Reason Magazine - Topics > Biotechnology

The Genetics of Ensoulment

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Until about a decade ago, there was only one way to make an embryo—the old-fashioned technique of combining an egg with a sperm. Then came Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996. Scottish scientists created her by injecting the nucleus of a breast cell from one sheep into the enucleated egg of another sheep. Dolly was essentially genetically identical to the donor of the breast cell nucleus.

Since then researchers have used reproductive cloning to produce mice, cats, dogs, horses, cows, goats, pigs, and other mammals. As valuable as reproductive cloning is for producing livestock and research animals, most researchers were excited by the prospect of using cloning to create human embryonic stem cells. These stem cells produced by therapeutic cloning might be used to grow perfect transplants to replace and repair damaged tissues and organs.

Therapeutic cloning to produce transplants fell directly into the heated abortion debate. From the pro-life point of view, cloned human embryos, like all other embryos, have the same moral status as adult human beings. The moral status of five-day embryos is still contested. Hoping to avoid controversy, researchers searched for sources of cells that would have the valuable properties of embryonic stem cells (self-renewing and transformable into any type of cell), but would be acceptable to pro-lifers.

One proposal is to create human stem cells using altered nuclear transfer (ANT). Championed by Stanford University bioethicist William Hurlbut, the technique is essentially the same as regular cloning except that it uses RNA interference to disable a single crucial gene so that the cloned entity cannot implant into a womb and thus cannot grow into a fully developed embryo. In ANT all of the genes involved would be human, even the one that has been deliberately broken.

A number of prominent Roman Catholic thinkers recently endorsed ANT as a morally acceptable way to produce human embryonic stem cells. So whether or not an entity can house a human soul evidently depends on the timing of the operation of a single gene. Other theologians question this, asking why such a cloned entity should not be considered a defective human embryo deserving of same the moral solicitude owed to disabled adult human beings.

The search for a morally unproblematic source of stem cells continued. Last fall, Shinya Yamanaka and his colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan and another team at the University of Wisconsin announced the good news that they had been able to transform adult human skin cells into cells that act very much like embryonic stem cells. Yamanaka took skin cells and inserted four genes—Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and Myc—that are expressed in embryonic stem cells, causing the skin cells to revert to the embryonic state. These induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are generating a huge amount of excitement among stem researchers and were even hailed as the end of the stem cell wars.

Well, not quite. The Kyoto and Wisconsin researchers used skin cells originally derived from human fetuses in their research. Still, such cells are not necessary to generate new iPS cells; they were just convenient. But let's approach the moral issue from another direction.

It turns out that, at least in mice, injecting iPS cells into mouse blastocysts creates chimeric mice. The iPS cells are incorporated into the developing mouse embryo and form part of the tissues and organs of new mouse pups. Researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts have gone even further. They created a mouse comprised entirely of iPS cells. The iPS cells form an embryo after they are embedded into tetraploid embryonic cells that grow into a placenta. There is no apparent reason why this technique wouldn't work in humans.

In April, this insight caused The Independent to hyperventilate, "Now we have the technology that can make a cloned child." The Independent quotes stem cell researchers Robert Lanza: "It raises the same issues as reproductive cloning and although the technology for reproductive cloning in humans doesn't exist, with this breakthrough we now have a working technology whereby anyone, young or old, fertile or infertile, straight or gay can pass on their genes to a child by using just a few skin cells." Maybe so, but iPS cell research raises an even more intriguing question.

Back in 1999, during a hearing of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, then-Director of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus made the intriguing observation that "It may eventually become possible to take a cell from any one of our organs and to expose it to the right set of environmental stimuli and to encourage that cell to return to a more primitive stage in the hierarchy of stem cells. Under those conditions, one might in fact generate the cell with as great a potential as a pluripotent cell from a very mature cell." Nine years later Yamanaka proved that Varmus was prophetic.

