Flavr of the Month

Daniel Kevles

• Perilous Knowledge: The Human Genome Project and its Implications by Tom Wilkie
  Faber, 195 pp, £14.99, May 1993, ISBN 0 571 16423 4
• The Language of the Genes: Biology, History and the Evolutionary Future by Steve Jones
  HarperCollins, 236 pp, £16.99, June 1993, ISBN 0 00 255020 2

Nothing in contemporary science seems to trouble the public more than genetic engineering. Despite the cloying sentimentality that Steven Spielberg has introduced into Jurassic Park, the film expresses the sharp scepticism about the benefits of manipulating DNA that forms the moral core of the novel by Michael Crichton on which it is based. In the novel, Ian Malcolm, the conscience of the tale, remarks as he lies dying from a raptor attack (in the film he doesn’t die; only villains die on Spielberg’s screen): ‘Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power.’ According to a recent poll, a substantial majority of Americans believe that the risks of genetic engineering outweigh the benefits.