Africa in the Age of Biology

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Free download from www.hsrcpublishers.ac.za

AFRICA IN THE AGE OF BIOLOGY

Wilmot James

HSRC Publishers

SCI 5_Africa Biology 007

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Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme, Africa Human Genome Initiative Occasional Paper Series No. 3 Series Editor: Prof. Wilmot James, Executive Director: Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council Published by HSRC Publishers Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.hsrcpublishers.ac.za © 2004 Human Sciences Research Council First published 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. ISBN 0 7969 2073 7 Production by comPress Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Marketing and Distribution, PO Box 30370, Tokai, Cape Town, 7966, South Africa. Tel: +27 +21-701-4477 Fax: +27 +21-701-7302 email: [email protected] Distributed worldwide, except Africa, by Independent Publishers Group, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL 60610, USA. www.ipgbook.com To order, call toll-free: 1-800-888-4741 All other inquiries, Tel: +1 +312-337-0747 Fax: +1 +312-337-5985 email: [email protected]


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Preface The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has established an occasional paper series. The occasional papers are designed to be quick, convenient vehicles for making timely contributions to debates or for disseminating interim research findings, or they may be finished, publication-ready works. Authors invite comments and suggestions from readers. This paper was presented as the first annual John Gerhart Memorial Lecture at the conference of the Africa Genome Initiative held in Cairo from March 26 to 29, 2004. Considerations of Egyptian science and arts and their lasting impact on Africa are a fitting tribute to the roundedness of John Gerhart, himself an art collector of some note, a gifted story-teller, an enthusiastic birder, an economist by training and a scientist by inclination, a philanthropist of great empathy and skill, and a university president with vision and leadership. One of the last things John Gerhart did before he died was to visit that birder’s dream, the Galapagos Islands, once described in the title of a book as Evolution’s workshop (Larson 2001). It was here that Charles Darwin spent a great deal of time observing the behaviour of species of beings that had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in isolation and in the absence of natural predators. If you approached and touched those birds, they did not fly away. Like John Gerhart, they lacked the biochemistry of trepidation.


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Africa in the Age of Biology

Harvard University’s Richard Lewontin in his book Human diversity explains the meaning of what is known in the world of mathematics as Markovian properties operating as part of the dynamics of physical and natural systems. The properties were named after the St Petersburg University trained Russian mathematician who first studied them. Andrei Markov (n.d.) is best remembered for his study of sequences of random variables where the future state of a variable is determined by a current variable but is independent of the way in which the present state arose from its predecessors. So, for example, in demography, information about the size of, say, the Egyptian population in 2004 depends only on how many people were alive in 2003 and on the birth and death rates among the various age and sex cohorts, without having to know for purposes of prediction how they came to be so. Lewontin talks about Markovian properties in reference to an understanding of species evolution and particularly that of hominids, where all we need to know in our endeavour to predict our future biological trajectory is the present state of our genes. Our genes are, no doubt, as Lewontin put it, ‘a consequence of their history’, but he also says that ‘the genes currently possessed by the species are all that matters for its evolutionary future, irrespective of how it acquired those genes’ (Lewontin 1995: 147). Processes of biological evolution work like Markov’s mathematical chains, where memory is interesting but irrelevant; for there is, as Lewontin puts it, no ‘memory in biology, only in books’ (Lewontin 1995: 148). After the sequencing of the human genome, he might not be quite so categorical about the apparently ahistorical quality of genetic material, as molecular geneticists would certainly attribute ‘time’ to

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mutational events that are recorded there as junk or rubbish or the real thing; but then again this matters not, for it is about what one needs to know in order to predict the future. History, however one may wish to conceive of it, does not count in the case of Markovian properties. By contrast, cultural systems such as modes of production, counting systems, language, writing, buildings, art, and so on, all depend vitally on an accumulation of memory and well-functioning means of their transmission from generation to generation. Indeed, human progress in our styles of material and cultural manner of life relies on our ability to store and pass on memory. Here the library, the architectural store of written human memory, in books principally, or scrolls at that time more likely, played a central, indisputable role. And it is in illustrating the non-Markovian principle of much of our culturalhistorical processes that Lewontin talks about the libraries of Alexandria: ‘[T]he low state of European culture,’ he writes, ‘that continued long after the disintegration of Rome was in part a consequence of the immense loss from the fund of technical and humanistic knowledge that occurred at the final destruction of the libraries of Alexandria in 391.’ He then adds: ‘In contrast, Muslim culture grew at a prodigious rate beginning in the seventh century partly because the knowledge of classical times – knowledge then unavailable to the Latin and Greek scholars of Europe – was preserved in Arabic manuscripts’ (Lewontin 1995: 148). There is no question that the libraries of Alexandria were central to the city and the broad region including what today is the Middle-East, North Africa and much of Central and Western Europe; that they were not the only ones to exist but were part of a larger set of institutions to emerge from the concatenations of cultural, scholarly and other areas of learning and application of what were then the advanced societies of this part of the world. The agency of their ruin is not so certain, neither is it clear what it was in volume and substance that the libraries actually contained. The institution was created by Ptolemy I Soter first as a museum to which his son Ptolemy Philadelphus added a library. It was Julius Caesar, some claimed, who destroyed the library, others put the blame on Christian mobs, and yet others peddle the story that it was ‘[o]n the orders of Omar, Caliph of Baghdad, [that] the entire collection of books (except for the works of Aristotle) stored at the Library of Alexandria were removed and used as fuel to heat water for the city’s public baths’ (Libraries n.d. Accessed 2004a + 2004b). The evidence for what happened is thin, and James Hannan’s assessment, balanced it would seem, is that ‘Caesar was most probably responsible for the loss of the Royal 2


