Magazine
Fishman And the Genome
Six (longish) years ago, I wrote an editorial on this page that my publisher won’t let me forget. It was called Gilgamesh and the Genome, and I’m pretty sure he continues to goof on me just because of the similarity of my name to that of the Sumerian king. The point I was trying to make in that editorial was that the decoding of the Gilgamesh poem and the decoding of the human genome revealed the same goal: living forever. At the time, I wrote:
Both of these sources, in a sense, address the same issue, albeit from opposite directions. Through the mapping of the human genome and the discoveries we shall make of the secrets of individual genes, we learn about the myriad individual components that create a gestalt of human life. Through gene therapy and other advances in biotechnology, we are told, man will someday overcome aging and possibly transcend death.
Through translating the story of Gilgamesh, we learn that man has always tried to circumvent death. The greatest king of his time (two-thirds divine, one-third man) travels to the limits of the underworld to learn how to overcome mortality. He learns that nothing is permanent. Upon returning to his kingdom of Uruk, all Gilgamesh can do is praise the strength of the city’s walls. Today, not one person in a million could identify Uruk on a map. Nor do those city walls stand. The first hero in literature faces the same limitations as a garbage man in the year 2000. Time passes and unmakes us all.
I tended to wax poetic in those days; sue me.* Why do I bring up my old material? Because I read a recent interview with Novartis executive Mark Fishman, M.D. in BusinessWeek, discussing the company’s biomedical research initiatives. It included the following exchange:
BW: You’ve said drug discovery needs a “new grammar.” What do you mean by that?
MF: The genome to date is like a list of all the words in the biological dictionary. We know the sequence of 22,000 or so genes, and this sequence predicts the proteins the genes encode. These are the words. But they lack definition. What do all these genes and proteins do, in health and in disease? Are these words reproducibly assembled in predictable arrays, or are they used, 22,000 by 22,000, in totally different ways in different cells at different times?
What struck me was this idea of a logos, language of life, with its protein alphabet, building a library in every cell. What
Dr. Fishman is saying, after all, is that we’ve already broken the code, but now we have to figure out what the plaintext means. And that passage sent me back to the year 2000 and Gilgamesh, when this magazine was just getting rolling and I was a mere Pharma pup.
At the time, I was operating under a “life extension” idea of what the Pharma industry was ultimately about. Not yet 30,
I had a romantic (or, more accurately, technocratic) delusion of what the Pharma industry is. Six years later, I understand a lot more about the baby steps of drug development, and plenty more about “lifestyle extension” as opposed to “life extension.”
I’m sure most people harbor a belief that someday we’ll conquer death through the right combination of drugs, devices and computers,** but I’m also sure that most of us would be happy if we could just get our cholesterol lower, or get our hair back, or quit smoking, or sleep better, or not feel our arthritis pain so much. Or all of the above.
Gil Roth
Editor
gil@rodpub.com
* Gestalt? What was I thinking?
** Personally, I’m betting that, before the end of my (expected) lifespan, we’ll be able to upload our consciousness into a device the size of an iPod. Of course, if you look through my iPod, you might think I’ve already achieved that goal.
