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za

AFRICA IN THE AGE OF BIOLOGY

Wilmot James

HSRC
Publishers

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Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme, Africa Human Genome Initiative Occasional Paper Series No. 3
Series Editor: Prof. Wilmot James, Executive Director: Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme of the
Human Sciences Research Council

Published by HSRC Publishers

Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
www.hsrcpublishers.ac.za

2004 Human Sciences Research Council

First published 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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 Preface
The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has established an occasional
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paper series. The occasional papers are designed to be quick, convenient vehicles
for making timely contributions to debates or for disseminating interim research
findings, or they may be finished, publication-ready works. Authors invite comments
and suggestions from readers.
This paper was presented as the first annual John Gerhart Memorial Lecture at
the conference of the Africa Genome Initiative held in Cairo from March 26 to 29,
2004. Considerations of Egyptian science and arts and their lasting impact on Africa
are a fitting tribute to the roundedness of John Gerhart, himself an art collector of
some note, a gifted story-teller, an enthusiastic birder, an economist by training and
a scientist by inclination, a philanthropist of great empathy and skill, and a university
president with vision and leadership. One of the last things John Gerhart did before
he died was to visit that birders dream, the Galapagos Islands, once described in
the title of a book as Evolutions workshop (Larson 2001). It was here that Charles
Darwin spent a great deal of time observing the behaviour of species of beings that
had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in isolation and in the absence of
natural predators. If you approached and touched those birds, they did not fly away.
Like John Gerhart, they lacked the biochemistry of trepidation.

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 Africa in the Age of Biology
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Harvard Universitys Richard Lewontin in his book Human diversity explains the
meaning of what is known in the world of mathematics as Markovian properties
operating as part of the dynamics of physical and natural systems.
The properties were named after the St Petersburg University trained Russian
mathematician who first studied them. Andrei Markov (n.d.) is best remembered
for his study of sequences of random variables where the future state of a variable is
determined by a current variable but is independent of the way in which the present
state arose from its predecessors. So, for example, in demography, information about
the size of, say, the Egyptian population in 2004 depends only on how many people
were alive in 2003 and on the birth and death rates among the various age and sex
cohorts, without having to know for purposes of prediction how they came to be
so.
Lewontin talks about Markovian properties in reference to an understanding of
species evolution and particularly that of hominids, where all we need to know in
our endeavour to predict our future biological trajectory is the present state of our
genes. Our genes are, no doubt, as Lewontin put it, a consequence of their history,
but he also says that the genes currently possessed by the species are all that matters
for its evolutionary future, irrespective of how it acquired those genes (Lewontin
1995: 147).
Processes of biological evolution work like Markovs mathematical chains, where
memory is interesting but irrelevant; for there is, as Lewontin puts it, no memory in
biology, only in books (Lewontin 1995: 148). After the sequencing of the human
genome, he might not be quite so categorical about the apparently ahistorical quality
of genetic material, as molecular geneticists would certainly attribute time to

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 Wilmot James

mutational events that are recorded there as junk or rubbish or the real thing; but
then again this matters not, for it is about what one needs to know in order to predict
the future. History, however one may wish to conceive of it, does not count in the
case of Markovian properties.
By contrast, cultural systems such as modes of production, counting systems,
language, writing, buildings, art, and so on, all depend vitally on an accumulation
of memory and well-functioning means of their transmission from generation to
generation.
Indeed, human progress in our styles of material and cultural manner of life relies
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on our ability to store and pass on memory. Here the library, the architectural store
of written human memory, in books principally, or scrolls at that time more likely,
played a central, indisputable role.
And it is in illustrating the non-Markovian principle of much of our cultural-
historical processes that Lewontin talks about the libraries of Alexandria: [T]he low
state of European culture, he writes, that continued long after the disintegration
of Rome was in part a consequence of the immense loss from the fund of technical
and humanistic knowledge that occurred at the final destruction of the libraries of
Alexandria in 391. He then adds: In contrast, Muslim culture grew at a prodigious
rate beginning in the seventh century partly because the knowledge of classical times
knowledge then unavailable to the Latin and Greek scholars of Europe was
preserved in Arabic manuscripts (Lewontin 1995: 148).
There is no question that the libraries of Alexandria were central to the city and
the broad region including what today is the Middle-East, North Africa and much of
Central and Western Europe; that they were not the only ones to exist but were part
of a larger set of institutions to emerge from the concatenations of cultural, scholarly
and other areas of learning and application of what were then the advanced societies
of this part of the world.
The agency of their ruin is not so certain, neither is it clear what it was in volume
and substance that the libraries actually contained. The institution was created by
Ptolemy I Soter first as a museum to which his son Ptolemy Philadelphus added a
library. It was Julius Caesar, some claimed, who destroyed the library, others put the
blame on Christian mobs, and yet others peddle the story that it was [o]n the orders
of Omar, Caliph of Baghdad, [that] the entire collection of books (except for the
works of Aristotle) stored at the Library of Alexandria were removed and used as fuel
to heat water for the citys public baths (Libraries n.d. Accessed 2004a + 2004b).
The evidence for what happened is thin, and James Hannans assessment, balanced
it would seem, is that Caesar was most probably responsible for the loss of the Royal