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Library’; a second library called the Serapeum ‘ceased to be when a Christian mob tore it down to the foundations under the leadership of the orthodox patriarch Theophilus after he had received word from the Emperor Theodosius’ (Libraries n.d. Accessed 2004b). The story about Arab destruction, by the Caliph of Baghdad, is a myth, without any evidence it would seem. And, of course, it is not the first time that Baghdad has been blamed for something it did not do or not blamed for what it did do. This paper starts with this story in part because some, if not most, of Aristotle’s work was housed in the Alexandria library; and this great figure, principally known for his philosophical scholarship, was also, as things tended to be then, one of the world’s first embryologists and developmental biologists. This same Aristotle, who collected and dissected embryos, and observed them closely, got the sex determination of human beings, we now know, terribly wrong. He claimed that the sex of a person was determined by the heat of the male partner during intercourse. The more heated the passion, the greater the probability of male offspring. He had counselled elderly men to conceive in the summer if they wished to have male heirs. Scott Gilbert in his text Developmental biology says about Aristotle that he ‘promulgated a very straightforward hypothesis of sex determination. Women were men whose development was arrested too early’ (Gilbert 2000: 523). With no sense at all of the microbiological, never mind the molecular biological, Aristotle and many since then had not a clue about the role of X and Y chromosomes, genetic heredity and the boost to human survival of sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction. Still, Aristotle was crucial in the history of biology and medicine for his painstaking observations, his method of pursuing some key questions about humanity and its evolution, and his unusual preoccupation with embryology, even though he could not recognise that sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction was nature’s masterful secret to human variety and survival. Egypt and its history are what lie at the heart of the early history of medical biology, engineering, physics, mathematics, architecture, art and literature. Although scholars today tend to think only of early Egyptians’ knowledge of the medical biology of mummification and their understanding of anatomy, the biochemistry of soft and hard tissue, decay and preservation, it is clear as Sameh Arab, Associate Professor of Cardiology at Alexandria University writes, that ‘[s]ome kind of medicine was already practiced in Egypt in the earliest prehistoric days’. He refers to the Kahung gynaecology papyrus dating to 1825 BC which ‘describes methods of diagnosing pregnancy and the sex of the fetus, toothache during pregnancy, diseases of women, as well as feminine drugs’ and to the Edwin Smith papyrus of 1600 BC, which can be 3


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described as a reference work on internal medicine, dealing as it does with ‘diseases of the eye, skin, extremities, gynecology and some surgical diseases’ (Arab n.d.). There is, of course, much more to be said about ancient Egyptian medicine and its link with modern biology, but that will have to be left for another time, another place.


... Among some recently found fossils left in the Still Bay area along South Africa’s southernmost coastline by what must have been ancestral Khoi or San people is a piece of decorated ochre, a form of iron ore. It is named in Afrikaans the blombos (flower-bush) ochre after the cave where the fossil discoveries were found. The name is an odd linguistic construction, being part of the vocabulary used to describe the indigenous fauna variety of the south-western Cape known as fynbos (fine-bush), to be found only there in all of its splendid variety and age. Christopher Henshilwood of the State University of New York, the archaeologist digging at this site, describes the red ochre as ‘measuring two and three inches long’, ‘first scraped and ground smooth to create flat surfaces’, and ‘then marked with cross hatches and lines to create a consistent complex geometric motif’(Highfield n.d.). What these markings mean is open to debate. One more cautious interpretation is that they are ‘tally marks’, ‘making them the oldest form of recorded counting ever found’ [Blombos Cave n.d.]. There is no independent source of proof as to what it is these ancestors were counting. It could have had something to do with the ordinary material habits of hunters and gatherers, and likely the tallying of animal kills. Or, perhaps, it related to trading with neighbours, or, more on a deeply existential level, observing the astronomical, with, as Georges Ifrah puts it so beautifully in the Universal history of numbers, a fascination with the regularity of ‘the phases of the moon, the eternal return of day and night, the cycle of the seasons’ or, we might add, given the context, the elliptical phases of the tides of great and marvellous oceans (Ifrah 2000: xvi). In the history of counting, the San and Khoi perhaps joined other human beings and, in observing that birds have two wings, animals four legs, and they ten fingers to their hands and ten toes to their feet, developed a numbering system using their fingers or toes as the base ten, the most common type of counting found among earlier peoples. Or perhaps they joined the Mayans, Aztecs, Celts and Basques who looked down at their feet and realised that their toes could be counted like fingers and chose the much more unusual arithmetic base of 20.

