My latest contribution to the Slate book club on Denialism is here. Most of the discussion concerns how to prompt a broader national debate on the subject of synthetic biology, a branch of science with revolutionary possibility that most Americans have never even heard of. Alas, I’m not optimistic this will change any time soon:
In today’s media world, you really need a national leader to broach such a conversation—e.g., President Obama, as you suggest in your book. While I’d be happy to be proven wrong, though, I doubt he has the time to bring up such a dark-horse topic, especially in light of all the other policy fires that must be put out. Without a presidential initiative, we lack an adequate national forum for discussing the complex and crucial problems that science lays before us. (Don’t expect synthetic biology to come up on Oprah; as you point out, she is too busy providing a platform for vaccine skeptics like Jenny McCarthy.)
As a result, synthetic biology may be fully upon us before people start thinking about it. And it will likely come to broader attention only as a result of some kind of political controversy—just as occurred with embryonic stem cell research or genetically modified foods. At that point, I fear, we’ll simply become polarized over the issue.
You can read my full reply here.
November 6th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
FYI – Science Friday has a segment on synthetic biology on today’s show: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200911063
November 6th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
The only people who need to think about it are the people working with it. I don’t even see this as anything new; it looks to me like yet another case of people looking for a name to sell.
For the past 15 years everything has been ‘nano’ and despite the fantastic claims of just about every nano-brain on the planet, very little of any use has come from ‘nanotech’ and many things which would fall squarely in other disciplines such as carbon fibers in material engineering are now being rebranded ‘nanotech’.
As for the ’synthetic biology’ – someone wake us up when they’ve done anything extraordinary. It has been decades since e. coli was tweaked to produce human compatible insulin and similar work is currently being done with a range of bacteria and fungi as well as crop plants. So there’s really nothing to dialogue about; this is all old hat and people are simply going about their business prodding to see what they can do. The only possible purpose of a ‘dialogue’ would be to create the incorrect impression that (a) this is new stuff and (b) it is somehow a threat to humans.
November 7th, 2009 at 10:08 am
I haven’t commented on this because I wasn’t that aware of Specter until this week. While there is a lot I can agree with he sometimes comes across as a higher brow John Stossel.
I don’t trust scientists with a financial, professional or personal status interest with being able to objectively judge the dangers of their producing self-replicating entities into the environment. I don’t trust their friends and colleagues to police them or to report objectively on the risks. And the history of such stuff leads me to believe that it’s not a question of if but when these things get into the environment.
November 7th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Our species has been living since 1945 with the threat of near future self-extinction via a nuclear war because humans evolved with an easily triggered instinct for war. Our entire history is a history of self destructive wars in which we only avoided self-extinction because we didn’t have nuclear weapons. That war instinct is in our DNA because it evolved about 70,000 years ago and saved our ancestors from extinction by competing “homo erectus,” social hunters long mistakenly believe to be our direct ancestors. Darwin never noticed the Crimean War, or any other human wars. Once we killed off our social hunter, non direct ancestor, almost human competitors, we started making war on other humans with different skin colors, cultures, lanquanges, cultures, religions, etc. DNA geneticist Richard Lewontin of Harvard found no basis for the excuse that human “races” exist and wars are simply their way of competing with with each other. Why, then do we make war so enthusiastically and kill each other en masse with such pleasure. Theoretically “synthetic biology” can remove our “war instinct” DNA that we inherit that will otherwise cause our nuclear self-extinction in the very near future. The only real question is can our synthetic biologists locate and remove that DNA in time. That should be the highest priority of all humans, especially of all scientists.
November 8th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Does anybody agree with me?
November 23rd, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Ed McGrath
you’re not entirely wrong, but don’t forget two important things. First, all studies suggest empirically that human beings have been dying from murder/killing by other humans at a continually decreasing rate (in proportion to population) since our Out of Africa Days. Also, while competition was a prominent quality in our evolutionary past so too was cooperation. In many ways cooperation (at least the degree to which humans do it) is one of the distinguishing features of humans compared with animals.