Fear of scientific advances a challenge: Shine

Grasping the opportunities provided by advances in medical science, rather than succumbing to fears about the challenges involved, is the key to the biology revolution, the vice-president of the Australian Academy of Sciences Prof John Shine told the National Press Club this week.

Shine singled out the human genome project and the advances in stem cells as two major recent developments in the biological sciences.

"Our biology database is now being updated to an extent that we are beginning to witness a corresponding biology revolution - initially directed at major diseases and improvements in quality of life but then at improving life itself," Shine said.

He said the human genome project had changed the way to do science, allowing researchers to take a more open discovery approach to identify potential genes involved in a particular disease or biological process instead of a hypothesis-driven approach, which is limited by previous research.

"For scientists the benefits are immediate - new insights into every field of biology. But the benefits will extend far beyond the research community to impact virtually every aspect of our life, but especially medicine and health care," Shine said.

And while stem cell research is coupled to concerns about the use of human embryos, the possibility of using stem cells to cure diseases including Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease is a noble dream, Shine said.

"Although enormous technical barriers need to be overcome to realise this dream, it seems much more real now than it did only a decade ago," he said.

Shine warned that new challenges would arise from the technological advances in stem cell research, with the potential contained in every discarded cell to give rise to another individual.

"Such cells however are critical to development of new treatments for a range of devastating disorders and we will need strong international agreements to stop these cells being placed into the womb with all the ethical and medical risks that would entail," he said. "Australia is leading the way in developing appropriate forums for debate about these important issues."

"As we begin to understand the complex and coordinated interactions between genes and between the myriad of chemicals and molecules that they encode, we inevitably begin to modify and adjust them. From the very beginnings of the human race, we have always used technology to transform the world around us - it is an integral part of human nature - now it is inevitable that we will change our biology, our internal environment, as in the past we have changed our external environment," he said.

But this perception -- that humanity is at the threshold of being able to rework its own biology -- is troubling to many people, Shine said.

"We are concerned at the philosophical implications - it may change the sense of who we are. We will need to make difficult choices that we are very uncomfortable with, but the biggest fear is that of losing control over humanity's future. The long term consequences of being able to play a direct role in our own evolution are not things we can plan, because it involves the shape of technologies that we cannot yet see and the values of future humans we cannot yet understand," he said.

"The real danger is to succumb to these fears and to unduly delay these advances - they cannot be stopped - think of the untold suffering that would have occurred if the development of antibiotics or of a polio vaccine had been delayed for a decade."