IT IS not often a new company emerges offering its customers eternal life. So when two graduates of London鈥檚 Royal College of Art came up with an idea for a permanent genetic memorial to a dead loved one, people listened. And their proposal is being taken seriously: last month a public agency awarded the pair 拢35,000 to develop it as a business.
The idea is to infuse the 鈥渂iological essence鈥� of a dead relative into the genome of an apple tree. Every cell of the tree would carry this kernel of grandma, say, which would be passed on to the tree鈥檚 progeny. The symbolism was not lost on the British press, which billed the idea as an 鈥渆nvironmentally friendly funeral鈥� and a 鈥渢ransgenic tombstone鈥� that would allow customers to 鈥渓ive on after their deaths in an ecologically friendly way鈥�.
It seems a curious reaction. These were the same newspapers that regularly publish hysterical stories about 鈥淔rankenstein foods鈥� and the evils of genetic modification. In this case, however, none of them questioned whether the trees would pose a risk to human health. Few of them delved deeper than asking whether eating an apple from a modified tree would be cannibalism.
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Yet this idea of a genetic memorial is not quite what it seems. The more you dig into the complex science, the more fragile it appears. It is questionable whether the final product would represent anything 鈥渉uman鈥� at all. And it raises all sorts of questions about how public money is awarded and how GM is sold to the public.
The original proposal, from artists Georg Tremmel and Shiho Fukuhara, was to insert a unique sequence of 鈥渏unk鈥� human DNA (one that did not code protein) into the tree鈥檚 genome. The pair have since abandoned this strategy, fearing ethical and safety objections. Instead, they plan to write a human genetic sequence within the sequence of an apple gene.
This is where things get complicated. The idea is to embed a coded version of a human DNA sequence into the DNA sequence of an apple gene without changing its length or the protein it spells out. This is possible because the genetic code consists of 64 three-letter words (or codons), but encodes only 20 amino acids. Hence most amino acids are signified by more than one codon (for example, GCT, GCG, GCC and GCA all code for alanine). By altering the codons in a gene, the team can write a 鈥渟ilent code鈥� within it.
The technique is borrowed from Joe Davis, a bio-artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Davis claims to have coded a 60-character fragment of a Greek text by Heraclitus into the white-eye gene of the fruit fly Drosophila. But the coding system he used is extremely convoluted, involving no less than eight coding steps.
Whether or not the company, which is called Biopresence, gets off the ground will depend initially on the UK regulatory authorities. The precise conditions Tremmel will have to meet are not publicly available. However, the body that awarded it the 拢35,000 grant 鈥� the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA), which distributes lottery cash to arts and science projects 鈥� says it will not hand over the money until the government鈥檚 Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE), the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and English Nature are confident the project will not threaten the environment.
Convincing them may be hard work. Jim Dunwell, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Reading who sits on ACRE, says the committee will have to consider every engineered tree separately. This will compel Biopresence to produce exhaustive test results for every order it receives. Even with a proposed price tag of 拢20,000 for each tree, this will surely be prohibitively expensive.
One thing that would help the project is some scientific credibility, something it currently lacks. The NESTA committee that decided to fund it did not include any scientists. It did consult an expert in the ethical and legal issues surrounding biotechnology, but NESTA was unable to tell us who that was.
Even if the project does get the green light, it will face what could be its most serious problem: whether customers will still buy it once they know the complexities involved. The question remains to what extent the altered apple gene sequence would represent human DNA. 鈥淗ow you relate this to a specific human I鈥檓 not sure,鈥� says Chris Leaver, head of plant sciences at the University of Oxford. He condemned the project as a waste of public funds.
Tremmel maintains that DNA is already an abstract representation of a person since it codes simply for protein and that he is merely adding another layer of abstraction. Maybe so, but for most people it will probably matter that while the genetic code shared by apples and humans is a natural product of evolution, Davis鈥檚 coding process is entirely man-made. At best, the link between grandma and his altered tree appears tenuous. Some might consider it close to non-existent.
If you are in search of a permanent genetic memorial to grandma, look closer to home. Her truly meaningful genetic legacy lies in you, your children and your grandchildren.