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Or again, perhaps, they joined the Sumerians and Babylonians, who chose for reasons unknown to us today a base of 60, which we use in respect of measuring time, with an hour being 60 minutes and a minute being 60 seconds; or the measurement of a circle into 360 degrees, each of 60 minutes divided into 60 seconds. Counting is, of course, the crucial first step; but it is not arithmetic and it certainly does not approach mathematics: the earliest known evidence for the arithmetic foundations of modern mathematics was found in Elam and Mesopotamia, Sumeria, Ancient Egypt, Crete, Greece and Rome. The mathematics of Ancient Egypt were quite obviously remarkable in their sophistication – proof of this are the remains of one of the great wonders of the world: the pyramids, which were engineered with extraordinary precision and on a scale that stretches the mind. And, in confirmation of the test of all construction tests, they still stand today, stripped perhaps, vandalised yes, looted certainly, but still there in all of their beauty and grace. Building the pyramids presumed expertise in stone cutting, engineering, mathematics and physics, not to mention understanding and mastering the basics of the physics of levers, navigation and water behaviour in moving these monstrous blocks of stone down the great river Nile. They are, in their practicality and complexity, stunning to us; looking as we do in admiration, backwards at history. This venture into biology and Africa is by way of counting and arithmetic then; because it is an interesting digression into the epistemological lineage of mathematics and, for reasons that will become clear, because there is a critical mathematical side to human genetics which also indicates where Africa stands in relation to modern biology today. The mass media has over the last few years been replete with news and feature stories about deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA and what it means and might mean for medicine, forensics, human origins and population ancestry. In part, the media has been celebrating because of the 50 years of progress that have passed since DNA was first discovered as having a double-helical architecture, and in part because of the sometimes over-dramatised advances in understanding and treating inherited disease regimes made possible by the sequencing of the human genome, the full repertoire of our biological instructions. Three billion base-pair nucleotides make up the human genome and these add up to an unknown number of genes in the region, it is said, of about 32 000. Nucleotide information is digital, in that two elements combine in a manner following the rule of A (for adenine) combining with T (for thymine) and G (for guanine) and with C (for cytosine), making up a chain – the full extent of which we have still to understand fully from the point of view of function and purpose; but we do, of course, know the 5


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exact sequence of all the genetic letters of the nucleotide alphabet. Indeed, genomes are encyclopaedias of genetic materials collected quite mechanically, not to prove a set of hypotheses but simply to document what there is – the hypotheses coming, as it were, later. And they now come thick and fast. Mathematics was required to count the DNA. Mathematical molecular biology, called bioinformatics, is required to make sense of the DNA, identify and discover the candidate genes that are the particular strings or chains of DNA and begin to ascertain their function. Described once by the South African born Nobel Laureate, Sydney Brenner, in typically sardonic and intellectually dismissive manner as a new brand of library science, bioinformatics is part of the essential equipment of every gene hunter. He or she is the person who can master the software and data management associated with millions and billions of bits of digitised information that add up to genes and combinations of genes that programme the various parts of the human body, its maintenance, the death of cells and eventually the demise of the entire organism. It is quite a business, made possible by the exponential growth of computerisation, and in particular the work of a person after whom the writer’s visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology is named, Gordon Moore. Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors that could be placed on a computer chip would double every 18 months, and so it has been for over 30 years. But people should not be misled by Sydney Brenner’s lovely, dolorous sense of humour: the information demands in genomics are staggering. The genome contains two kinds of digital information, one that encodes the protein and RNA ‘molecular machines of life’, and the other being the regulatory networks that specify how these genes are expressed in time, space and amplitude. DNA information is layered and arranged in a hierarchy, starting with the gene, then the RNA, then the protein, then the protein interactions, then the protein complexes, then the networks of protein complexes in a cell, then the tissues and organs, then the individual organism, followed by populations and the ecosystems in which they live. In this kind of discovery science, mastering such vast quantities of information to answer important questions is a skill and an art. And the hardware? The first automated sequencing machine took a day, in 1986, to sequence 250 of the three billion base pairs. It took the human genome project ten years to sequence the human genome, two years shorter than predicted; and the private company Celera with its so-called shotgun approach took less than the public consortium’s ten, using a warehouse of computers to do so. ‘With single-DNAmolecule sequencing, we foresee a time’ say the inventors of the first sequencing machine ‘when the entire genome of an individual could be sequenced in a single 6


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day at a cost of less than $10 000 (compared to the $50 million it would cost today)’ (Hood & Galas 2003: 131). The full human genome is publicly available, and if one has the hardware and Internet connection, for free, anyone can download that part of the genome that would be of interest to them. We have to thank, among others, the Wellcome Trust for that. And so, in Africa, there are institutions that specialise in bioinformatics, although it is not known at what level of information scientists are working in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. An African Bioinformatics Network (Abionet) has as affiliated institutions the University of Benin, the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape, the University of Pretoria, the University of Mali and several other institutions. Abionet’s mission summarises the abiding passion of geneticists working in Africa today: The purpose of the network is to enable African scientists to unlock the scientific potential of recent advances in genomics in order to accelerate medical advances against infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS that are still killing so many in Africa. The recent availability of genomic data from a wide range of organisms, including common African pathogens, presents new challenges for biologists, sociologists, mathematicians and computer scientists alike. (African Bioinformatics Network n.d.)

