Customer Reviews

Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew About Genes

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have to admitt that I first picked up this book because the title jumped out at me, but I'm glad I did. Shrinking the Cat is a wonderful little book crammed full of the sort of lucious tidbits of scientific knowlege that I love. As I read the book I just couldn't wait to work the ideas I was picking up into conversations with my friends. This is one of those books that can make you look at things you already know in a whole new light, and that is a rare thing. I already knew a lot of the facts that Hubbell covered in this book, but I had not looked at them the way Hubbell does. I really enjoyed the way she wove the history of Man's creation of Silkworms, Domestic Cats, and Apples in to a single story tied together the Silk Road linking Asia and Europe.

I'm not sure that Hubble really lays to rest the fears that people have about transgenic plant and animals, but she does a very good job of showing how in many ways we have always lived in a world created by human hands, and that shaping the world is the basic and defining thing that make us human.

This is a wonderful book. I was fascinated from cover to cover. I have never read this author before and went right out and got more of her books. Many of my friends responded to my enthusiasm by telling me that had known and loved her writing for years. How could I have missed it?
The book is very well written and clearly very well researched. It captures your attention and holds it.
The author has very cleverly chosen to illustrate her subject with three species that have changed because of their connection with humans. By limiting her scope, she is able to cover her subject thoroughly. I was fascinated from start to finish.

(2 1/2 stars) This is a quick, pleasant, light read that turns out to have very little substance. Hubbell's central thesis appears to be that genetic engineering is nothing to be worried about, since we've been doing genetic engineering - better known as breeding and horticulture - for thousands of years.

There's a good deal to be said for that thesis (as well as a good deal to be said against it), but "Shrinking the Cat" doesn't get around to saying very much of it, since the bulk of the book consists of leisurely digressions. There are a few brief, half-hearted, very elementary science lessons, for those who have forgotten everything they might have heard in high school biology class. They scarcely convey enough information to convey why people ought not be alarmed over "frankenfoods", and certainly not enough information to understand the reasons why (as Hubbell acknowledges) some scientists are nevertheless worried about the implications of genetic engineering. Not a word about the sort of gene-jumping encouraged by certain G.E. techniques (like plasmids), nor about the increasing dangers of monocultures, nor about the potential damage to wild stocks by inadvertent interbreeding with engineered organisms, nor the long term danger posed to food supplies when Monsanto engineers crops to be sterile, so that farmers must return to the corporation for each and every year's supply of seeds. Though she is correct about many of the public's fears being groundless, her book will not be of any appreciable use in helping anyone understand the real technical or policy issues in any depth.

If you aren't expecting to learn anything serious, though, her randomly chosen facts about the history of domestication, concentrating on the beneficial development of corn, silkworms, cats, and apples, are sufficiently diverting to justify the short time it will take to browse through them. It's nice to get a two-page spread showing just where the Silk Roads ran; to be told just when and where Golden Delicious and Macintosh apples first turned up; to learn that the Egyptian word for cat was "miaw", and that Johnny Appleseed was a devout Swedenborgian, with a knapsack full of other such agreable trivia.

We are alarmed by the idea of genetically altered crops. A clever new word trades on the fear: "Frankenfood," which hints that we are in danger of making some new Karloff-like fiend on the farm. We make new species, the fear runs, and only God can do that; for those who don't believe in gods, there is the worry that this is hijacking evolution in a dangerous and unprecedented way. Genetic engineering somehow violates our sensibilities about how the world ought to run. And yet it shouldn't. The subtitle of Sue Hubbell's book _Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew About Genes_ (Houghton Mifflin Company) captures the idea well. We have only in the last few years been splicing a snip of flounder gene into corn, say, but for millennia we have altered crops and domestic animals so that their genes are irrevocably changed. Humans, bless their hearts, are going to try to figure things out and tinker with them. Hubbell demonstrates that while it is untrue that we have nothing to worry about, we have altered other organisms to our advantage before, and have dealt with unexpected consequences from the alterations. We are going to fiddle around with genes directly (as opposed to previous indirect fiddling), and we will do the same thing.