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 Africa in the Age of Biology

Library; a second library called the Serapeum ceased to be when a Christian mob
tore it down to the foundations under the leadership of the orthodox patriarch
Theophilus after he had received word from the Emperor Theodosius (Libraries n.d.
Accessed 2004b). The story about Arab destruction, by the Caliph of Baghdad, is a
myth, without any evidence it would seem. And, of course, it is not the first time
that Baghdad has been blamed for something it did not do or not blamed for what
it did do.
This paper starts with this story in part because some, if not most, of Aristotles
work was housed in the Alexandria library; and this great figure, principally known for
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his philosophical scholarship, was also, as things tended to be then, one of the worlds
first embryologists and developmental biologists. This same Aristotle, who collected
and dissected embryos, and observed them closely, got the sex determination of
human beings, we now know, terribly wrong. He claimed that the sex of a person was
determined by the heat of the male partner during intercourse. The more heated the
passion, the greater the probability of male offspring. He had counselled elderly men
to conceive in the summer if they wished to have male heirs. Scott Gilbert in his text
Developmental biology says about Aristotle that he promulgated a very straightforward
hypothesis of sex determination. Women were men whose development was arrested
too early (Gilbert 2000: 523). With no sense at all of the microbiological, never
mind the molecular biological, Aristotle and many since then had not a clue about
the role of X and Y chromosomes, genetic heredity and the boost to human survival
of sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction.
Still, Aristotle was crucial in the history of biology and medicine for his painstaking
observations, his method of pursuing some key questions about humanity and its
evolution, and his unusual preoccupation with embryology, even though he could
not recognise that sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction was natures masterful
secret to human variety and survival.
Egypt and its history are what lie at the heart of the early history of medical biology,
engineering, physics, mathematics, architecture, art and literature. Although scholars
today tend to think only of early Egyptians knowledge of the medical biology of
mummification and their understanding of anatomy, the biochemistry of soft and
hard tissue, decay and preservation, it is clear as Sameh Arab, Associate Professor
of Cardiology at Alexandria University writes, that [s]ome kind of medicine was
already practiced in Egypt in the earliest prehistoric days. He refers to the Kahung
gynaecology papyrus dating to 1825 BC which describes methods of diagnosing
pregnancy and the sex of the fetus, toothache during pregnancy, diseases of women,
as well as feminine drugs and to the Edwin Smith papyrus of 1600 BC, which can be

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 Wilmot James

described as a reference work on internal medicine, dealing as it does with diseases of

the eye, skin, extremities, gynecology and some surgical diseases (Arab n.d.). There
is, of course, much more to be said about ancient Egyptian medicine and its link with
modern biology, but that will have to be left for another time, another place.

...
Among some recently found fossils left in the Still Bay area along South Africas
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southernmost coastline by what must have been ancestral Khoi or San people is a
piece of decorated ochre, a form of iron ore. It is named in Afrikaans the blombos
(flower-bush) ochre after the cave where the fossil discoveries were found. The name
is an odd linguistic construction, being part of the vocabulary used to describe the
indigenous fauna variety of the south-western Cape known as fynbos (fine-bush), to
be found only there in all of its splendid variety and age.
Christopher Henshilwood of the State University of New York, the archaeologist
digging at this site, describes the red ochre as measuring two and three inches long,
first scraped and ground smooth to create flat surfaces, and then marked with cross
hatches and lines to create a consistent complex geometric motif(Highfield n.d.).
What these markings mean is open to debate. One more cautious interpretation is
that they are tally marks, making them the oldest form of recorded counting ever
found [Blombos Cave n.d.]. There is no independent source of proof as to what it is
these ancestors were counting. It could have had something to do with the ordinary
material habits of hunters and gatherers, and likely the tallying of animal kills. Or,
perhaps, it related to trading with neighbours, or, more on a deeply existential level,
observing the astronomical, with, as Georges Ifrah puts it so beautifully in the Universal
history of numbers, a fascination with the regularity of the phases of the moon, the eternal
return of day and night, the cycle of the seasons or, we might add, given the context, the
elliptical phases of the tides of great and marvellous oceans (Ifrah 2000: xvi).
In the history of counting, the San and Khoi perhaps joined other human beings and,
in observing that birds have two wings, animals four legs, and they ten fingers to their
hands and ten toes to their feet, developed a numbering system using their fingers or toes
as the base ten, the most common type of counting found among earlier peoples.
Or perhaps they joined the Mayans, Aztecs, Celts and Basques who looked down
at their feet and realised that their toes could be counted like fingers and chose the
much more unusual arithmetic base of 20.