The human host to disease has been sequenced, as have the genomes of the pathogens. It is the interaction between host and pathogen which has to be understood properly, and remedies and interventions developed. Last year, about a fifth of the inaugural conference of the Africa Genome Initiative, entitled the ‘Human Genome and Africa’, was devoted to what is called pathogen genomics. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, it was indeed a mini-conference in the bigger event. Currently, scientists are looking carefully at the ethical and legal considerations in drug and vaccine discovery and will probably focus on drugs and vaccines for effective public health care responses to Africa’s three killer diseases at the conference in 2005, likely to be held in Kenya. At the inaugural conference, virologist and Nobel Laureate David Baltimore argued that current HIV vaccine development is unlikely to be successful because of HIV’s instability and rapid evolutionary mutation. He put forward the proposition that an immunity protein requires engineering and has allocated a company to work on the idea. 7


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Mathew Berriman of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, whose area of expertise is the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, said genomics do advance research but that ‘in the next five years, it is unlikely we will see any benefits. Over the next 10 years, some knowledge will seep through, and aid understanding of the mechanisms of drug resistance. But the most significant impacts will be in the 20 year timescale, with drugs and vaccines for treating the disease’ (Genome News, Supplement to the Mail & Guardian 6 June 2003, p. 4). Then there is also the story of tuberculosis, as told by Stewart Cole of the Institute Pasteur. Tuberculosis has a dreadful synergy with HIV and is largely a social disease as a consequence of poverty and poor housing; on the bacterial and viral side, it is also now better understood as a result of genomics. ‘Genetic mapping,’ he says ‘suggested the human and animal strains of tuberculosis once shared a progenitor, but evolved independently’(Genome News, Supplement to the Mail & Guardian 6 June 2003, p. 4). A remedy, though, is not in sight. It may be, in the North, that one result will be the emergence of personalised medicine, of having drugs and interventions designed specifically for the unique modality of one person’s disease profile; because having so ‘many polymorphisms associated with disease susceptibility brought DNA diagnosis to medicine and opened the pathway to truly predictive medicine, where the risks of disease can be identified in advance of symptoms’ (Hood & Galas 2003: 131). We in the South, as elsewhere, need to work hard at figuring out how to make genomics relevant to clinical practice in private and public medicine, so that it does not remain with the privileged and elite few. In the South, it is also about bringing killer diseases under control. That is a job on its own, requiring extraordinary investment that simply is not there or easily forthcoming. In the, I believe, undervalued report Genomics and world health, the authors say the following in terms of what to expect from the private sector: ‘The private sector does not invest in research aimed at diagnostics or therapeutics for diseases that are predominant in developing countries because the populations most likely to need them do not have purchasing power. ... In 1997, for example, it was estimated that low and medium income countries accounted for only 20% of the global pharmaceutical market, even though they made up over 80% of the world’s population.’ They go on to add that although public research funding has considerations other than profit maximisation, it is nevertheless sadly the case that ‘pneumonia, diarrhea, tuberculosis and malaria, which together account for more than 20% of the disease burden of the world, receive less than 1% of the total public and private funds devoted to health research. In 1998, out of the US$70 billion global spending on health research, only US$300 million 8


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was directed to vaccines for HIV/AIDS and US$100 million to malaria research’ (Weatherall, Brock & Chee 2002: 17–18). A five to 20-year time span for results from the revolution in genomic and postgenomic biomedicine to make a real difference in Africa does not sound right and is surely unacceptable; it is a reflection of the irrationality of a global system that has to be redirected by focused African-sourced investments, by governments, in creating properly functioning public health systems built in part around ‘thinking institutions’, and the university-private sector partnerships in genomic research and development. It is indeed a pleasure to note the creation of the Institute for Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town and the new Biosciences Facility that has been established in Kenya. Also, of course, Ain Shams University’s centre for bio-engineering, which is another emerging centre of excellence along these lines. Development here is wholly our responsibility, for many of us have allowed the little we had during colonialism to collapse, with of course some notable exceptions. And it is also our responsibility to invest generously in African entrepreneurs in the biomedical and biotechnological arenas by providing the avenues for venture capital and technical expertise; all this helped along by northern hemisphere corporate partnerships and, when necessary, aid. NEPAD has already moved into this area, which is welcome, but the scale of the challenge needs to be matched by the scale of the necessary investment.

... Marketing information for a new diet tablet called Hoodia gives the nutritional content as follows (as required by United States law): Chromium 100 mg Calcium pyruvate 48 mg Hoodia gordonii 20: 150 mg Citrus pectin 40 mg Grapefruit seed extract 30 mg Prune 30 mg All this is caffeine free, ephedra free and stimulant free – ‘a diet pill unlike any other’, the advertisement says; 90 tablets for just $29,95! Hoodia, it turns out, is a natural appetite suppressant used in ‘[t]he harsh environments in which the Kung! Bushmen have lived for thousands of years’; here where hunters are on the hunt sometimes for days, Hoodia ‘suppresses hunger’ and meets considerable energy requirements. ‘The San call the cactus !khoba and have 9


