The law of unintended consequences

Russ Swan finds the unpredictable outcomes of genetic sequencing technology, well, rather predictable

Of all the laws of the universe, from Murphy's to Boyle's to Newton's third, I think my favourite has to be the law of unintended consequences. You know the sort of thing: the US government bans alcohol, with the result that bootleggers fill the void and in the process get very rich. Alcohol consumption is scarcely changed, but tax revenues disappear and criminal suppliers become more powerful.

Or, more disastrously, nuclear power stations are sited on the coast in order to be provided with a ready supply of cooling water, but essential equipment and back-ups are positioned in basements where they are incapacitated when that cooling water arrives in an unforeseen tsunami.

On a philosophical level, the law of unintended consequences is at the very core of modern scientific thought. The butterfly effect is a popular example – stating that a tiny disturbance in atmospheric movement caused by a single beat of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon rain forest can trigger a tropical storm which devastates northern cities a week or two later. Unintended consequences is closely related to chaos theory and fractal geometry and all that other stuff that seems to be finding its way into Hollywood plots lately.

And now it is threatening to undermine one of the very pillars of the British establishment. Bear with me on this.

Perhaps the greatest advance in laboratory science in recent years has been the extraordinary boom in nucleic acid handling. What was once the stuff of fantasy has become, in just a few years, routine and even hum drum. While visiting top university recently, I overheard an undergraduate conversation about how tedious the lab practicals involving PCR were.

Tedious! This is an astonishing technology with the power to unlock the very essence of life – even more amazing for having become simple and cheap. What took some of the finest scientific minds of the 20th century the best part of their careers to create is now merely a chore to be done on the way to the next subsidised pint of watered-down lager.

One of the unexpected outcomes of the great Crick and Watson breakthrough in determining the structure of DNA has been the adoption of the double-helix as a motif both of scientific understanding and the elegant beauty of nature. The door handles of the Royal Society in London neatly incorporate the pattern into a glassy matrix, while top architects shamelessly pass off nature's great design as their own innovative take on a spiral staircase. You don't have to look far, these days, to see the pattern applied everywhere from the packaging on toiletries to the corporate logos of financial institutions.

Recently we've seen an alternative representation of nucleic acids become a popular device – instead of the double helix, the barcode-of-life design is becoming the graphical meme of our times. To you and me, this is little more than the pattern on a gel electrophoresis plate, but to the Great Unwashed (or perhaps undenatured) it has become the new method of expressing individuality.

There has been an explosion in the number of services offering to create an individual genetic fingerprint from a mouth swab, and turn it into a unique artwork. I have to confess a little scepticism about how genuine some of these really are, as one person's output image is utterly indistinguishable from any other. For all you know, that expensive Perspex artwork could be displaying a few bands sequenced from a cabbage rather than your inner cheek.

The latest wacky interpretation of this science-as-art phenomenon may just become one of those examples of unintended consequences. The British aristocracy has for generations been obsessed with the preservation of its DNA, apparently believing there is something special about whatever genetic coding is responsible for chinless halfwittery or horse-facedness, but of course they didn’t appreciate that that's what they were doing. How could they? Simply marrying your cousin was enough to keep the blood blue and preserve the lineage.

Now, though, they've caught on to the sculptural potential of their 'superior' DNA. Few families are as aristocratic as the Cavendishes, perhaps better known as the Devonshires. The present Duke of Devonshire last month announced a scheme to incorporate the family DNA into the very fabric of the ancestral pile at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, via some mumbo-jumbo involving handmade ceramic panels which interpret their genetic code and which will form an entire room (well, they have 130 rooms to play with, so why not?)

This bonkers plan is an excellent example of unintended consequences. Not only could Crick and Watson never have imagined anything remotely so narcissistic when struggling to determine the secret of life, the generations who fought to keep the blood lines pure could never have foreseen that, in the early 21st century, the mantle of aristocracy would be passed on through hard solids like ceramics, rather than soft ones like, well, the next generation.