Varmus continued, "One might even in fact imagine generating a cell that is totipotent [able to develop into a complete organism] in that manner." In other words, researchers may one day take human cells all the way back to the embryonic stage, at which point they could be implanted into a womb, where they could eventually develop into complete human beings. This is the direction in which iPS cell research is heading. So instead of switching off one gene to make sure that an entity is not worthy of their moral concern, pro-lifers may soon have to worry about the opposite, pushing an adult cell so far back in its developmental stage that switching on a single gene will turn it into an embryo.

Advances in stem cell research may be provoking a kind of "God of the Gaps" retreat on the moral status of embryos. People who subscribe to God of the Gaps thinking believe that the hand of God can be seen in those things which science cannot explain. In this case, the closing gaps in the details of molecular biology are forcing pro-lifers into an uncomfortable corner where they have to decide whether or not a cell can be imbued with a soul by turning a single gene on or off.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

What the Hell Is Human Dignity Anyway?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:32:00 EDT

Friend of reason Steven Pinker plows into the mushy category of "human dignity"—routinely invoked to argue against advances in science and medicine that will enliven and lengthen our lives—like nobody's business here:

Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.
Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it.

Whole thing in The New Republic, via Arts & Letters Daily, here.

Read Pinker's reason interview here.

'Technology Is at the Center'

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Running Babies Through a Scanner Darkly

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:26:00 EDT

From today's Congress Daily:

Former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly is scheduled to make a pitch on Capitol Hill today for legislation on the House floor requiring all states to screen newborns for the full complement of disorders that can be detected in early childhood.
Kelly, whose 8-year-old son died in 2005 of a nervous system disorder called Krabbe disease, planned to join Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Children and Families Subcommittee, to urge the House to pass Dodd's newborn-screening bill. A vote on the legislation is scheduled for today.
Not all states screen infants for all disorders such as Krabbe, and Dodd's bill would require such testing to be uniform across the country.

While it's easy to imagine (and to celebrate) a world where genetic testing is so cheap and easy that most people get their kids tested as a matter of course, mandating testing at this stage doesn't make sense and may even slow progress and artificially inflate prices.

The same reasoning applies here as in the case of mandating florescent light bulbs: A mandate will reduce incentives to keep pushing prices down and testing technology at the bleeding edge of science. Plus, picking a list of disorders to be tested for, and setting it down in the fast-drying concrete of legislation will breed a less flexible, less adaptable field.

How's this for a case of nanny state--literal and figurative?

The Biggest Green Mistake

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In the last year, the price of wheat has tripled, corn doubled, and rice almost doubled. As prices soared, food riots have broken out in about 20 poor countries including Yemen, Haiti, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Mexico. In response some countries, such as India, Pakistan Egypt and Vietnam, are banning the export of grains and imposing food price controls.

Are rising food prices the result of the economic dynamism of China and India, in which newly prosperous consumers are demanding more food—especially more meat? Perennial doomsters such as the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown predicted more than a decade ago that China's growing food demand would destabilize global markets and signal a permanent increase in grain prices. But that thesis has so far not been borne out by the facts. China is a net grain exporter. India is also largely self-sufficient in grains. At some time in the future, these countries may become net grain importers, but they are not now and so cannot be blamed to for today's higher food prices.

If surging demand is not the problem, what is? In three words: stupid energy policies. Although they are not perfect substitutes, oil and natural gas prices tend to move in tandem. So as oil prices rose above $100 per barrel, the price of gas also went up. Natural gas is the main feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer. As gas prices soared, so did fertilizer prices which rose by 200 percent.

As a report from the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (ICSFAD) notes, applying the fertilizer derived from 1000 cubic feet of natural gas yields around 480 pounds of grain. That amount of grain would supply enough calories to feed a person for one year. Rising oil prices also contribute to higher food prices because farmers need transport fuel to run their tractors and to get food to urban markets.

Even worse is the bioethanol craze. Politicians in both the United States and the European Union are mandating that vast quantities of food be turned into fuel as they chase the chimera of "energy independence." For example, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed misbegotten legislation requiring fuel producers to use at least 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022-which equals about 27 percent of the gasoline Americans currently use each year and is about five times the amount being produced now. And the European Union set a goal that 10 percent of transport fuels come from biofuels by 2020.

