Hybrid embryos: concluding remarks

One last thing about hybrid embryos. Yeah, yeah, I know. Old news and all that. It takes me a while to get from shouting at the radio to writing up a post, OK? Anyway, it's about something that struck me while listening to Radio 4's Leading Edge on theiPlayer while half awake the other day. Leading edge is a pop-science programme: it's aimed at the masses, but it's supposed to have higher standards than news bulletins when it comes to explaining reality in detail. This particular gem of absurdity hadn't occurred to me before; perhaps I've become somewhat immune to the crazy misunderstanding of science in the news, but I really notice it when it comes to science programmes.

The crime in question? Being so obsessed about DNA. The problem with hybrid embryos, apparently, is that you'll be mixing human nuclear DNA with a tiny (really tiny) amount of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from other mammal species. On Leading Edge, the correspondent went on to allay our fears of such an unholy chemical congress by explaining that this has been done many times before with pairs of mammal species with a conspicuous lack of devastating explosions, zombie epidemics or eightlimbed monster mice. He went on to describe the mitochondrion for us (the "power pack", of course), the percentage of our DNA which it actually contains (point-twelvety), and the number of copies in which it found in the cell (17 1/2 billion, except on sundays or if you earn over 20% of your annual income from savings and investments).

What do you mean, I'm not taking this seriously? Oh, well, maybe I do think that perhaps the whole hybrid-embryo-in-the-media thing is just verging a little bit on the totallybatshit insane. Does anybody actually think that the religiously motivated opponents of science are worried about mtDNA ? Will explaining mitochondrial copy number make them feel better? OK, no, but what about all the non-partisan chaps who have heard these militant bishops on the radio telling us that hybrid embryos will be the worse thing that humanity has ever done, you ask? They will surely have concluded that there must be some genuine controversy involved, you add? Well, maybe.

But if that is the case, how is a discussion of DNA going to help anyone understand that the "controversy" is not scientific. What, indeed, does DNA have to do with anything? I could give you a vague introduction to what DNA has to do with hybrid embryos, and indeed what DNA does not have to do with hybrid embryos. But can the journalists who are covering this story? No. It would appear that they have all be on How To Talk About DNA In The Media 101. DNA is, you'll be interested to learn, the blueprint for the body; and by the sounds of it, DNA is pretty much the only thing in the cell that does anything at all. Oh, except for the mitochondria, obviously. But then, they contain their own DNA,init?

Confused accounts of biology aside, you can not solve a religiously motivated controversy by talking about science -- not in a week, anyway. The barking bishops have made it quite clear that they couldn't give a damn about the science. Facts mean nothing when the truth is divinely revealed. So you can discuss the hybrid embryo controversy or you can discuss the hybrid embryo science. Combining the two convinces nobody, but gives the impression that the controversy has some sort of scientific legitimacy. It doesn't.