Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering

10 The Cow

Chapter 10 the Cow Organism or Bioreactor? The tall tree on the next page probably does not match your mental picture of a typical white oak (Quercus alba).The trunk appears disproportionately long and narrow and the crown is small compared to the trunk. Is this tree unhealthy? No. It is perfectly healthy, but it is shown out of context. Set in the middle of a forest, it would look like most of the other trees in a bottomland deciduous woodland in northeastern North America.You have to imagine this single tree surrounded on all sides by other trees of similar height with long trunks reaching skyward—mainly sugar maples, red maples, and red oaks. They have grown in concert with one another, perhaps out of an abandoned pasture, for about eighty to a hundred years. As they spread their crowns, they produced shade for one another, and the dominant growth direction was upward into the light-filled space above. The lower branches, which never grew to great size, died off in the increasingly shady environment of the upward -shooting trees. In this way, the long, branchless trunk developed, and we need to imagine the seemingly meager crown of the individual trees as part of the larger green canopy of the whole forest. The shorter tree is also a white oak, with a dramatically different form. This broad-crowned tree grew free-standing at the edge of a pasture . It had, as a young tree, no neighbors growing close by. As is typical for a solitary tree, the crown gradually spread out broadly in all directions , attaining a relatively spherical shape. In general, branches grow outward and ramify into the space of greater brightness surrounding them. The leaves and branches themselves create darkness so that the outward spreading is toward greater brightness.A tree is, in part, its own context (see also Holdrege 2005a). 112 • To Be an Organism Figure 10.1. White oak (Quercus alba). Tree growing in a forest (left), and a free-standing tree (right). (Drawing by Craig Holdrege) Context Organisms such as these two white oaks teach us that we begin to understand isolated facts only when we look at them in the light of a larger context. Indeed, facts appear isolated only because we have abstracted them from all their relationships and connections in order to focus more clearly and narrowly. In order to gain real understanding, however, we need to overcome this isolation, re-creating the context in which life gains its fullness. Although it may sound simple to restore context in order to gain understanding, it is not. Our contrary habits run deep. In science we are trained to seek the clear outlines of decisive facts held in sharp focus.We learn to look for underlying mechanisms—material causes—by excluding from view the ambiguities of any larger view. This approach is called reductionism, and it is taught, if not always by name, in schools and universities around the world. For example, in pursuing the physiological mechanisms that cause The Cow • 113 a tree’s trunk to grow long and narrow, we might study cell growth. This would lead us to cell metabolism. Finally, we may discover genes associated with cell proliferation or elongation. Such a study is perfectly justified and leads to detailed knowledge. But problems arise when we forget the limitations imposed upon our conclusions by the narrowness of our focus. Our answers are valid only within the boundaries of our chosen methods and perspectives.We have not, after all, explained the tree’s form when we determine some of the physiological parameters of cell growth. If we believe we have, then we have lost sight of the white oak growing in a bottomland forest community. Outside this context the physiological processes associated with elongation simply do not occur. Unfortunately, it is unlikely today that a scientist studying genes will know very much about the way trees grow. The requirements of specialization leave little time for cultivating the contextually rich knowledge of an organism in its different natural settings. The more we analyze, the more detailed, but also the more fragmented , our knowledge becomes. We run the danger of treating the organs , tissues, cells, genes, or other substances we investigate as if they were entities unto themselves. If we do this, then we may begin considering the organism to be an agglomeration of independent parts. It is only a...