The result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel, drawing down global grain stocks to their lowest levels in decades. Keep in mind that 100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year.

As Dennis Avery from the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues points out, the higher corn prices that result from biofuels mandates mean that farmers are shifting from producing wheat and soybeans to producing corn. Less wheat and soybeans means higher prices for those grains. In the face of higher prices for wheat, corn and soybeans consumers try to shift to rice which in turns raises that grain's price. In addition, higher grain prices encourage farmers in developing countries to chop down and plow up forests. It also hasn't helped that some traditionally strong grain exporters such as Australia have experienced extreme weather.

So what to do? In the short run, there is some good news. High prices are encouraging farmers to shift back toward wheat and soybeans which should relieve some of the pressure on grain prices. Second, the biofuels mandates must go. If biofuels are such a good idea, entrepreneurs, inventors and investors will make them into a viable energy source without any government subsidies. Thirdly, both high and low technologies are addressing high fertilizer prices. On the high tech front, Arcadia Biosciences has created biotech rice and corn varieties that need much less nitrogen fertilizer that conventional varieties require. In Bangladesh and other poor countries, farmers are embedding low tech fertilizer-infused briquettes in the soil to deliver nitrogen to rice. This boosts crop production 25 percent while cutting fertilizer use by 50 percent.

Expanding acreage to grow biofuels is bad for biodiversity and may even boost the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to man-made global warming. Avery notes that food production needs to double because there will be more people who will want to eat better by 2050, at which point world population begins to slide back downwards. Turning food into fuel makes that goal much harder to achieve. Avery is right when he argues, "Biofuels are purely and simply the biggest Green mistake we've ever made and we're still making it."

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Humanizing Animals

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Combining animal and human genes provokes unease among some philosophers, theologians, and ordinary citizens. Currently, scientists want to inject the nuclei of human cells into animal eggs-generally from cows and rabbits--that have been stripped of their nuclei to create cell hybrids, or cybrids. Human eggs are hard to come by and expensive whereas animal eggs are plentiful and cheap. The aim is to produce embryonic stem cells for research.

No one knows if such cybrid embryos might grow into human babies if implanted in an appropriate womb. Would such cybrid babies suffer some physical or mental problems as a result of their animal genetic heritage? That heritage would basically be the energy producing mitochondria derived from the cytoplasm of the animal cells into which the human nuclei were inserted. Since cows and rabbits live much shorter lives than do humans it might be that any cybrid humans with cow or rabbit mitochondria would not live as long as normal humans. In addition, the operation of animal mitochondria in cybrids might mimic some mutational mitochondrial diseases that already afflict people. These real risks of creating physically and mentally diminished human beings mean that it would be immoral to grow human-animal cybrids into full-term babies.

But let's flip the question-instead of diminishing humans, what about uplifting animals by boosting their intelligence and physical dexterity? Uplifting animals to human-like sapience has been explored by many speculative writers. For example, in H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), humanized animals are commanded to follow Moreau's law: "Not to go on all-fours; Not to suck up Drink; Not to eat Fish or Flesh; Not to claw the Bark of Trees; Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?" But they are not Men and they eventually revert to their beast natures and destroy their hubristic creator. Even worse is Pierre Boulle's novel, The Planet of the Apes (1963), in which uplifted apes are now the masters of animal-like degenerate humans. On the other hand, in Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975), the underpeople, humanlike beings created from animals, struggle for their rights and are morally superior in many respects to their human masters.

The most popular novels of the genre are David Brin's The Uplift Saga and The Uplift Trilogy. In Brin's universe, one sapient species after another throughout the galaxies uses genetic engineering to uplift non-sapient species to self-aware intelligence. In Brin's books, humanity uplifts dolphins and chimps and we three earthly species go cheerfully caroming around the universe together.

Some technoprogressive thinkers such as editor-in-chief of Betterhumans.com George Dvorsky argue that we have a moral obligation to uplift other species to sapiency. "It would be negligent of us to leave animals behind to fend for themselves in the state of nature," declared Dvorsky. He foresees mostly great good coming out of any such project. On the other hand, the prospect of uplift inspires dread in bioconservatives like Francis Fukuyama who worries that biotechnologists will create slave chimpanzees with the intelligence of a ten-year old boy.

