The Human Genome and the Human-altered Environment.

When the sequencing of the human genome was published in Science and Nature last winter, it was greeted by the mainstream media as an historic achievement. Much attention was given to what this could mean for medical intervention--for the eradication of many diseases and, ultimately, for the creation of taller, stronger, more long-lived humans who would never again be vulnerable to inherited afflictions. The mood of the moment was perhaps like that of 15th or 16th century explorers who had just discovered a new territory and were trying to assess the assets they were about to claim--the taller, stronger New World trees they could cut for ships' masts, or the shiploads of West African slaves or Aztec gold they could seize, or the exotic California firs or Florida egret plumes with which they could fill their holds.

History tells us that the thrall of discovery tended to blind such explorers to the long-term consequences of such plunder--or "resource extraction," as it would come to be called. Those who cut trees, whether for masts or for firewood, were probably quite unaware that they were contributing to a process that would eventually decimate half the world's forests. The Conquistadors who marched across Mexico with Cortez were probably unaware that the sneezes and skin sores they carried from Europe--to which they were themselves somewhat inured--would soon kill off a large portion of the indigenous population.

Over the millennia, it seems, human explorers have rarely understood, or in any case worried about, the range of impacts their intrusions would eventually have. Paleontologists tell us it was likely the human expansion over the planet, long before the beginning of recorded history, that wiped out the Pleistocene mammals--the woolly mammoths, scimitar cats, and Ice Age bison--that were common across North America, Europe, and Asia. Later, when the settling of farmers and herders led to the rise of cities and civilizations, it also brought about an extensive desertification of once forested land, and a progressive salinization and erosion of the once fertile soil.

There's no indication that early explorers or farmers--or, later, those economic adventurers who built the first cars, container ships, and computers--ever worried that the kind of global commerce and homogeneity they were bringing might eventually begin to erode not only the bio-logical diversity of the planet's other life, but the cultural diversity of the human species itself. That erosion has been documented in Payal Sampat's article starting on page 34 of this issue, which analyzes the high-stakes expansion of the dominant western culture and its effects on human languages and cultures worldwide.

In the coming exploration of the genome, some experts wonder whether some of the blindness of our earlier forays into the unknown is about to be repeated, with unknowable consequences--for human rights, privacy, progeny, and evolution itself. But the most immediate concern may be that in all the excitement over future medical breakthroughs, we may have lost sight of what the main threats to human health really are. Just how much sense does it make to put such enormous emphasis on curing diseases via biotechnology, when so little emphasis is given (by the global economy as a whole) to eliminating the environmental degradation which is by far the larger threat to human health? As the medical journal The Lancet noted in a February 17 editorial, "The major risk factors for human illness are not likely to be affected by the range of applications that knowledge of the human genome will bring forward. Malnutrition, poor water and sanitation systems, unsafe sex, tobacco, and alcohol make up the top five risk factors for human disability."

Beyond those, and to a large degree underlying them, there are the pervasive environmental threats of air pollution, falling water tables, and the rising stresses of climate change and biodiversity loss. If we are rapidly degrading the environment in which we evolved, and to which our genome is attuned, isn't our best investment in future health to first focus on saving that environment?

At WORLD WATCH, we have been wondering what the thoughts of some genetic scientists might be on these questions. We wanted to hear from someone who examines not just the moment of discovery and its promised rewards, but what the gold rush could mean over the long term. We thought of the evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, who has made a career of studying the integration of the planet's life as a whole, both across the kingdoms of life and across the eons of time. Her response is the essay that appears on the following two pages.