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Or again, perhaps, they joined the Sumerians and Babylonians, who chose for
reasons unknown to us today a base of 60, which we use in respect of measuring time,
with an hour being 60 minutes and a minute being 60 seconds; or the measurement
of a circle into 360 degrees, each of 60 minutes divided into 60 seconds.
Counting is, of course, the crucial first step; but it is not arithmetic and it certainly
does not approach mathematics: the earliest known evidence for the arithmetic
foundations of modern mathematics was found in Elam and Mesopotamia, Sumeria,
Ancient Egypt, Crete, Greece and Rome.
The mathematics of Ancient Egypt were quite obviously remarkable in their
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sophistication proof of this are the remains of one of the great wonders of the
world: the pyramids, which were engineered with extraordinary precision and on
a scale that stretches the mind. And, in confirmation of the test of all construction
tests, they still stand today, stripped perhaps, vandalised yes, looted certainly, but still
there in all of their beauty and grace.
Building the pyramids presumed expertise in stone cutting, engineering, mathematics
and physics, not to mention understanding and mastering the basics of the physics of
levers, navigation and water behaviour in moving these monstrous blocks of stone
down the great river Nile. They are, in their practicality and complexity, stunning to
us; looking as we do in admiration, backwards at history.
This venture into biology and Africa is by way of counting and arithmetic then;
because it is an interesting digression into the epistemological lineage of mathematics and,
for reasons that will become clear, because there is a critical mathematical side to human
genetics which also indicates where Africa stands in relation to modern biology today.
The mass media has over the last few years been replete with news and feature
stories about deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA and what it means and might mean for
medicine, forensics, human origins and population ancestry. In part, the media has
been celebrating because of the 50 years of progress that have passed since DNA was
first discovered as having a double-helical architecture, and in part because of the
sometimes over-dramatised advances in understanding and treating inherited disease
regimes made possible by the sequencing of the human genome, the full repertoire of
our biological instructions.
Three billion base-pair nucleotides make up the human genome and these add up
to an unknown number of genes in the region, it is said, of about 32 000. Nucleotide
information is digital, in that two elements combine in a manner following the rule of
A (for adenine) combining with T (for thymine) and G (for guanine) and with C (for
cytosine), making up a chain the full extent of which we have still to understand
fully from the point of view of function and purpose; but we do, of course, know the

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 Wilmot James

exact sequence of all the genetic letters of the nucleotide alphabet. Indeed, genomes
are encyclopaedias of genetic materials collected quite mechanically, not to prove a
set of hypotheses but simply to document what there is the hypotheses coming, as
it were, later. And they now come thick and fast.
Mathematics was required to count the DNA. Mathematical molecular biology,
called bioinformatics, is required to make sense of the DNA, identify and discover the
candidate genes that are the particular strings or chains of DNA and begin to ascertain
their function. Described once by the South African born Nobel Laureate, Sydney
Brenner, in typically sardonic and intellectually dismissive manner as a new brand of
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library science, bioinformatics is part of the essential equipment of every gene hunter.
He or she is the person who can master the software and data management associated
with millions and billions of bits of digitised information that add up to genes and
combinations of genes that programme the various parts of the human body, its
maintenance, the death of cells and eventually the demise of the entire organism.
It is quite a business, made possible by the exponential growth of computerisation,
and in particular the work of a person after whom the writers visiting professorship
at the California Institute of Technology is named, Gordon Moore. Gordon Moore,
founder of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors that could be placed on a
computer chip would double every 18 months, and so it has been for over 30 years.
But people should not be misled by Sydney Brenners lovely, dolorous sense of
humour: the information demands in genomics are staggering. The genome contains
two kinds of digital information, one that encodes the protein and RNA molecular
machines of life, and the other being the regulatory networks that specify how these
genes are expressed in time, space and amplitude.
DNA information is layered and arranged in a hierarchy, starting with the gene,
then the RNA, then the protein, then the protein interactions, then the protein
complexes, then the networks of protein complexes in a cell, then the tissues and
organs, then the individual organism, followed by populations and the ecosystems in
which they live. In this kind of discovery science, mastering such vast quantities of
information to answer important questions is a skill and an art.
And the hardware? The first automated sequencing machine took a day, in 1986,
to sequence 250 of the three billion base pairs. It took the human genome project
ten years to sequence the human genome, two years shorter than predicted; and the
private company Celera with its so-called shotgun approach took less than the public
consortiums ten, using a warehouse of computers to do so. With single-DNA-
molecule sequencing, we foresee a time say the inventors of the first sequencing
machine when the entire genome of an individual could be sequenced in a single

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 Africa in the Age of Biology

day at a cost of less than $10 000 (compared to the $50 million it would cost today)
(Hood & Galas 2003: 131).
The full human genome is publicly available, and if one has the hardware and
Internet connection, for free, anyone can download that part of the genome that
would be of interest to them. We have to thank, among others, the Wellcome Trust
for that. And so, in Africa, there are institutions that specialise in bioinformatics,
although it is not known at what level of information scientists are working in
Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, South
Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. An African Bioinformatics Network
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(Abionet) has as affiliated institutions the University of Benin, the International

Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), the South African National
Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape, the University of
Pretoria, the University of Mali and several other institutions. Abionets mission
summarises the abiding passion of geneticists working in Africa today:

The purpose of the network is to enable African scientists to unlock the scientific
potential of recent advances in genomics in order to accelerate medical advances
against infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS that are
still killing so many in Africa. The recent availability of genomic data from a wide
range of organisms, including common African pathogens, presents new challenges
for biologists, sociologists, mathematicians and computer scientists alike. (African
Bioinformatics Network n.d.)

