Assistant Professor of Biology Lois Banta By Liz Greenspan '99 Each year, a company that markets a test to diagnose the genetic disorder Fragile X visits elementary school classrooms in Denver, Colorado. After explaining that the disorder is associated with some learning difficulties and elongated facial features, the representatives ask the public school teachers to identify children that may have these facial features. The children are taken from the class and the representatives measure the ratio of the length of their face to the width of their face, how far their ears stick out, and the distance between their eyes. In front of the student, the representatives discuss whether each child is likely to have Fragile X, and at the end of the day, letters are sent home to parents asking if they would like to have their child tested for the genetic alteration that results in Fragile X because they may be at risk. This scenario may sound like a page from the history of the Eugenics movement that took place in the first half of this century, but as Haverford Assistant Professor of Biology Lois Banta explains, this is happening today. For Banta, the ethics of genetic testing and genetic engineering are questions she deals with daily. In addition to running her own lab and supervising student science majors, Banta spends a great deal of time inside and outside the classroom applying science to issues of societal and political importance, like genetic testing. In her bi-yearly course, Human Genetics, Ethics, and Public Policy, Banta presents students with an historical account of genetics in this country and provides a forum to discuss the current implications of genetic testing and experimentation. "My goal in teaching the course is to send students out in the world knowing something about this whole business of genetic technologies, because I have no doubt that they will face decisions that deal with it," Banta says about her public policy course. "I feel they ought to know a little of the science behind human genetics so they are able to make a more informed decision." Many of the students in this course are non-science majors, and Banta knows that she is providing them with possibly their only biology exposure. "I try to teach Mendelian genetics and recombinant DNA but always in the context of how they can be used ... why are Mendel's peas at all interesting?" she asks. "It is an opportunity to teach them science in a way that is a little more user-friendly." For the few biology majors in the class, Banta highlights the issues from a medical perspective. "If they are going to go on to medical school or graduate school and are going to be doing research in human genetics, then they need to be thinking about what the implications are of what they are doing." Banta first became interested in questions of ethics and human genetics as a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. Congress was debating the ethics and funding possibilities of the Human Genome Project at the time, and Banta discovered that these questions were extremely relevant to her studies . The chair of the biology department at Caltech, Lee Hood, happened to be one of "the early movers and shakers" in automated DNA sequencing - the cornerstone of the Human Genome Project that allows researchers to read the DNA sequence of the entire human genome. Hood, along with science historian Daniel Kevles, organized a lecture series at Caltech on the implications, ethics, and effects of genetic testing, material which was later gathered into the book The Code of Codes. Once Banta began attending the series and thinking about questions like the effect of genetic testing on health insurance, and the extent to which humans are genetically determined, she was hooked. "I went to these talks and I just got really fascinated with the whole subject," she said. "So I started reading a little bit and picking up articles here and there as I ran across them, and I knew that I wanted to teach a course in this field." Banta spent her first two years at Haverford developing her public policy course and has attended numerous lectures and presentations on the subject. She finds that there is a current surge in discussion on genetic testing, primarily because new technologies allow scientists to engineer DNA in ways previously thought to be impossible. "It is the explosion in genetic information that allows you to be making correlations, doing tests on people, finding whether someone has the gene for this or that. So it's opened a lot of potential for genetic discrimination," Banta says. Banta is not as certain that all fellow biologists are raising similar questions concerning these technologies. "I don't think a lot of biologists really spend a lot of time debating the more philosophical issues. Some of them are very interested in it, but I think a lot of the concern is coming from the sociologists, the philosophers of science," she says. "But certainly the whole impact that genome sequencing and the other related technologies, like gene therapies, are having on the biological world is very large." Banta also runs a lab at Haverford, working not with human genetics, but plant genetic engineering. She focuses on a bacterium that infects plants with a disease known as crown gall, or "plant cancer." The infected plants grow tumors on their leaves or stems as a result of uncontrollable cell division that the bacterium activates, similar to human cancer. This disease is the only known example of naturally occurring DNA movement across kingdom lines, Banta explains, because infection occurs when a piece of the bacterial DNA moves from the bacterium to the plant cell. Banta and her students focus primarily on the mechanisms within the bacterial cell membrane that allow this movement to occur. "It's a question of how do you get this big chunk of DNA across this greasy membrane and into the plant cell, and that's fascinating," Banta says. Understanding this phenomenon is central for biologists who genetically engineer plants in a lab. "About 15 years ago researchers realized that maybe you could take advantage of the way these bacteria infect plants to move DNA that you would choose into a plant, and that would be genetic engineering," she says. "This has a lot of implications for agriculture, because if you can genetically engineer plants then you can start to introduce traits that might be helpful, like insect resistance or drought resistance," Banta explains. This past semester Banta teamed with Economics Professor Richard Ball to teach a course that would explore some of the implications for this technology within agriculture, specifically for Third World countries. " If you hear the industry types talk about this, they invariably talk about why this is a good thing; the idea that 'the world population is going to double in the next 40 years, there is not enough food to go around, how in the world are we going to feed them? Well, we are going to genetically engineer plants.' And that's a little disingenuous, because if you look at what the companies are working on, they are genetically engineering tobacco, and cotton, and they are genetically engineering crops that are important agronomically to this country. What they are not doing is addressing crops that are important in the developing world, like cassava for example." Banta says. To fill in this hole, Banta and Ball, who focuses on development economics, began to explore the possibilities for agrobiotechnology in developing countries. They ask not only what could be done in the Third World, but if it would be sustainable. "A lot of what we do talk about in the course is the question of technology transfer. What would it take to be able to get research done in a developed country that would be applicable to that country's needs, for example by genetically engineering cassava, a subsistence crop in much of the developing world, but which has little commercial value in developed countries? If you could get somebody to work on this, what would it take to get the genetically altered plant adopted in a developing country? And if you could do that, what would the impact be on the small family farmer?" By consistently applying her science to broader issues in society, Banta creates a more valuable learning environment for her students and herself. "I just don't see the point of doing science in a vacuum," she says. "I don't think it is interesting for me and I don't think it is interesting for society." Banta admits that drawing these connections may be a less-traveled path within the field of molecular biology, but that she has made it a top priority. "I feel that I have some responsibility to be looking at the societal implications of what we are doing. There are a lot of social justice ramifications to modern biological research and that is an area I am quite interested in." In her public policy course and the agricultural biotechnology course, "most students leave with more questions than they had when they came in," she says. "A lot of times what you get are comments like, 'I thought I knew where I stood on this issue, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I am really confused now.' And I guess I feel like I am doing my job when this happens."