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been chewing on it for thousands of years to stave off hunger and thirst during long hunting trips in their parched Kalahari Desert home,’ writes Leon Marshall for National Geographic News (Marshall 2003). Expert natural botanists, the Kung! Bushmen can readily identify more than 300 different types of plants with different properties, of which Hoodia is a key but hardly the only such plant, leaving the perhaps naive or indifferent Kung! Bushmen open to exploitation by modern pharmaceutical companies, seeking a profit by turning natural remedies into commercial, biomedical interventions. And, indeed, pharmaceutical companies have begun to, as they put it, ‘bio-prospect’ in extreme and harsh environments that ‘could make possible even more fantastic scientific and commercial feats’. Billions of US dollars are at stake, says Elizabeth Weise of USA Today with a sense of the journalistically spectacular: ‘Possible discoveries include detergents made from enzymes that work much better than existing products in cold water; color pigments in cloth that don’t degrade in heat, made from microbes that thrive in hellishly hot water; and antibiotics strong enough to kill off even the most drug-resistant bugs that pop up in our hospitals’ (Weise 2004: 9D). Some of these organisms living in extreme places fall under no single national authority, such as those in Antarctica, the deep sea-bed or even, who knows, the moon and Mars; by no means a far-fetched idea, given the recent landing of scientifically loaded rovers on the planet nearest to ours. So, for example, ‘activities on the world’s most inhospitable continent [Antarctica] are overseen by 54 countries that are party to the Antarctic Treaty System’. As bio-prospecting does not fall under this treaty, the scientific advisors to the United Nations recently presented a report outlining more comprehensive and inclusive international agreements to include protection against what are called bio-prospecting and bio-piracy. In the instance of Hoodia, an interesting model arose, though the jury is still out on whether it is working or not: the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), in whose laboratories P57 was identified as Hoodia gordonii, will pay a representative body of the San eight per cent of milestone payments made by its licensee, the United Kingdom pharmaceutical company Phytopharm, during the drug’s clinical development. This payment came to more than $1million. But the biggest revenues would derive from the agreed six per cent in royalties paid to the San if and when the drug is marketed by Pfizer, which in turn has been licensed by Phytopharm. National Geographic News remarks that ‘given the international demand for obesity drugs, the market for P57 could run to billions of dollars’. Unorganised, poor, marginalised, abused, and lurching towards extinction, these oldest of ancient peoples bear genetic materials that are of the greatest depth and 10


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most diverse historically, likely the ancestors to all of us. To them, Hoodia may bring some fortune, some salvation. It has invited organisational structures and a leadership that were not there before, at least not with the same clarity of purpose, to receive and distribute funds to the San community, entering thereby the domain of politics; for who is the San community, and on what basis and on whose terms do those who distribute scarce resources distribute them, especially in a community that is so lacking in even the most elementary of services? And so the South African San Council emerged in 2001 to represent some San tribes, as did a Trust, whose purpose it is ‘to use income received from the CSIR for general upliftment, development and training of the San community approved by the Board of Trustees’. This Board consists of seven individuals drawn from the ranks of the San, NGOs and the South African Government. Human rights lawyers and those with modern professional skills who could help represent the interests of minority and indigenous communities at local, regional and world bodies came forth to assist; here the South African San Institute (SASI) has played a particularly beneficial role. The legal issue, one that pertains worldwide including Africa, concerns the role of patents in respect of biological and botanical knowledge. Recently the United Nations expressed its concern over bio-prospecting in Antarctica by pharmaceutical companies in search of unique organisms that can be used for commercial purposes. The bio-prospectors, who speak of the last frontiers, search in what are known as hydrothermal events: the deep sea-bed, the water column of the high seas and polar ice caps. The United Nations University, based in Tokyo, recently published a report recommending a range of rules to regulate bio-prospecting. ‘Isolating and extracting the substances that allow organisms to survive in one of the earth’s harshest environments could lead to new cancer treatment drugs, antibiotics and industrial compounds,’ the report says. One valuable substance is glyco-proteins, which function as antifreeze in some of the fish there and prevent them, obviously, from freezing to death. If isolated and produced, antifreeze substances could be used for ‘raising the freeze tolerance of commercial plants, improving farm fish production in cold climates and extending the shelf life of frozen foods’ (Stoddard n.d.). The report sums up the difficulties: ‘Companies are concerned because there is no title in these resources ... ownership is undefined. They can spend millions developing a product with questions remaining about ownership,’ said one of the co-authors of the report, Sam Johnston. On the other hand, scientists’ concerns are that the ‘commercial nature of this will take away from the transparency and cooperation which is the hallmark of Antarctic research,’ Johnston reportedly added. The Convention on 11


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Biological Diversity, which emanated from the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, a model of its kind in regulating bio-prospecting on paper, simply had not worked, with the result that a country like Brazil, with its equatorial forests, felt pressed to close its national borders and prohibit any of its biological materials from leaving. Of course, the search to find within nature answers to at some times difficult and at other times ephemeral problems of humankind opens up ethical and legal frontiers that involve the disciplines that worry about these things: law, philosophy, ethics and, as it turns out, anthropology and sociology. A current research theme concerns the ethical and legal issues involved in drug and vaccine discovery, the idea being to chart the terrain for Africa in anticipation of having such interventions to deal with, given the continent’s substantial disease burden. Rules have to be defined according to which African populations can be used as subjects to discover the genetic basis of some inherited (and acquired) diseases, to test vaccines and drugs in development, and to start making clear sense of what can be done to start resisting that poor precedent and bad habit set in the United States of patenting everything that moves, including various bits of human genome sequence. At the same time, though, one obviously understands the need for companies to protect, justify and recoup their considerable investments. But many drugs that can make a huge difference to the health of African populations are not covered by patent law. At the 2003 conference of the Africa Genome Initiative, Gordon Dougan of Imperial College’s Centre for Molecular Microbiology called on African countries to take advantage of new genomic technology and develop their own drugs, and mentioned India and Cuba in particular in this regard. Technology associated with genome sequencing has made the process of drug and (some) vaccine development much simpler. Dougan said that ‘the development of vaccines in developing countries had fallen back in the last 20 years and was now concentrated in the hands of four major multinational companies’. Generic vaccines, Gordon added, ‘could be made by anybody’ and ‘Africa should also start developing vaccines to immunize its population against diseases which are prevalent in this region’ (Daniels 2003: 6). A senior African scientist, who is also a member of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), light-heartedly observed that, from the point of view of manufacturing some generic drugs and vaccines, it would be like ‘brewing beer’, and without patents to worry about, quite straightforward. Therefore, what Africa needs are entrepreneurs in this field and some venture capital to get them going. By no means a small point, as Africa lacks entrepreneurs in the biotechnological, medical and pharmaceutical areas. It is not enough to have the science and technology; entrepreneurs are crucial for development and success. 12