The human host to disease has been sequenced, as have the genomes of the
pathogens. It is the interaction between host and pathogen which has to be
understood properly, and remedies and interventions developed. Last year, about
a fifth of the inaugural conference of the Africa Genome Initiative, entitled the
Human Genome and Africa, was devoted to what is called pathogen genomics.
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, it was indeed a mini-conference in the bigger event.
Currently, scientists are looking carefully at the ethical and legal considerations in
drug and vaccine discovery and will probably focus on drugs and vaccines for
effective public health care responses to Africas three killer diseases at the conference
in 2005, likely to be held in Kenya.
At the inaugural conference, virologist and Nobel Laureate David Baltimore
argued that current HIV vaccine development is unlikely to be successful because of
HIVs instability and rapid evolutionary mutation. He put forward the proposition
that an immunity protein requires engineering and has allocated a company to work
on the idea.

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Mathew Berriman of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, whose area of expertise
is the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, said genomics do advance research but
that in the next five years, it is unlikely we will see any benefits. Over the next 10
years, some knowledge will seep through, and aid understanding of the mechanisms
of drug resistance. But the most significant impacts will be in the 20 year timescale,
with drugs and vaccines for treating the disease (Genome News, Supplement to the
Mail & Guardian 6 June 2003, p. 4).
Then there is also the story of tuberculosis, as told by Stewart Cole of the Institute
Pasteur. Tuberculosis has a dreadful synergy with HIV and is largely a social disease
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as a consequence of poverty and poor housing; on the bacterial and viral side, it is also
now better understood as a result of genomics. Genetic mapping, he says suggested
the human and animal strains of tuberculosis once shared a progenitor, but evolved
independently(Genome News, Supplement to the Mail & Guardian 6 June 2003,
p. 4). A remedy, though, is not in sight.
It may be, in the North, that one result will be the emergence of personalised
medicine, of having drugs and interventions designed specifically for the unique
modality of one persons disease profile; because having so many polymorphisms
associated with disease susceptibility brought DNA diagnosis to medicine and
opened the pathway to truly predictive medicine, where the risks of disease can be
identified in advance of symptoms (Hood & Galas 2003: 131). We in the South,
as elsewhere, need to work hard at figuring out how to make genomics relevant to
clinical practice in private and public medicine, so that it does not remain with the
privileged and elite few.
In the South, it is also about bringing killer diseases under control. That is a job on its
own, requiring extraordinary investment that simply is not there or easily forthcoming.
In the, I believe, undervalued report Genomics and world health, the authors say the
following in terms of what to expect from the private sector: The private sector does not
invest in research aimed at diagnostics or therapeutics for diseases that are predominant
in developing countries because the populations most likely to need them do not have
purchasing power. ... In 1997, for example, it was estimated that low and medium
income countries accounted for only 20% of the global pharmaceutical market, even
though they made up over 80% of the worlds population. They go on to add that
although public research funding has considerations other than profit maximisation,
it is nevertheless sadly the case that pneumonia, diarrhea, tuberculosis and malaria,
which together account for more than 20% of the disease burden of the world, receive
less than 1% of the total public and private funds devoted to health research. In 1998,
out of the US$70 billion global spending on health research, only US$300 million

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 Africa in the Age of Biology

was directed to vaccines for HIV/AIDS and US$100 million to malaria research
(Weatherall, Brock & Chee 2002: 1718).
A five to 20-year time span for results from the revolution in genomic and post-
genomic biomedicine to make a real difference in Africa does not sound right and is
surely unacceptable; it is a reflection of the irrationality of a global system that has to be
redirected by focused African-sourced investments, by governments, in creating properly
functioning public health systems built in part around thinking institutions, and the
university-private sector partnerships in genomic research and development. It is indeed
a pleasure to note the creation of the Institute for Infectious Diseases and Molecular
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Medicine at the University of Cape Town and the new Biosciences Facility that has been
established in Kenya. Also, of course, Ain Shams Universitys centre for bio-engineering,
which is another emerging centre of excellence along these lines. Development here is
wholly our responsibility, for many of us have allowed the little we had during colonialism
to collapse, with of course some notable exceptions. And it is also our responsibility to
invest generously in African entrepreneurs in the biomedical and biotechnological arenas
by providing the avenues for venture capital and technical expertise; all this helped along
by northern hemisphere corporate partnerships and, when necessary, aid. NEPAD has
already moved into this area, which is welcome, but the scale of the challenge needs to be
matched by the scale of the necessary investment.