Setting aside the fact that no one has any idea of how to actually uplift, that is, to dramatically boost the intelligence of animals, would it be moral to do it? How would a dumb animal give its consent to being uplifted? Since no human being gives his or her consent to being born with whatever level of intelligence or health he or she has, why should prior consent be required for uplifting animals? Dvorsky actually thinks that it is more moral to uplift already born animals so that we can ask them before-and-after questions. Perhaps they would recall their pre-sapient state and tell us if it were preferable to the anxieties of self-awareness. But what if uplifted chimps and dolphins told us that self-aware intelligent language using is not all that it's cracked up to be and that they'd rather go back to their state of natural innocence?

Also, would uplifted animals retain something of their essential chimpanzee or dolphin natures? This could be problematic. For example, male chimpanzees share the human male proclivity for violence. And dolphins indulge in gang rape and kill for fun. It is possible that some intellectually-enhanced chimps and dolphins could be psychopathic murderers. In other words, uplifted animals might not be morally any better, and maybe even worse, than human beings. Would-be uplifters might suffer the fate of Dr. Moreau.

Fukuyama's concerns about subhuman slaves cannot be dismissed. Uplift advocate Dvorsky agrees: "Animals may also be engineered to have specialized physical or cognitive characteristics while lacking certain neurological faculties. Theoretically, such creatures could be designed for specific tasks, such as manual labour, dangerous work, or as sex trade workers--and at the same time be oblivious to the demeaning or hazardous nature of their work. For all intents and purposes these would be happy slaves."

So would it be wrong to uplift animals and make them happy slaves? One could imagine uplifted animals designed to receive an addictive jolt of pleasure inducing dopamine every time they successfully carry out a human command. Something like that already happens when a dog gets patted on its head by its owner for fetching a ball. Dvorsky denounces the prospect of uplifted happy slaves as "a repugnant possibility and an affront to humanitarian values."

Now imagine human beings who have been genetically engineered with a dopamine obedience circuit. It's pretty clear that we would consider such engineered people as "diminished" because their capacity for self-government would have been deliberately limited. We generally regard people as acting freely when they act on their own intentions and for their own reasons without coercion. In this case, the biotechnically juiced-up dopamine circuit functions as a kind of gentle coercion. But wait, aren't we all already in thrall to our un-tampered with dopamine reward circuits?

Creating happy uplifted animal slaves faces two chief moral objections. First, I would not want to be a happy slave. If I wouldn't want to be one then I assume no one else, including uplifted animals, would want to be. Second, a society dependent on happy slaves would be morally corrosive.

So why wouldn't I want to be a happy slave-after all I would be, by definition, happy. I reject happy servitude because I don't want limitations placed on my capacities and my aspirations. But of course, my genes and environment have already limited my intellectual and physical capacities and aspirations. However, living as a human discontented with my shortcomings, I know that it is "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n." When sufficient progress has been made later this century, I hope to have the power of choosing how to use new technologies to enhance my capacities and even at the risk of overwhelming and destroying my own identity.

On the point of moral corrosion, consider the plot of The Planet of the Apes. What has happened is that the humans uplifted the apes and became so dependent upon their simian servants that their intellects decayed. There are, of course, lots of confounding factors, but history features no economically and technologically robust slave-holding civilizations. In any case, I suspect humanity will become deeply integrated with our increasingly powerful computational technologies so that happy animal slaves will be basically useless anyway.

Some have argued that self-aware intelligence is an ecological niche that can only be inhabited by one species. If two proto-intelligent species arise at the same time, one eventually out-competes and causes the extinction of the other. This may have happened to our Neanderthal cousins. Would uplifting animals spark a dangerous evolutionary competition for the occupation of the intelligence niche?

