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In the book you talk about the importance of discriminating between science fact and science fiction—we aren’t headed toward Brave New World.
Yes, designer genes and cloning will never work. There is a difference between principle and practice. You might say, "Well, they have a technique which works now," and this is true, you can make a cloned sheep, and you can make a cloned cat—but in humans it will never work. Humans are something very different from animals, and the numbers required to get cloning to work in animals are completely prohibitory with humans.
Are the possibilities of stem cells exaggerated as well?
Some people think that whenever you find something you will cure this disease or that disease—when scientists find an enzyme that prolongs the life of a worm by a couple of days, then they say, "This is something! We will live forever!" And of course it's not true. People exaggerate these findings so much, and they do it because they think they will get more research money. But you cannot just buy a treatment by putting more money into a particular field. It works differently—it works more by chance. You have to have a good grounding and have good ideas and be well-educated and do interesting things, and then every now and then something will pop up—but you cannot push too hard! You cannot say, "This must work now!" If you want to climb a mountain, often the direct way is not the right way, often it's better to go in circles.
Will there be breakthroughs within your lifetime?
You get answers all the time, of course, small answers to big questions. But big breakthroughs, I don't know.
What is the biggest question in biology?
Understanding evolution, how animals and plants and organisms evolved and formed shapes and adapted to different environmental conditions—I think that's fascinating, and we have very good theories, but the exact path is not really very well known. We also don't really know how diversity arises, how we get new species and this enormous diversity in shape and form.
Is that what you're working on now?
Yes, that's much of my research, how you get diversity. When you compare genes from different animals, you find very similar genes in worms and in flies and in humans, and this doesn't really explain how they got different. And I want to know why.
Are you still working with drosophila?
We are now mostly working with zebra fish. There is great variation in fishes, and if we can understand it in fishes then perhaps we can also figure out the differences in mammals. And it's much easier to work with fishes than with mammals.
Why is it easier to work with fish than, say, mice?
Mice are live-bearing, and their embryos are small and you can't look at them. Fish lay clear eggs and you don't have to kill the mother in order to look at the babies, which you have to do in mice.
How many fish do you have right now?
We have about 10,000 aquaria. It's a big house with five rooms. And the total number of fish is probably 500,000.
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