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Then there is the question of genetically modified foods. Attention was focused on this issue by Zambia’s refusal to accept genetically modified crops as aid because, said Drinah Nyirenda, a former University of Zambia dean and executive director of the Zambian Programme Against Malnutrition, of the country’s ‘concerns about the effect that genetically modified food would have on the environment and maintaining the diversity of local crops’ (Nyirenda 2003). For Africa as a whole, the story is more complicated. South Africa is the only country on the continent with commercialised, genetically modified crops. The director of Genetic Resources at the Department of Agriculture, Dr Shadrack Moephuli, is quoted as being an upbeat supporter of what genetically modified crops might bring to the country’s vast population of poor people: ‘South Africa’s impoverished rural people would be the main beneficiaries of controversial genetically modified organism technology.’ He added: ‘At the moment trials are ongoing with maize and cotton. These are being done with small scale subsistence farmers in rural areas. These are the kinds of areas where it is important to realize the benefits of food security that can come with crops that are resistant to pests’ (Seccombe 2000). More than mere experiment, South Africa had 163 000 hectares of genetically modified yellow maize and a further 18 000 hectares of genetically modified cotton in the 1999 to 2000 season. Still, South Africa is a signatory to the BioSafety Protocol, and its openness towards commercialised, genetically modified crops might bring it into conflict with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) whose members differ in their stance. Malawi, Namibia and Zimbabwe, for example, do not accept genetically modified crops unless they are milled first; and only the latter country is conducting research on the commercial production of various genetically modified agricultural products. The irony of having some African countries, which in the past could feed their people, now turning back genetically modified seeds or crops is only made less painful by what is described as the aggressively self-interested commercial stance of the United States in its search for markets in the European Union, having secondary consequences for the much smaller and probably less important markets of Africa. Referring to the US challenge to the EU at the World Trade Organization, Amadou Kanoute, the Africa Director of Consumers International, said that the United States lawsuit against the European Union to ease restrictions and standards ‘will boomerang against the United States because so many countries are in the process of developing regulatory systems for genetic modification’. In fairly typical and not altogether inaccurately a manner, Kanoute said that he believes the Bush administration’s main goal in launching the WTO case is not concern about Africa food production and 13


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hunger, but the export of US corn to the $300 million European market (Kanoute 2003). While the big boys fight it out then, African countries are keen to adopt what is known as bio-safety measures, in protocols globally and legislation nationally. But this clamour to regulate hides an alarming lack of capacity to discriminate between which genetically modified crops are genuinely harmful to people, biodiversity and the environment, and in what measure, and which are not, by many governments lacking expertise in modern agriculture and food production in the era of molecular biology and genomes. Africa could certainly do with a continental resource to provide good advice to governments in the area of genetically modified foods, backed up by good science. Possibly, it is a continental resource that could be provided by the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) too; and there are also other global agencies like the World Health Organization. People should not be fooled by the claim that genetically modified foods are the answer to problems of poverty, malnourishment and development in Africa. That would be to misdiagnose the problem, poorly understand the motives of commercial bio-agriculture and naively trust governments of the North about the altruistic benefits of accepting their exports. George Monbiot writes as follows in the Guardian of 9 March 2004: GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes that give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can’t be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seeds companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market. No one in her right mind would welcome this.

He goes on to talk about how some genetically modified crops do have higher yields and how some too can be changed to have more nutrients, ‘though both these developments can be over hyped’ and require rigorous scrutiny before such crops are imported and used. Monbiot mentions the project to engineer sweet potato to resist viruses in Kenya as having collapsed, despite $6 million in funding from Monsanto, The World Bank and the United States, whereas across the border, in Uganda, a far cheaper and conventional ‘breeding programme has doubled sweet potato yields’. It turns out, too, that the other Kenya project to engineer vitamin-enriched rice also collapsed before starting because it appears as if ‘malnourished people appear not to be able to absorb Vitamin A in this form’ (Monbiot 2004: 23). 14


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Still, Monbiot overstates his point; what we simply need is the capacity for rational, scientific, common sense assessments of what is good for us and what is not; and while we are busy doing that, we should not wreck but build and rebuild the agricultural economies that in the past fed Africa’s people. For biotechnology in food production is neither the panacea nor the evil imperial plot it is made out to be; everything depends, as always, on what we make of and do with the biotechnology, which in turn depends on what we make of our agricultural economies.