A rich speculative literature makes it clear that there a plenty of ways in which uplift technologies could be misused or go awry, but there is no bright moral line forbidding the uplift of animals to human-level intelligence. Successfully uplifted animals would have to be treated with the same moral respect that we owe to human persons.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Neither Gods Nor Goo

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

By the middle of the century, the inventor Ray Kurzweil suggests in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, human beings will live in perpetual clouds of nanobots, molecule-sized robots that spend each moment altering our micro-environments to our precise preferences. Over the longer term, he imagines that nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at the molecular level—will let us change our shape and appearance, become immortal, and transfer our minds with ease between far-flung planets.

By contrast, the thriller writer Michael Crichton describes nanobots running amok in his 2002 novel Prey. With his signature mix of tech savvy and paranoia, Crichton imagines the tiny automatons forming “nanoswarms,” clouds that visually mimic human beings in order to infiltrate and destroy us—sort of microscopic, sentient super-kudzu.

Both our hopes and fears regarding nanotechnology have been extreme from the beginning, if we take as the beginning K. Eric Drexler’s 1986 book Engines of Creation. Drexler, an engineer, described nanotech as the ultimate fulfillment of humanity’s dynamic, self-transforming tendencies: the ability to create whatever we want, whenever we want it, combined with an imperative to take this godlike new power to the stars and turn the universe into our playground. Drexler also described the dark twin of this vision: the “gray goo” scenario. Self-replicating nanobots, which proliferate by turning surrounding matter into copies of themselves, would go out of control, turning the entire Earth into themselves—the most homogeneous imaginable version of the apocalypse. In the words of a technophilic but precaution-prone acquaintance of mine, a computer programmer who has his wristwatch set to alert him if a tsunami approaches Manhattan: “The gray goo scenario should at least give one pause.”

Such disaster fears are already fueling calls for regulation, even with the technology barely out of the cradle. Nanotech-related products will soon account for $2.6 trillion in sales each year, according to a London School of Business/Rice University study. The current applications are concentrated in products that benefit from highly efficient filtering or surface-application processes, such as microchips, car wax, and sunscreen. But down the road, the likely applications include molecule-perfect wound-healing, flawless cleaning processes, quantum computing, far easier bioengineering, much more efficient photon and electrical transfer, and much more. In a June 2007 press release, Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, noted that nanotechnology “promises to be the most important innovation since electricity and the internal combustion engine.” At the same time, it called for more testing and oversight, warning that some nanotech applications “might pose substantial risks to human health and the environment.”

Although Consumers Union concedes that “no confirmed cases of harm to humans from manufactured nanoparticles have been reported,” it adds that “there is cause for concern based on several worrisome findings from the limited laboratory and animal research so far.” It worries that particles that are nontoxic at normal sizes may become toxic when nanosized; that these nanoparticles, which are already present in cosmetics and food, can more easily “enter the body and its vital organs, including the brain,” than normal particles; and that nanomaterials will linger longer in the environment. All of this really comes down to pointing out that some particles are smaller than others. Size is not a reliable indicator of potential harm to human beings, and nature itself is filled with nanoparticles. But the default assumption of danger from the new is palpable.

Anti-nanotech sentiment has not been restricted to Consumers Union’s relatively short list of concerns. In France, groups of hundreds of protesters have rallied against even such benign manifestations of the technology as the carbon nanotubules that allow Parkinson’s sufferers to stop tremors by directing medicine to their own brains. In England members of a group called THRONG (The Heavenly Righteous Opposed to Nanotech Greed) have disrupted nanotech business conferences dressed as angels. In 2005 naked protesters appeared in front of an Eddie Bauer store in Chicago to condemn one of the more visible uses of nanotech: stain-resistant pants.

These nanopants employ billions of tiny whiskers to create a layer of air above the rest of the fabric, causing liquids to roll off easily. It’s not quite what Kurzweil and Crichton had in mind, nor is it “little robots in your pants,” as CNN put it. But nanotechnology arguably embraces any item that incorporates engineering at the molecular level, including mundane products like this one.

