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One of the oldest tricks in the book is writing about writing. But I cannot begin without saying that I had originally intended — for the past several months — to write in this issue about George Orwell, a figure whose legacy has enjoyed an appropriate renaissance of late as a prophet of the modern surveillance state, and somewhat less notoriously as the first modern media critic. However, it was not 1984 or Homage to Catalonia that I wished to invoke, but a rather more obscure essay entitled “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.” In it, Orwell wrote on the coming of spring and the land’s emergence from a wartime winter slumber; a toad’s eye he describes as “the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.”

“Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other,” he continues, “if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site.” Indeed, spring is finally here, in a welcome burst of blossoms and light; and from Orwell’s musings I hoped to make a short leap to the emergence of biology from its own winter — one of faith misplaced and emphasis mistaken, with DNA seen as uniquely central to all the processes of life.

But those breezy idylls were rudely displaced by a couple of minor stories which arrived in my mailbox last weekend. The first involved a recent report, jointly written by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization, suggesting — innocuosly enough — that people should eat balanced diets. To this end it recommended we cut back on sugar, the overconsumption of which is linked to the obesity now epidemic in the West.

Now, some would call obesity a socially constructed category, a demonizing form of body politics, and their motives, if not their position, are laudable. Exploiting dissatisfaction with our physiques is a technique found on the schoolyard and Madison Avenue alike. But since 1991, obesity rates in the United States have risen by 74%, to the point where one-fifth of the population is dangerously overweight. Rates are highest among the poor and dark-skinned; and similar increases are seen throughout the world, wherever Western-style development spreads. Dismissing these numbers as a product of perception would be foolish, and it would be just as foolish to ignore the likelihood of a connection — considered by most to be simple common sense — between parallel increases in obesity, sugar consumption, and ailments like heart disease and diabetes. This, of course, is precisely what the sugar industry, using tactics refined by the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, is attempting to do — even threatening to cut WHO funding if the report’s suggestions are not retracted.

Meanwhile, the second article, a short BBC screed entitled “Gene Hope for Diabetes”, breathlessly summarized a study recently published in Nature Medicine on the successful application in mice of a gene therapy which induces liver cells to produce insulin. Not mentioned was the fact that gene therapy has proven wildly unsuccessful in humans; after more than a decade of dubiously ethical research and testing, only nine people have been treated ‘successfully’ — and two of them subsequently developed forms of leukemia never before seen outside a laboratory.

Almost everything that is wrong with biotechnology and its place in society can be seen by reading these articles together: a problem of profoundly human origin, its root causes denied or downplayed, and the consequences addressed by throwing money and time at a profoundly flawed technology. Gene therapy for diabetes — or most anything else — is doomed because our understanding of cell biology and human physiology is, Watson & Crick fiftieth anniversary galas notwithstanding, incomplete.

Slowly we are learning that DNA, so reflexively called the building block of life, is but one part of the genetic process, which itself is but a fragment of the whole. That is the subject of Barry Commoner’s “Unraveling the Secret of Life,” which examines evidence that casts doubt on conventional notions of DNA replication. Devinder Sharma, in the second of three installments, speaks of publicity-driven agricultural biotechnology that ignores the fundamental problem of distribution; and Phil Bereano examines why such produce is treated so differently in the United States and Europe. Finally, we continue our unfortunately too-relevant coverage of biological warfare with a feature on a proposed bioterrorism research facility in Boston.

As for Orwell, he shall have to wait until next year; but in the meantime, the concluding words of “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”:

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.