...
Marketing information for a new diet tablet called Hoodia gives the nutritional
content as follows (as required by United States law):
Chromium 100 mg
Calcium pyruvate 48 mg
Hoodia gordonii 20: 150 mg
Citrus pectin 40 mg
Grapefruit seed extract 30 mg
Prune 30 mg
All this is caffeine free, ephedra free and stimulant free a diet pill unlike any
other, the advertisement says; 90 tablets for just $29,95!
Hoodia, it turns out, is a natural appetite suppressant used in [t]he harsh
environments in which the Kung! Bushmen have lived for thousands of years; here
where hunters are on the hunt sometimes for days, Hoodia suppresses hunger and
meets considerable energy requirements. The San call the cactus !khoba and have

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been chewing on it for thousands of years to stave off hunger and thirst during
long hunting trips in their parched Kalahari Desert home, writes Leon Marshall
for National Geographic News (Marshall 2003). Expert natural botanists, the Kung!
Bushmen can readily identify more than 300 different types of plants with different
properties, of which Hoodia is a key but hardly the only such plant, leaving the perhaps
naive or indifferent Kung! Bushmen open to exploitation by modern pharmaceutical
companies, seeking a profit by turning natural remedies into commercial, biomedical
interventions. And, indeed, pharmaceutical companies have begun to, as they put
it, bio-prospect in extreme and harsh environments that could make possible even
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more fantastic scientific and commercial feats. Billions of US dollars are at stake,
says Elizabeth Weise of USA Today with a sense of the journalistically spectacular:
Possible discoveries include detergents made from enzymes that work much better
than existing products in cold water; color pigments in cloth that dont degrade in
heat, made from microbes that thrive in hellishly hot water; and antibiotics strong
enough to kill off even the most drug-resistant bugs that pop up in our hospitals
(Weise 2004: 9D).
Some of these organisms living in extreme places fall under no single national
authority, such as those in Antarctica, the deep sea-bed or even, who knows,
the moon and Mars; by no means a far-fetched idea, given the recent landing of
scientifically loaded rovers on the planet nearest to ours. So, for example, activities
on the worlds most inhospitable continent [Antarctica] are overseen by 54 countries
that are party to the Antarctic Treaty System. As bio-prospecting does not fall under
this treaty, the scientific advisors to the United Nations recently presented a report
outlining more comprehensive and inclusive international agreements to include
protection against what are called bio-prospecting and bio-piracy.
In the instance of Hoodia, an interesting model arose, though the jury is still out on
whether it is working or not: the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research (CSIR), in whose laboratories P57 was identified as Hoodia gordonii, will
pay a representative body of the San eight per cent of milestone payments made by
its licensee, the United Kingdom pharmaceutical company Phytopharm, during the
drugs clinical development. This payment came to more than $1million. But the
biggest revenues would derive from the agreed six per cent in royalties paid to the
San if and when the drug is marketed by Pfizer, which in turn has been licensed
by Phytopharm. National Geographic News remarks that given the international
demand for obesity drugs, the market for P57 could run to billions of dollars.
Unorganised, poor, marginalised, abused, and lurching towards extinction, these
oldest of ancient peoples bear genetic materials that are of the greatest depth and

10

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most diverse historically, likely the ancestors to all of us. To them, Hoodia may bring
some fortune, some salvation. It has invited organisational structures and a leadership
that were not there before, at least not with the same clarity of purpose, to receive
and distribute funds to the San community, entering thereby the domain of politics;
for who is the San community, and on what basis and on whose terms do those
who distribute scarce resources distribute them, especially in a community that is so
lacking in even the most elementary of services?
And so the South African San Council emerged in 2001 to represent some San
tribes, as did a Trust, whose purpose it is to use income received from the CSIR for
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general upliftment, development and training of the San community approved by the
Board of Trustees. This Board consists of seven individuals drawn from the ranks of
the San, NGOs and the South African Government. Human rights lawyers and those
with modern professional skills who could help represent the interests of minority
and indigenous communities at local, regional and world bodies came forth to assist;
here the South African San Institute (SASI) has played a particularly beneficial role.
The legal issue, one that pertains worldwide including Africa, concerns the role of
patents in respect of biological and botanical knowledge.
Recently the United Nations expressed its concern over bio-prospecting in
Antarctica by pharmaceutical companies in search of unique organisms that can be
used for commercial purposes. The bio-prospectors, who speak of the last frontiers,
search in what are known as hydrothermal events: the deep sea-bed, the water column
of the high seas and polar ice caps.
The United Nations University, based in Tokyo, recently published a report
recommending a range of rules to regulate bio-prospecting. Isolating and extracting
the substances that allow organisms to survive in one of the earths harshest
environments could lead to new cancer treatment drugs, antibiotics and industrial
compounds, the report says. One valuable substance is glyco-proteins, which
function as antifreeze in some of the fish there and prevent them, obviously, from
freezing to death. If isolated and produced, antifreeze substances could be used for
raising the freeze tolerance of commercial plants, improving farm fish production in
cold climates and extending the shelf life of frozen foods (Stoddard n.d.).
The report sums up the difficulties: Companies are concerned because there is no
title in these resources ... ownership is undefined. They can spend millions developing
a product with questions remaining about ownership, said one of the co-authors
of the report, Sam Johnston. On the other hand, scientists concerns are that the
commercial nature of this will take away from the transparency and cooperation which
is the hallmark of Antarctic research, Johnston reportedly added. The Convention on

