2/14/2017 Billionaires say theyll end disease: evolution says otherwise | Aeon Ideas

Billionaires say theyll end disease:

evolution says otherwise
Jim Kozubek

In late 2016, Facebooks CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan pledged to
invest at least $3billion to cure, manage and prevent all disease through the creation of a
Biohub, a fount of non-prot innovation that would retain the exclusive right to
commercialise its inventions. Around the same time, Microsoft said it had plans to solve
cancer by 2026and Facebooks co-founder Sean Parker promised $250 million
<http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45821/title/Napster-Cofounder-
Launches-Cancer-Initiative/> (through his tax-exempt non-prot organisation, or 501c3) to
ght cancer while retaining the right to patents. e philanthropists Eli Broad and Ted
Stanley have contributed $1.4billion in private wealth to fund the Broad Institute research
centre (another 501c3, involved <http://www.nature.com/news/titanic-clash-over-crispr-
patents-turns-ugly-1.20631> in a high-stakes patent battle) and its associated Stanley
Center for Psychiatric Research, to open schizophrenias black box and hack the genetics
of psychiatry. Much like Andrew Carnegie and John DRockefeller of yesteryear, who
https://aeon.co/ideas/billionaires-say-theyll-end-disease-evolution-says-otherwise?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dbbe4ae016-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_20 1/3
2/14/2017 Billionaires say theyll end disease: evolution says otherwise | Aeon Ideas

donatedtheir wealth to build public libraries and establish foundations, todays Silicon
Valley billionaires seek a legacy, this time in the realm of health and disease.

But there is a disconnect. Comparing the body to a machine, complete with bugs to be xed
by means of gene modication tools such as Crispr-Cas9, conicts with Charles Darwins
theory of evolution: machines and computers do not evolve, but organisms do. Evolution
matters here because bits of code that compromise one function often enhance a second
function, or can be repurposed for a new function when the environment shifts. In
evolution, everything is grasping for its purpose. Parts that break down can become the
next best thing.

e element of evolutionary time can be lost on technologists who think that more data and
money will end disease. For Darwin, evolution of a species depended on natural selection of
the individual organism. Discovery of DNA later resulted in what became known as the
modern synthesis, establishing a unifying framework for the inuence of tiny things such
as genes and large things such as populations, all while preserving Darwins key principle
that selection hinged on the individual. By 1966, the evolutionary biologists Richard
Lewontin and John Hubby had proposed
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1211185/> the concept of balancing
selection, which suggests that rare versions of genes can stay in a population since they add
to genetic diversity. In fact, being heterogeneous, or having a single copy of a rarer form of a
gene, even one that is suboptimal or contributes to genetic risk, can often benet an
individual, thus remaining among a species in small frequencies.

e theoretical biologist Stuart Kauman argued that rare genetic variants are the basis of
innovation, and may remain in circulation, not by chance, but because they add a tness
benet to the system of at least a small number of organisms in a population. Evolution is
not just chance caught on a wing. It is not just a tinkering of the ad hoc, of bricolage, of
contraption. It is emergent order honoured and honed by selection, he wrote in e Origins
of Order (1993).

By contrast, a modern data scientist often assumes the reductionist position: that more data
and better analysis in biology will lead to problems solved. As the molecular biologist James
Watson said in 1989: We used to thinkthatour fatewas in ourstars,but now weknow that,
in large measure,our fateis in our genes. One reason we might favour this explanation is
that our brains are wired to seek answers, simple cause-eect relationships. But we have so
few drugs and solutions nearly two decades after sequencing the human genome. is
might have less to do with the quality of analysis and more to do with the biological
principles of evolution and time. Instead of thinking of humanity as a closed system, wed
do better to look through the open lens of ecology, in which the system itself is subject to
inuence by input from the outside. In even a single lifetime, our bodies take on an
https://aeon.co/ideas/billionaires-say-theyll-end-disease-evolution-says-otherwise?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dbbe4ae016-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_20 2/3
2/14/2017 Billionaires say theyll end disease: evolution says otherwise | Aeon Ideas

onslaught of genetic mutations, hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections rewire our

brains by the moment, and pathogens bombard us, penetrating the organs and blood-brain
barrier, and creating an ever-changing microbiome that enhances or erodes health.

In evolution, nothing comes for free.Stress can both trigger

<http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v18/n10/abs/nn.4109.html> creativity and
compound a raft of chronic maladies. Genetic variants that cause cystic brosis can protect
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352304215000239> against cholera,
and those that contribute to Tay-Sachs can protect
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352304215000239> against
tuberculosis. A variant in the gene PCSK9 can lower
<http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18224> your LDL cholesterol, but can increase
<http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18224> your risk for ischemic stroke. Gene transfer
can eectively treat diseases caused by a single errant gene, but risk variants that inuence
diseases wont go away because they often provide advantages as time goes on.

Even cancer is less a machine with cell circuits that go haywire than an evolving entity that
undergoes evolution and change in real time. Shapeshifting tricks that enablea cancer to
escape our treatment can be independent of changes to the permanent genetic code. One
of the reasons that the immunotherapeutic approach has been so practical is that it treats
cancer in terms of ecology. e cancer evolves, but the immune system, primed for that kind
of ght, can sometimes keep pace.

Darwin introduced a viewpoint that was radically unsettling: we dont progress to a more
perfect form, but adapt to local environments. If humans are machines, then we can simply
repair the broken parts. But if there is something more fundamental to the crisis of life than
mere mechanisms of biology, then risk, and an element of danger, will always be with us. I
will wager something even more: since genetic variation is the basis of innovation, and
diversity, making ourselves too perfect could mean our doom.

aeon.co 06 February, 2017

https://aeon.co/ideas/billionaires-say-theyll-end-disease-evolution-says-otherwise?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dbbe4ae016-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_20 3/3