The Supreme Court has been busy for the past few weeks, and the decision with the greatest implication for the future of science was the Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. In a unanimous ruling, the Court stated that human genes may not be patented and drew a sharp distinction between DNA formed in nature and DNA synthesized in a laboratory. While the decision was a long-awaited victory, it also raised a few eyebrows due to the majority opinion's statement that "A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent-eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring."
Close, but no cigar. cDNA, or complementary DNA, forms when retroviruses use an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to convert their genomic RNA into DNA that can then be integrated into their infected hosts.
Adding to the confusion, Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion, confirmed the naturalness of cDNA by stating that "the nucleotide sequence of cDNA is dictated by nature, not by the lab technician" while also stating that the laboratory technician "unquestionably creates something new when cDNA is made." To acknowledge potential errors in the Court's decision, Justice Antonin Scalia issued a concurrence, saying that while the court had reached the right result, it had gone astray in "going into fine details of molecular biology" that he was unable to affirm on his own knowledge.
The technical contradictions and inaccuracies in the Court's ruling, as well as Scalia's acknowledgment, underscore the complicated relationship between science and the humanities. With the breakneck pace of scientific discovery across disciplines, it is unsurprising to see the law and ethics lagging far behind.
However, given that science and technology affect every dimension of our lives, the resolution of many modern-day problems from personal health choices to the search for alternative fuels requires a considerable amount of input from the scientific field. Therefore, society must address the potential social and ethical challenges that arise from rapid scientific and technological innovation. These challenges include the preservation of rights and the maintenance of an informed citizenry. To keep the public educated about scientific advances, those in the humanities will play an integral role in both educating non-scientists and crafting policies that affect scientists. Specifically, future writers, journalists, lawyers and policy-makers must be well versed on the intricacies of science as well as its potential social and ethical impact in society.
This education is already occurring at Dartmouth, where a number of science departments offer courses for non-science majors who want to explore the sciences. For instance, the biological details of the aforementioned court case would have been evident to students who had taken "Genes and Society," a non-major Biology course that teaches students about the scientific details and societal impact of genetics research. However, while the College offers a handful of classes that seek to bridge the gap between society and the sciences through the TAS/TLA distributive, it lags far behind its peer institutions. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare offers a comprehensive list of courses in "science, technology, and society," Harvard University offers a concentration in history and science, Brown University offers an interdisciplinary concentration in science and society, the University of Pennsylvania offers a major and a minor in science technology and society within its Department of History and Sociology of Science and Cornell University offers science and technology studies and allows biology majors to "combine biology with exposure to perspectives from the social sciences and humanities on the social, political and ethical aspects of modern biology."
Considering these offerings, it is clear that the College is lagging behind. As an institution that touts its emphasis on the liberal arts, it is imperative that the College educates its future graduates on the sciences' growing reach through the lens of the humanities. Society will increasingly look for graduates who are not only culturally and socially literate, but also knowledgeable in science and technology. Dartmouth ought to acknowledge these needs and diversify its offerings to its students, lest it fail to bridge the widening gap between the sciences and the humanities.