... Public-private partnerships in the biotechnology era between knowledge centres such as universities or institutes and (especially) pharmaceutical companies can be as lucrative as they are challenging in the governance area: a recent controversy at the University of California at Berkeley over whether a corporate funder of a major science project should have a seat on the governing body overseeing the work indicates that the issue is germane everywhere and not only in Africa, where there is a standing accusation from certain quarters that African institutions are mere platforms for the interests of the multinational pharmaceutical companies and donor country interests seeking less restrictive places to bio-prospect, test and market new biotechnology products. As a test of the integrity of what it is we do, we should ask how biotechnological research in Africa feeds back into the teaching of modern biology at its universities, the training of the next generation of research scientists, and the establishment and maintenance of quality research laboratories – a rare commodity on this continent. We should return to the well-tried and tested partnership between research and teaching, so valued in university life and so central to the evolution of new ideas. There is nothing so important to keeping one’s balance as having to conduct research and to teach the younger generation – to test hypotheses in the laboratory and in the classroom with young active minds; and the central question is how well both are done in Africa in the various areas of biology that have been remade and reorganised by the rapid development of genetics. Certainly none of the disciplines and subdisciplines including anatomy, botany, ecology, embryology, histology, immunology, medicine, mycology, neuroscience, pathology, pharmacology, physiology, systematics, veterinary medicine, virology and both vertebrate and invertebrate zoology have been untouched by the extraordinary advances in molecular and cell biology, biophysics, biochemistry and genetics. These are breathtakingly represented by the human genome project, one of the

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great accomplishments built on the cumulative advances in biology over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Although we might have an idea derived from anecdotal personal experience, no systematic assessment of what is taught today at university level across Africa in the biological and life sciences has emerged. It is a challenge for bodies like the academies of sciences to see what can be done about this hiatus, for we need to know in order to monitor progress and to encourage and support what is already being done. A significant grant ought to be made to the association of academies of science to assess the quality, scale and depth of the teaching of modern biology at all African universities. A disturbing trend is that organisations that are making a name for themselves in this area are increasingly uninvolved in the teaching arena, and indeed see it as a burden, which means the benefits of new knowledge remain locked up in the corporation or government department or in the narrow halls of the institute. What is the use of that for future generations, and how disturbing it is for the vocation of education to be reduced in such a manner? The success of serious biological science in Singapore, says Sydney Brenner, was not simply the investment from government, which was indeed generous, but having a critical mass of scientists, postdoctoral students and university departments to carry the initiative forward with their expertise and energy – and look at the results they achieved. It is, from the point of view of research, obviously the case that many scientists in Africa do ongoing research of great importance, and judging by the work done at the 2004 Cairo, the 2003 Spier and other discipline-based conferences that happen all the time, we are not a complacent community. It is, though, also quite striking, if not altogether unsurprising, that African or African-trained scientists who receive what is regarded as the pinnacle of global recognition by way of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physiology and Medicine invite such recognition by virtue of work done at research laboratories at universities or institutes in the North, and specifically in the United States and United Kingdom. In these countries there are abundant resources, a critical mass of scholars, well-provisioned laboratories, and a working and defined research culture. But it is also true that the Nobel Laureates from Africa completed their basic university training, almost without exception, in their home countries; there is as a result nothing here to be ashamed of, although there is a great deal concerning current quality in some quarters to worry about. It is true for the Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail, now at the California Institute of Technology, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 for his study of the transition states of chemical reactions using what is known as femtosecond spectroscopy. Zewail started what Bengt Norden in his Nobel Prize address described 16


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as a new field of femtochemistry, which is ‘using the fastest camera in the world’, a method of capturing how a ‘molecule passes the transition state as fast as the atoms in the molecule move’. ‘Zewail’s use of the fast laser technique can be likened to Galileo’s telescope’, no small compliment in the history of science (Norden 2002:253). It is true for the South African born Sydney Brenner, who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2002, shared between three scientists for their discoveries of the regime of genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death of a completely sequenced and biologically fully described everyday garden worm that goes by the unpronounceable (at least the first part of it) name of Caenorhabditis elegans. At the inaugural Africa Genome Initiative meetings in Stellenbosch last year, Brenner described what he would like to do in biology for the human genome, which would be to collect what he calls ‘humanity’s genes’, much as he did with C. elegans, which was to provide a full biological description of what every part of the organism does down to its finest detail. It is true for Sir Aaron Krug, who spent his younger years in South Africa and received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1982 for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of the biologically important nuclei-acid protein complex. Sir Aaron was an important contemporary of James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, all involved in establishing that the architectural structure of DNA is double helical, which permitted them, in their now famous understatement of the century, to identify the copying mechanism for DNA and thus provide the answer to one of life’s greatest mysteries: how does heredity work? And I must add that it is true for South African Max Theiler for his discoveries concerning yellow fever and how to combat it (Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1951), as well as for Allan Cormack, for the development of computerassisted tomography (Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1979). Those who can are returning the investment. Sir Aaron is a co-patron of the recently formed Institute for Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDMM) at the University of Cape Town. Established ‘in order to consolidate and expand existing efforts to combat the most serious threats to health and overall prosperity in the region: infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, TB, parasitic infections, locally prevalent cancers and genetic disorders’, the IDMM has a compelling vision to be a research body capable of ‘relevant, cutting edge biomedical research, employing enabling and emerging technologies, embedded in an environment where clinical and research skills are well developed’ (Institute of Infectious Disease 2003). It seeks to combat some of Africa’s viral, bacterial and parasitic diseases on a regional level. 17