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Biological Diversity, which emanated from the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, a
model of its kind in regulating bio-prospecting on paper, simply had not worked, with
the result that a country like Brazil, with its equatorial forests, felt pressed to close its
national borders and prohibit any of its biological materials from leaving.
Of course, the search to find within nature answers to at some times difficult and
at other times ephemeral problems of humankind opens up ethical and legal frontiers
that involve the disciplines that worry about these things: law, philosophy, ethics
and, as it turns out, anthropology and sociology.
A current research theme concerns the ethical and legal issues involved in drug
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and vaccine discovery, the idea being to chart the terrain for Africa in anticipation
of having such interventions to deal with, given the continents substantial disease
burden. Rules have to be defined according to which African populations can be used
as subjects to discover the genetic basis of some inherited (and acquired) diseases, to
test vaccines and drugs in development, and to start making clear sense of what can
be done to start resisting that poor precedent and bad habit set in the United States of
patenting everything that moves, including various bits of human genome sequence.
At the same time, though, one obviously understands the need for companies to
protect, justify and recoup their considerable investments.
But many drugs that can make a huge difference to the health of African populations
are not covered by patent law. At the 2003 conference of the Africa Genome Initiative,
Gordon Dougan of Imperial Colleges Centre for Molecular Microbiology called on
African countries to take advantage of new genomic technology and develop their
own drugs, and mentioned India and Cuba in particular in this regard.
Technology associated with genome sequencing has made the process of drug and
(some) vaccine development much simpler.
Dougan said that the development of vaccines in developing countries had fallen back
in the last 20 years and was now concentrated in the hands of four major multinational
companies. Generic vaccines, Gordon added, could be made by anybody and Africa
should also start developing vaccines to immunize its population against diseases which
are prevalent in this region (Daniels 2003: 6). A senior African scientist, who is also a
member of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), light-heartedly observed that,
from the point of view of manufacturing some generic drugs and vaccines, it would
be like brewing beer, and without patents to worry about, quite straightforward.
Therefore, what Africa needs are entrepreneurs in this field and some venture capital
to get them going. By no means a small point, as Africa lacks entrepreneurs in the
biotechnological, medical and pharmaceutical areas. It is not enough to have the science
and technology; entrepreneurs are crucial for development and success.

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 Africa in the Age of Biology

Then there is the question of genetically modified foods. Attention was focused
on this issue by Zambias refusal to accept genetically modified crops as aid because,
said Drinah Nyirenda, a former University of Zambia dean and executive director
of the Zambian Programme Against Malnutrition, of the countrys concerns about
the effect that genetically modified food would have on the environment and
maintaining the diversity of local crops (Nyirenda 2003).
For Africa as a whole, the story is more complicated. South Africa is the only country
on the continent with commercialised, genetically modified crops. The director of
Genetic Resources at the Department of Agriculture, Dr Shadrack Moephuli, is
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quoted as being an upbeat supporter of what genetically modified crops might bring
to the countrys vast population of poor people: South Africas impoverished rural
people would be the main beneficiaries of controversial genetically modified organism
technology. He added: At the moment trials are ongoing with maize and cotton.
These are being done with small scale subsistence farmers in rural areas. These are the
kinds of areas where it is important to realize the benefits of food security that can come
with crops that are resistant to pests (Seccombe 2000). More than mere experiment,
South Africa had 163 000 hectares of genetically modified yellow maize and a further
18 000 hectares of genetically modified cotton in the 1999 to 2000 season.
Still, South Africa is a signatory to the BioSafety Protocol, and its openness
towards commercialised, genetically modified crops might bring it into conflict with
the Southern African Development Community (SADC) whose members differ in
their stance. Malawi, Namibia and Zimbabwe, for example, do not accept genetically
modified crops unless they are milled first; and only the latter country is conducting
research on the commercial production of various genetically modified agricultural
products.
The irony of having some African countries, which in the past could feed their
people, now turning back genetically modified seeds or crops is only made less
painful by what is described as the aggressively self-interested commercial stance of
the United States in its search for markets in the European Union, having secondary
consequences for the much smaller and probably less important markets of Africa.
Referring to the US challenge to the EU at the World Trade Organization, Amadou
Kanoute, the Africa Director of Consumers International, said that the United States
lawsuit against the European Union to ease restrictions and standards will boomerang
against the United States because so many countries are in the process of developing
regulatory systems for genetic modification. In fairly typical and not altogether
inaccurately a manner, Kanoute said that he believes the Bush administrations main
goal in launching the WTO case is not concern about Africa food production and