Only a few species are covered in the book to show how altered we have made them. Cats were selected from individuals of wild stock who were less frightened of encountering humans, those who were small and controllable, and those who happened to be pretty. Fearfulness, size, and markings are all controlled by genes, and thus, without gene splicing or recombinant technology, we began engineering the genes of the cat. Silkworms have become so domesticated that they cannot flea from danger and placidly die if we do not hand them food. Corn is so husked that its seeds could not disperse without our help. Apples are cloned (grafted) because their genetics are too complicated and a tree from a seed bears fruit nothing like the apple that bore the seed.

Hubble has packed a small volume with much ancient lore and economics as well as explanations ranging from Mendel and multicaulismania ("the dream of growing rich by growing silkworms") to Darwin and DNA. She is an enthusiastic and lucid teacher, and includes personal and amusing stories that might hide just how much scientific information is expressed here. She ponders our new capacity for direct genetic engineering and places it in a historical context. It might not be persuasive to everyone who worries about Frankenfood, but her optimism is at least well-informed. "This is an interesting and hopeful time in which to live," she says, "even more so to be born into. Our grandchildren are lucky."

Genetic engineering was not possible before "we knew about genes". The public often confuses genetic engineering with selective breeding, but the author of this type of book has no excuse for doing so.

Selective breeding works exactly the same way as natural selection (aka "survival of the fittest"), with humans providing the selection pressure (deciding which animal or plant is "fittest" - and gets to reproduce).

Genetic engineering involves combining genetic material on the molecular level - allowing combinations that would otherwise be impossible. Genes from fish being spliced into tomato plants to create a more freeze resistant tomato is one example.

Not incidentally, domestic cats (felis catus) originated from species that are about the same size as domestic cats (felis sylvesterus - the European wildcat, and the North African subspecies). No "shrinking" was involved.

It is interesting to note that the effects of selective breeding as practiced by humans "before we knew about genes" is not always as lasting as we might think. For instance, myriad pigeon and poultry breeds exibit an amazing array of variety in color, feathering, and build, (an internet search will provide examples). However, if allowed to breed amongst themselves with no human selection, the offspring will resemble the original "wild" species within a very few generations.

Sue Hubbell writes natural history as though it were an art form. She is as careful as a poet in the words she uses, and she expresses her sentiments like a classicist, with restraint and the long view. Here her purpose is to turn down the heat in the debate about genetic engineering by pointing out that we humans have been engineering plants and animals for thousands of years. She writes, for example, that "inserting a Bt gene into corn was not nearly as big a deal as creating corn in the first place. 'That' was a very big deal." (p. 34)

A "Bt" gene is from the bacterium, Bacilllus thuringiensis, that produces a toxin that kills moths. It also kills monarch butterflies, and Hubbell is giving her reaction to what she terms the "FRANKENFOOD KILLS BUTTERFLIES!!!!" story (p. 22-23) from a few years ago. In short, Hubbell thinks that we have already done a whole lot of genetic engineering and that what we are doing today is just a continuation of that. She warns against unintended consequences of genetic modifications, but she is not alarmed. She writes, "This is an interesting and hopeful time in which to live, even more so to be born into. Our grandchildren are lucky. We are rapidly acquiring knowledge, if not yet understanding, of the genetic basis of life." (p. 159)

Well, I'm not alarmed either, but there is no denying that transgenetic organisms will escape from our farms and ranches and mate up with other creatures in the wild, and there will indeed be those "unintended consequences" that we are warned about. Hubbell calls this the "problem of limits: How do we limit the effects of six billion of our kind on the rest of the world and avoid making alterations that harm other kinds of life and change the world so drastically that we can no longer live in it ourselves?" (p. xii)

Good question, and her answer is we have to "develop a deep, broad, and sensitive understanding" of the processes of life and "marry [that understanding]...to a broadened ecological intelligence." (pp. 159-160) And I suppose whether we are likely to do that or not really depends on whether one is an optimist or a pessimist. Clearly Hubbell is an optimist.

Hubbell writes primarily about corn, silkworms, cats, and apples in four easy to read and interesting chapters. We learn how the silk industry began in China and how attempts were made again and again, often by government fiat, to transplant the farms to other places in the world, including the United States, and how most attempts failed. We learn how corn was cultivated from teosinte and turned into the biggest agricultural crop in the US, in no small part because corn syrup has become the sweetener of choice by the American food industry, particularly in sodas and snack foods. But what I want to know is what happened to the delicious and tender sweet (but not too sweet) yellow corn that came into the supermarkets every year? Now what we get is white, bland, too sweet and nearly tasteless. As Hubbell points out, sometimes what happens is crops are modified for appearance and shelf life and favor is sacrificed. She gives the example of the red delicious apple that really is beautiful to look at, but too bland to be called delicious.

