Today we tackle a rather complex issue:

There has been a lot of, perhaps underserved, resistance to a number of bio-science applications (eg. GM food, stem cells, cloning). Do you forsee any future applications that should be restricted or regulated?

MT: I’ve got a lot of good commentary on this Brain Parade from people who are much more knowledgeable and articulate on the subject than I am so instead of giving you my two pence let’s just get straight to the commentators:

Russell Blackford:This is an issue that consumes my waking thoughts. One difficulty is that we don’t know in advance what technologies will prove to be possible in what timeframes, or what the social impacts will be. We can explore scenarios in our thinking - and of course serious science fiction does this all the time, often in great depth - but none of us are prophets. The best science fiction writers will tell you that their work uses models of the future to reflect on the present, and perhaps on where we are going. Whatever else it may be, it is not meant to be predictive. Joe Haldeman is very firm on this point, and he is absolutely right.

What we can be confident of is that there will be massive technological, economic, and social change in the coming decades and centuries, just as there has been throughout the modern period (since the Renaissance, the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, and especially since the Industrial Revolution). We just don’t know the form it will take. In those circumstances, we can contemplate the future with fear and hostility, or we can be cautiously optimistic, as I am.

Many new technologies will require regulation of some kind for safety and efficiency. That is typical of technological change. For example, no one wants to see a drug that contributes to better health, longevity, or memory - but only at the cost of triggering schizophrenia in a significant percentage of people who use it. At a minimum, any new innovations that might enhance human capabilities will need to be subjected to some kind of detailed regulatory regime to ensure that they are essentially safe for public use. Similarly, a powerful form of molecular-level engineering technology would have to be restricted in whatever ways were required to ensure safety. I’m not convinced that we should take the so-called grey goo problem all that seriously, but any powerful technology can be misused or have intrinsic dangers - we will need to have regulations to deal with this. We will inevitably, and rightly, monitor new technologies and try to reduce their dangers while obtaining their benefits - just as we do with, say, the motor car, the contraceptive pill, and the Internet.

For me, the more interesting question is whether some technologies should be suppressed altogether - perhaps permanently, perhaps for a period of time. I’m temperamentally opposed to this. Calls for legal bans are often based on the “yuck factor”, more-or-less irrational fears about the future, or a kind of sentimentalism about the present (or the recent past) - as if our current/recent institutions and ways of doing things can be retained forever and any change to them will render human life horrible or meaningless. Much of my work involves trying to sort out what it is in the human psyche or the human condition that causes this widespread fear of technological and social change.

But I don’t rule out the possibility that some technologies could create problems - there may be difficulties in developing some of them without breaching ethical standards, or in introducing them with adequate safety guarantees, or in ways that are socially equitable. Those sorts of problems may not be insurmountable, but they might well cause delays in a range of cases, even if they don’t justify permanent prohibitions.

For example, we don’t have a safe technology for human reproductive cloning, and there’s no obvious prospect of developing it without conducting experiments that are pretty clearly outrageous because of their effects on human beings (I mean the actual women and babies involved, not zygotes and embryos, which have no moral standing as far as I’m concerned). There might be a way around it at some time in the future, for all I know, but for the moment we are faced with an impasse. For that reason, I don’t want to see any serious attempts at human reproductive cloning for the foreseeable future, though I actually oppose the kinds of laws that have been passed to prohibit it, which treat it as an intrinsically vicious and anti-social
act like murder or rape. It’s nothing of the kind: if a safe human cloning technology were available it would benefit some people (e.g. some lesbian couples, some heterosexual couples where the man is severely infertile), and I would be all for them using it. Instead of passing draconian laws with huge prison sentences, as many countries have been doing, we should simply apply (with any necessary updating) the research regulations that we currently have in place. The idea is just to ensure that any experimental attempts to break the impasse I’ve described are conducted ethically. Conversely, if strict application of standards in research ethics holds back the development of safe human reproductive cloning it is a consequence that I’m happy to live with.

In some cases, it might even be necessary to stop certain technologies on the ground that they will foreseeably create unacceptable social divisions or inequalities. I cannot oppose this in principle; it is a cost-benefit analysis that all depends on how the actual circumstances are shaping up. But what I do say is this - and here’s a viewpoint that’s seldom expressed in the debates. It would be deeply regrettable if this sort of action were ever needed. If we do it, we should do so in a spirit of reluctance, rather than one of moralistic self-righteousness. We really should be making the benefits of new technologies as widely available as possible. Stopping them (or, more realistically, delaying them) is a poorsubstitute. If we ever have to do this, it will be an admission of defeat rather than a social triumph. If at any time we conclude that there is no alternative but to pass a law banning some potentially-beneficial technological innovation, it will be an occasion to hang our heads in shame.

Russel Blackford is an Australian writer, critic, and student of philosophy and bioethics based in Melbourne, Victoria who blogs at Metamagician and Hellfire Club

Jamais Cascio:
I think there will be a lot of regulation and restriction, but very little of it will be effective for long.

For some reason (and there are undoubtedly multiple doctoral theses in this question), humans are particularly squeamish around biological engineering. As a result, many technologies and practices that would have measurable benefits are likely to be restricted out of fear and “ick” responses. (This isn’t to say that all bioengineering is good, only that many societies will have a hard time selecting the good from the bad.)