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 Wilmot James

hunger, but the export of US corn to the $300 million European market (Kanoute
2003).
While the big boys fight it out then, African countries are keen to adopt what is
known as bio-safety measures, in protocols globally and legislation nationally. But
this clamour to regulate hides an alarming lack of capacity to discriminate between
which genetically modified crops are genuinely harmful to people, biodiversity and
the environment, and in what measure, and which are not, by many governments
lacking expertise in modern agriculture and food production in the era of molecular
biology and genomes. Africa could certainly do with a continental resource to provide
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good advice to governments in the area of genetically modified foods, backed up by

good science. Possibly, it is a continental resource that could be provided by the New
Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) too; and there are also other global
agencies like the World Health Organization.
People should not be fooled by the claim that genetically modified foods are the
answer to problems of poverty, malnourishment and development in Africa. That
would be to misdiagnose the problem, poorly understand the motives of commercial
bio-agriculture and naively trust governments of the North about the altruistic
benefits of accepting their exports. George Monbiot writes as follows in the Guardian
of 9 March 2004:

GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them.

They can patent the seeds and the processes that give rise to them. They can make sure
that crops cant be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds
from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seeds companies and closing
them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market. No
one in her right mind would welcome this.

He goes on to talk about how some genetically modified crops do have higher yields
and how some too can be changed to have more nutrients, though both these
developments can be over hyped and require rigorous scrutiny before such crops are
imported and used. Monbiot mentions the project to engineer sweet potato to resist
viruses in Kenya as having collapsed, despite $6 million in funding from Monsanto,
The World Bank and the United States, whereas across the border, in Uganda, a far
cheaper and conventional breeding programme has doubled sweet potato yields. It
turns out, too, that the other Kenya project to engineer vitamin-enriched rice also
collapsed before starting because it appears as if malnourished people appear not to
be able to absorb Vitamin A in this form (Monbiot 2004: 23).

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Still, Monbiot overstates his point; what we simply need is the capacity for
rational, scientific, common sense assessments of what is good for us and what is
not; and while we are busy doing that, we should not wreck but build and rebuild
the agricultural economies that in the past fed Africas people. For biotechnology in
food production is neither the panacea nor the evil imperial plot it is made out to be;
everything depends, as always, on what we make of and do with the biotechnology,
which in turn depends on what we make of our agricultural economies.

...
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Public-private partnerships in the biotechnology era between knowledge centres such as

universities or institutes and (especially) pharmaceutical companies can be as lucrative
as they are challenging in the governance area: a recent controversy at the University
of California at Berkeley over whether a corporate funder of a major science project
should have a seat on the governing body overseeing the work indicates that the issue
is germane everywhere and not only in Africa, where there is a standing accusation
from certain quarters that African institutions are mere platforms for the interests of
the multinational pharmaceutical companies and donor country interests seeking less
restrictive places to bio-prospect, test and market new biotechnology products.
As a test of the integrity of what it is we do, we should ask how biotechnological
research in Africa feeds back into the teaching of modern biology at its universities,
the training of the next generation of research scientists, and the establishment and
maintenance of quality research laboratories a rare commodity on this continent.
We should return to the well-tried and tested partnership between research and
teaching, so valued in university life and so central to the evolution of new ideas. There
is nothing so important to keeping ones balance as having to conduct research and to
teach the younger generation to test hypotheses in the laboratory and in the classroom
with young active minds; and the central question is how well both are done in Africa
in the various areas of biology that have been remade and reorganised by the rapid
development of genetics. Certainly none of the disciplines and subdisciplines including
anatomy, botany, ecology, embryology, histology, immunology, medicine, mycology,
neuroscience, pathology, pharmacology, physiology, systematics, veterinary medicine,
virology and both vertebrate and invertebrate zoology have been untouched by the
extraordinary advances in molecular and cell biology, biophysics, biochemistry and
genetics. These are breathtakingly represented by the human genome project, one of the

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great accomplishments built on the cumulative advances in biology over the course of
the 19th and 20th centuries.
Although we might have an idea derived from anecdotal personal experience,
no systematic assessment of what is taught today at university level across Africa
in the biological and life sciences has emerged. It is a challenge for bodies like the
academies of sciences to see what can be done about this hiatus, for we need to
know in order to monitor progress and to encourage and support what is already
being done. A significant grant ought to be made to the association of academies
of science to assess the quality, scale and depth of the teaching of modern biology
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at all African universities. A disturbing trend is that organisations that are making a
name for themselves in this area are increasingly uninvolved in the teaching arena,
and indeed see it as a burden, which means the benefits of new knowledge remain
locked up in the corporation or government department or in the narrow halls of
the institute. What is the use of that for future generations, and how disturbing it is
for the vocation of education to be reduced in such a manner? The success of serious
biological science in Singapore, says Sydney Brenner, was not simply the investment
from government, which was indeed generous, but having a critical mass of scientists,
postdoctoral students and university departments to carry the initiative forward with
their expertise and energy and look at the results they achieved.
It is, from the point of view of research, obviously the case that many scientists
in Africa do ongoing research of great importance, and judging by the work done at
the 2004 Cairo, the 2003 Spier and other discipline-based conferences that happen
all the time, we are not a complacent community. It is, though, also quite striking,
if not altogether unsurprising, that African or African-trained scientists who receive
what is regarded as the pinnacle of global recognition by way of the Nobel Prizes in
Chemistry and Physiology and Medicine invite such recognition by virtue of work
done at research laboratories at universities or institutes in the North, and specifically
in the United States and United Kingdom. In these countries there are abundant
resources, a critical mass of scholars, well-provisioned laboratories, and a working
and defined research culture. But it is also true that the Nobel Laureates from Africa
completed their basic university training, almost without exception, in their home
countries; there is as a result nothing here to be ashamed of, although there is a great
deal concerning current quality in some quarters to worry about.
It is true for the Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail, now at the California Institute
of Technology, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 for his study
of the transition states of chemical reactions using what is known as femtosecond
spectroscopy. Zewail started what Bengt Norden in his Nobel Prize address described