Incidentally is it interesting to compare her chapter on apples with that by Michael Pollan in his The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001). Pretty much the same story is told of how apples do not develop to type from seed but need to be grafted; and how every once in a great while a tree grown from seed will indeed result in something very tasty. Whereas Pollan had some fun debunking the Johnny Appleseed mythology while pointing out that most apples in those days were grown to be made into hard cider, Hubbell contents herself with mentioning that hard (and soft cider, she adds) were one of the few things people could drink that were safe.

In the chapter on cats we learn that cats have shrunk as a consequence of their domestication; indeed they have smaller skulls and smaller brains. However, Hubbell writes, "Just because...cats...have been genetically modified...it does not follow that they are any less than their wild cousins." (p. 94) This reminds me of the idea that domesticated animals in general are (and need to be) "dumber" than their wild relatives. Hubbell references Helmut Hemmer's Domestication: The Decline of Environmental Appreciation (1990) as explaining that domesticated cats can be tame because their "brain centers for sensitivity to changes in sound and movement are reduced," making them "less jumpy" and "able to accept the fact that sometimes twigs snap." (p. 92) This reminds me of one of my pet theories that domesticated humans (perhaps I should say "self-domesticated") are not as smart as we once were when we roamed the savannahs and made our living hunting and gathering. To live in our crowded cities with all the noise, crowding, pollution, etc., we must needs have our "environmental appreciation" turned down, otherwise we might suffer from sensory overload. It might be that part of the price we pay to be civilized is to be dumbed down.

I would enthusiastically give this book five stars, but it is rather short (160 pp; about 45,000 words). Sue Hubbell said her previous book Waiting for Aphrodite would be her last, but then she got interested in the public debate over genetically engineering and so wrote this book. I predict she will write another; at least I hope she does. Her eloquent and reasoned tone about a subject that stirs so much emotion is welcome and needed.

News flash - we've been doing it for 4000 years - or so says Sue Hubbell. Don't worry that you are not a geneticist - each chapter of this well written book combines a personal narrative with history, a primer on genetics, and bits of the author's life in the Ozarks. This book focuses on the ceturies old changes to a variety of organisms, including cats (hence the title). As with other man made and artificial divisions (e.g. the sciences - Biology, Chemistry, etc.) species are a product of our human need to impose order on what appears to be a chaotic universe. They are not an immutable laws of nature. Read this book and at least you'll be able to add well-reasoned commentary when the subject comes up at the office.

I'm really disappointed in the length of the book. For the amount of research and time it appears Hubbell put into this, it seems she could have filled out the data and examples more thoroughly. She really just presents 3 examples of human controlled breeding/propagation: silk worms, apples, and housecats. This explanations in the book are completely for the layman so this book could be appropriate for young students.

There were a bunch of interesting anecdotes in here. The title topic, of engineering cats, was fascinating, as was the progressive evolution of corn. However, too much of the book was taken up by asides by the author in which she explained the most basic of basic information on genetics for the readers. I realize that this is for the laymen, but I would have appreciated more depth and breadth. There are so many other interesting similar stories of human genetic intervention, and there is so much more detail she could have gone into for each case study she explored.

Furthermore, while her agenda for the book is something that needs to be broadcast to the non-scientific world-- namely, that genetic engineering of our surrounding life forms is nothing new in human history-- she doesn't even mention the valid fears that some scientists have brought up-- the fear that some people have that inter-species genetic engineer _might_ cause previously unknown diseases to hop from one species to another with potentially disastrous effects. Rather, she dismisses all concern over genetically engineered food as hysteria (and, in her defense, most of the concern _is_ simply misplaced hysteria).

Ultimately, I liked the _idea_ of this book, but the execution left much to be desired. Especially with a list price..., you might want to wait for the paperback.

By reading the prologue I assumed the author was going to ease a reader's concerns about "FrankenFoods." Instead, it turned into a history book, detailing how our first bio-engineered foods and species came about. It did not address some of the questions I had hoped an advocate for today's technology would challenge: about commodifying seeds used the world over, and forcing people to use them by removing those that are unpatented; about allergies and the need for labeling. In short, I thought it avoided the issues I hoped to consider.