Listeners to BBC Radio 4's "Moral Maze' last night will have been interested to hear the well-known geneticist, Prof Steve Jones, say that the dilemma faced by the scientist was the difficulty in distinguishing when one knew almost everything and when one knew almost nothing. Prof Jones went on to say that, in his view, in the case of biology we know almost nothing. This would seem to be a slightly more elegant expression of the sentiment expressed by J. Craig Venter, president of the Celera Corp, who delivered the genome text to Science:

"We don't know shit about biology."

Prof Jones, incidentally, although avowedly anti-"green", has in the past expressed profound environmental concerns about recombinant DNA technologies (most commonly referred to as genetic engineering), complaining about the reckless myopia and bad science underlying such approaches which fail to take account of the inter-linked multi-dimensional nature of the genome:

“So confident are the [bio]technicians of the safety of their products that each one is seen as no more than an  arbitrary mix of independent lengths of DNA. Their view takes no account of the notion of species as interacting groups of genes, the properties of one ... depending upon the others with which it is placed.” [http://www.usinfo.state.gov/topical/global/biotech/specter.htm ]

And in Prof Jones’ view things could easily go disastrously wrong as a result of recombinant DNA technologies:

“Those genes are going to get out into other plants. Everybody knows that. And we have no idea what is going to happen... A tiny accident, one gene leaking out, can have massive consequences” [Leading geneticist urges GM caution http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_315000/315566.stm ]