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 Africa in the Age of Biology

as a new field of femtochemistry, which is using the fastest camera in the world, a
method of capturing how a molecule passes the transition state as fast as the atoms in
the molecule move. Zewails use of the fast laser technique can be likened to Galileos
telescope, no small compliment in the history of science (Norden 2002:253).
It is true for the South African born Sydney Brenner, who won the Nobel Prize for
Physiology and Medicine in 2002, shared between three scientists for their discoveries
of the regime of genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death
of a completely sequenced and biologically fully described everyday garden worm
that goes by the unpronounceable (at least the first part of it) name of Caenorhabditis
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elegans. At the inaugural Africa Genome Initiative meetings in Stellenbosch last year,
Brenner described what he would like to do in biology for the human genome, which
would be to collect what he calls humanitys genes, much as he did with C. elegans,
which was to provide a full biological description of what every part of the organism
does down to its finest detail.
It is true for Sir Aaron Krug, who spent his younger years in South Africa
and received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1982 for his development of
crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of the biologically
important nuclei-acid protein complex. Sir Aaron was an important contemporary of
James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, all involved
in establishing that the architectural structure of DNA is double helical, which
permitted them, in their now famous understatement of the century, to identify the
copying mechanism for DNA and thus provide the answer to one of lifes greatest
mysteries: how does heredity work?
And I must add that it is true for South African Max Theiler for his discoveries
concerning yellow fever and how to combat it (Nobel Prize in Physiology and
Medicine in 1951), as well as for Allan Cormack, for the development of computer-
assisted tomography (Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1979).
Those who can are returning the investment. Sir Aaron is a co-patron of the recently
formed Institute for Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDMM) at the
University of Cape Town. Established in order to consolidate and expand existing
efforts to combat the most serious threats to health and overall prosperity in the region:
infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, TB, parasitic infections, locally prevalent
cancers and genetic disorders, the IDMM has a compelling vision to be a research
body capable of relevant, cutting edge biomedical research, employing enabling and
emerging technologies, embedded in an environment where clinical and research skills
are well developed (Institute of Infectious Disease 2003). It seeks to combat some of
Africas viral, bacterial and parasitic diseases on a regional level.

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 Wilmot James

Other powerful regional centres of biomedical research include the International

Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and the International Centre for Insect Physiology
and Ecology (ICIPE), both in Kenya, and the Ain Shams University in Egypt, which
serves as a biomedical hub for north-east Africa. There are emerging possibilities for
West and Central Africa too, indicating the groundswell of local African initiatives
that cannot, however, proceed without considerable global support, subject as it is to
the fluctuating economic and political pulse of the North.
And then there are, finally, individuals such as Sarah Tishkoff, Trefor Jenkins and
Himla Soodyall who bring to bear the considerable and penetrating hypotheses of
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evolutionary biology to African history, specifically in an effort to link population

genetics to the ancestry of African and global populations fascinating subject matter
that is beginning to have some impact, but not enough, on the historiography of
Africa. Certainly, benchmark publications like the Unesco history of Africa require
an engagement with the journey of life mapped out by mitochondrial DNA and
the Y chromosome in the writing of what has been called African pre-history, which
goes back to human origins and the diffusion of modern Homo sapiens populations
throughout the globe. The recent focus on genetic bottlenecks is a key contribution
in this direction, leading, it is my hope, to the revision of existing and the publication
of new volumes in the Unesco series. As Richard Dawkins puts it in a characteristic
flourish of science and poetry, [e]volution is an enchanted loom of shuttling DNA
codes, whose evanescent patterns, as they dance their partners though geological deep
time, weave a massive database of ancestral wisdom, a digitally coded description of
ancestral worlds and what it took to survive in them (Dawkins 1996: 24). And as I
began this paper with mathematics, I end it with the observation that Africa in the
Age of Biology is part of the lovely story about breaking down knowledge boundaries
fixed here and elsewhere, and that we should link the sciences, the humanities and
the social sciences in answering some basic questions on our origins, life and destiny
in this world.

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