But if a technology is useful and powerful, people will try to find ways to get ahold of it, despite restrictions. If it’s beneficial, enough countries or communities will make it available that it will be almost impossible to restrict in other locations; if it’s empowering, there will be an enormous black market. But cross-border smuggling and black markets are not good environments for quality control and cautious use.

I don’t think that prohibition works. We saw its failings in the US regarding alcohol in the 1920s, and we see its failings now regarding narcotics. Attempts to keep technologies secret have an equally lousy history. Keeping the Windows source code under lock and key has done little to prevent viruses and “trojan horse” attacks; I think there’s a strong argument that openness makes for a far better security model, simply because there’s more opportunity to find flaws, and fewer reasons to engage in “cover your ass” practices.

It may be a bit counter-intuitive, but I think that open source bio/ nano science would be a far safer world than a locked-down bio/nano regime.

Jamais Cascio is “World Builder-in-Chief” at Open the Future and co-founder, WorldChanging

Thomas Ray: Anything involving self-replication.

Thomas Ray is a professor with the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma. He has appeared as a character in the science fiction novels Slant, The Rise of Endymion and Donnerjack

David Winter:
I think sort of idealogical opposition (”it’s wrong”, “you can’t play God” “Ewww”) to the applications you’re talking about is really pretty stupid and largely based on ignorance. We have a national Bioethics Council in New Zealand and one of the things they found when they talked to be people about these applications was they got a very different response after they explained them a little. If you ask someone “should we put human genes in other organisms” they generally say no. If however you tell someone that you can take human insulin gene, transfect it into some yeast and grow litres of human insulin for diabetics people see the appeal. I’m not sure if that’s just self interest winning out over the yuck response - I know Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Institute thinks the same thing will happen when the benefits of stem cells and therapeutic cloning come on stream.

Having said all that I think these technologies should still be regulated. Although I don’t think there is anything inherently ‘wrong’ with any of them they could still be applied in damaging ways. For instance genetically modified corn would probably happily swap genes with teosinte (the grass from which maize was developed) or the ~60 other races of maize in Mexico. That might not sound like too much of a problem but Mexico holds just about all the genetic diversity in maize and if scientists want to breed new genes (drought resistance, salt tolerance…) into existing maize cultivars they’ll need to find them from these older races - not the inbred ones we grow now.

David Winter is a New Zealand student of genetics and biochemistry who blogs at Science and Sensibility

Janet D. Stemwedel:
I’m not sure I’m in favor of restrictions or bans so much as I’m in favor of transparency. Why should companies that produce and sell GM foods want to hide that information from the consumer? Put the facts on the label and let the consumer decide. Put the information out there so people can make reasonable decisions and enter into reasonable dialogues about the pros and cons of various ways we can use these technologies.

When the purveyors of the technology get all paternalistic and say, “Well, the consumers wouldn’t understand, so it’s better not to scare them off by putting the information on the label, and all our research shows there are no bad consequences from consuming a GM tomato vs. a non-GM tomato,” they’re deciding up front what the consumer should care about. There are plenty of other issues that consumers also care about: How does GM technology impact the costs for the small family farmer? How well does the GM technology hide the fact that this tomato has been sitting on the shelf for days? How much fuel was consumed transporting this tomato to my supermarket? Consumers are more than just entities who trade currency for goods: they’re people with interests that they want to pursue. To the extent that technology can help us do that, great! To the extent that technology may be used to reduce our choices, not so great. (Think “Gattaca”.)

Scientists need to get comfortable speaking up for the positive uses of their technologies — to non-scientists as well as amongst themselves. And, they need to listen to concerns people have about possible negative consequences of using these technologies. Ignoring these — forgetting that non-scientists have a good grip on their own interests — is not so far from the intellectual dishonesty of some in the anti-science camp.

How to balance all the competing views and interests is, of course, the challenge of pluralism. But we have to engage that challenge. We can’t just plug our ears and hope it will go away.

Janet D. Stemwedel is an assistant professor of philosophy at San Jose State University she’s also the blogger behind Adventures in Ethics and Science

Bora:
I am, again cautiously, optimistic about all the technologies you mentioned. From what I could see, the scientists involved in this kind of research are, perhaps more than other kinds of scientists, careful and thoughtful about the ethics of their research. What worries me is the relocation of so much of this kind of science away from universities and into industry, where ethical norms are much more lax and there is pressure on scientists from above to make marketable discoveries.

I do not like the developments like the Monsanto seed which makes farmers dependent on annual purchases of seed from the Big Business. On the other hand, the safety of GM crops is, from what I have read in trustworthy sources, quite high - that is the prime concern of researchers in the field and they do everything in their power to make this technology as safe as possible.

Stem-cell research has much promise, but the results will take some time to move from the lab to the hospital. The dangers of cloning are over-rated. Much of inheritance is not written in the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA, thus cloning does not produce identical copies of an individual, not even physically, let alone in terms of personality. I hope that people learn this and stop fearing cloning. Then, I doubt that cloning humans will be something people will have a great motivation to do if it does not produce identical copies.

Bora is a PHD student specializing in Chronobiology and blogs at A Blog Around the Clock

Daniel Rhoads:
Of course. There’ll always be new technologies that will have to be rigorously evaluated by feasibility and risk analyses, as well as by the public’s view of what a society should be like. And this is what we see with GM food, stem cells, etc.; these new technologies go through a “getting acquainted” stage with society, and slowly become incorporated into everyday usage in some way or another.
Daniel Rhoads is a cell and molecular biologist who blogs at Concerned Scientist and Migrations

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