Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew about Genes

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.

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.

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 Hubbe

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."

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.