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Other powerful regional centres of biomedical research include the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), both in Kenya, and the Ain Shams University in Egypt, which serves as a biomedical hub for north-east Africa. There are emerging possibilities for West and Central Africa too, indicating the groundswell of local African initiatives that cannot, however, proceed without considerable global support, subject as it is to the fluctuating economic and political pulse of the North. And then there are, finally, individuals such as Sarah Tishkoff, Trefor Jenkins and Himla Soodyall who bring to bear the considerable and penetrating hypotheses of evolutionary biology to African history, specifically in an effort to link population genetics to the ancestry of African and global populations – fascinating subject matter that is beginning to have some impact, but not enough, on the historiography of Africa. Certainly, benchmark publications like the Unesco history of Africa require an engagement with the journey of life mapped out by mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome in the writing of what has been called African pre-history, which goes back to human origins and the diffusion of modern Homo sapiens populations throughout the globe. The recent focus on genetic bottlenecks is a key contribution in this direction, leading, it is my hope, to the revision of existing and the publication of new volumes in the Unesco series. As Richard Dawkins puts it in a characteristic flourish of science and poetry, ‘[e]volution is an enchanted loom of shuttling DNA codes, whose evanescent patterns, as they dance their partners though geological deep time, weave a massive database of ancestral wisdom, a digitally coded description of ancestral worlds and what it took to survive in them’ (Dawkins 1996: 24). And as I began this paper with mathematics, I end it with the observation that ‘Africa in the Age of Biology’ is part of the lovely story about breaking down knowledge boundaries fixed here and elsewhere, and that we should link the sciences, the humanities and the social sciences in answering some basic questions on our origins, life and destiny in this world.

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References African Bioinformatics Network (ABioNet) (n.d.). Accessed 26 Feb. 2004


Arab SM (n.d.) Medicine in Ancient Egypt, Part 1. Accessed 24 Feb. 2004 Blombos Cave (n.d.) Accessed 20 Jan. 2004 Daniels K (2003) Africa must produce its own vaccines, Genome News. Dawkins R (1996) Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: W.W. Norton. Gilbert S (2000) Developmental biology. Sunderland MA, Sinauer Associates, 6th edition. Highfield R (n.d.) Engraved ochres from Blombos Cave, Science Press Release. Accessed 20 Jan. 2004 Hood L & Galas D (2003) The digital code of DNA in J Clayton & C Dennis (eds) 50 years of DNA. New York: Nature Palgrave Macmillan. Ifrah G (2000) The universal history of numbers: From prehistory to the invention of the computer. Toronto: John Wiley & Sons. IIDMM (Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine). Faculty of Health Sciences (2003) University of Cape Town. Pamphlet. Kanoute A (2003) Agriculture. African advocates: Domestic concerns fuel GMO bans, Congress Daily (17 June). Larson EJ (2001) Evolution’s workshop: God and science on the Galapagos Islands. New York: Basic Books. Lewontin R (1995) Human diversity. New York: Scientific American Library. Libraries (n.d.) Accessed 19 Feb. 2004a Accessed 19 Feb. 2004b Markov AA (n.d.) Accessed 26 Feb. 2004 Marshall L (2003) Africa’s bushmen may get rich from diet-drug secret, National Geographic News (16 April). Accessed 19 Feb. 2004

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Monbiot G (2004) Starved of truth, The Guardian (9 March). Norden B (2002) Nobel Prize Address by Professor Norden in A Zewail Voyage through time: Walks of life to the Nobel Prize. Cairo and New York.


Nyirenda D (2003) Agriculture. African advocates: Domestic concerns fuel GMO bans, Congress Daily (17 June). Accessed 19 February 2004 Seccombe A (2000) South Africa sees GMOs easing rural hardship, Daily Mail & Guardian (8 February). Stoddard E (n.d.) UN wants rules for bioprospecting in Antarctica. Reuters. Accessed 24 Feb. 2004 Weatherall D, Brock D & Heng-Leng Chee (2002) Genomics and world health. Geneva: WHO. Weise E (2004) USA Today (2 February).

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Africa in the Age of Biology

Africa in the Age of Biology (Africa Human Genome Initiative)

Diversity in Africa: The Coming of Age of a Continent

In Search of Africa

The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson

In Africa

Radiography in the Digital Age: Physics, Exposure, Radiation Biology

Radiography in the Digital Age: Physics, Exposure, Radiation Biology

The Masque of Africa

The Decolonization of Africa

The Masque of Africa

Evolution in Age-Structured Populations (Cambridge Studies in Mathematical Biology)

The politics of party coalitions in Africa

The Politics of History in Contemporary Africa

The evaluation of public expenditure in Africa

The Dialectics of Transformation in Africa

The Accumulation of Capital in Southern Africa

The sword in the age of chivalry

Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa

A History of the Church in Africa

In the Age of the Quiet Sun

Gladiolus in tropical Africa: systematics, biology & evolution

Charleston in the age of the Pinckneys

The Victorian Soldier in Africa

The Crisis in South Africa

The Biology of Peatlands (Biology of Habitats)

The War in South Africa

The Age of Ra

The age of turbulence

The Age of Innocence

Africa in the Age of Biology