularly in large cities, come under pressures to get the best schooling for their children, in a way its analogous to that. But the one thing I think that we misunderstood 100 years ago and therefore are probably misunderstanding again now, is the extent to which there is diversity in human beings and the extent to which individuals will want to do different things. For example: halfway through this century, people started thinking about in vitro fertilisation and what the effects would be of test tube babies. One of the things that they said was that the problem would be that people would rush out and try to have famous people's babies instead of their own babies. Lenin was mentioned as someone who everybody would want to have as the father of their child. Well of course it is exactly the other way around. The technology has been used to enable people who couldn't have children, have them. I think the instinct for us to act in our individual interest as opposed to try and do something for the good of society, which was the point of eugenics and all those other ideas at the beginning of the last century, will be much more important. But I think the one thing you should remember is never to trust someone like me about telling you what the year 2100 is going to be about. I haven't the foggiest. I mean I'm giving my guesses but they are no more than guesses and we should remember that an awful lot of people were wrong a hundred years ago. Q: What are you most looking forward to in the 21st century? A: What I'm most looking forward to I think is understanding the entire human genome. I think that's a fantastic intellectual advance on the part of our species really. It is wonderful that it is coming at the moment of the millennium. What I most fear I think about the future is that we haven't really done anything to improve human competence and human nature. The technology gets better and better but people don't get better and better and the potential for individuals to wreak havoc on their fellow members of the human race is still as great as ever. |
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