Just as the nano label can be broadly applied to products for branding and attention-grabbing purposes, so too can critics use the label to condemn barely related developments by linking them to the (still hypothetical) problems of nanopollution and gray goo. But there’s a danger in thinking of nanotech only in god-or-goo terms. People at both extremes of the controversy fail to appreciate the humble, incremental, yet encouraging progress that nanotech researchers are making. And focusing on dramatic visions of nanotech heaven or hell may foster restrictions that delay or block innovations that can extend and improve our lives.

In a Small Country
To get a look at some of the real nanotech re-search, neither divine nor gooey, I went on a junket to one nanotech hotspot, visiting researchers in Glasgow, Dundee, and Edinburgh. (Scottish Enterprise, a public-private economic development agency that promotes international awareness of such researchers and other Scottish ventures, paid for the trip.) I also made a quick visit to the Edinburgh grave of Adam Smith, a reminder that the Scots are proudly, even pugnaciously, entrepreneurial and inventive—“punching above our weight,” as many people in that nation of only 5 million like to put it before rattling off a list of the famous inventors who have come from Scotland.

One of those famous Scots was the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Today, thanks to nanotech, one of his countrymen may be on the verge of creating a workable version of a system that Maxwell first imagined. “It’s a little bit frustrating when people talk about nanobots and gray goo, because it’s not as exciting as what we’re really going to be able to do,” says Edinburgh University chemist David A. Leigh. Leigh believes nanotech might allow us to create a system physicists call Maxwell’s Demon. With virtually no expenditure of energy, it could sort all the warmer particles of gas in a chamber to one side and all the cold particles to the other. It would be almost like getting heat from thin air, an immense source of energy at virtually no cost. Maxwell recognized that such a process would border on violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states, in essence, that entropy wins in the end, that things tend not to assume a more complex, orderly form unless energy is added to them. Since filtering—a far cry from robotically conquering the world—is what nanoparticles currently do best, Maxwell’s Demon is not such a far-fetched application.

In the meantime, Leigh contents himself with miracles like making water droplets run uphill, thanks to tiny, twisting “motors” created by simple chemical reactions between a few atoms. Similarly, the Livingston-based company Memsstar is creating more efficient surfaces for industrial coatings and wafers by, for instance, finding ways to keep them dry with microscopic gyroscopes. Leigh recognizes that this is “complete sci-fi stuff,” but he suggests it’s a wonder we haven’t made more use of such processes before. “Nature uses molecular machines to do everything…every single biological process,” he says. “We used controlled molecular motion for nothing. Nature isn’t using it for nothing. When mankind learns to make molecular machines, it’s going to change everything.” He expects that revolution within a decade.

Being able to design surfaces at the molecular level increasingly means being able to alter them on cue at the molecular level. “You can make surfaces that change their properties, so you can drag objects toward you just using light,” says Leigh. “One day, you might walk into your house to find that the kids have made some big mess, and you just turn on some lasers that put everything back in place.” After years of using nanotech for micro-level processes such as more efficiently sorting chemicals, Leigh says, his water droplet stunt “showed that you could use microscopic machines to do things in the real world, the big world.”

The staff of Leigh’s Edinburgh lab, perhaps as a reminder to remain humble, has put up a poster of actor/singer David Hasselhoff that reads, “ ‘I tried to save the world and I forgot to save myself.’ —The Hoff.” Leigh is mindful that for all our fantasies of transforming the outside world, our own bodies are an important locus of nanotech potential. “Nature carries cargo throughout the cells using molecular machines,” he says, and that opens up all sorts of possibilities for manipulating the system.

Pumping Ion
Medical uses offer some of the most immediate benefits of improved molecular manipulation. Adam Curtiss, a professor of cell biology at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Cell Engineering, has shown that by restructuring molecules on the surface of stem cells—just altering the roughness of the surface, without making chemical or biological changes—scientists can determine what sort of tissue the cells will grow into. Scott Wilson, a senior project manager with Scottish Enterprise, enthuses that nanotech may soon allow the easy transfer of signals between wires and nerves. That could be useful in many cybernetic and medical devices, such as more versatile prostheses. A step farther removed from the human body, ArrayJet, a company based in the Midlothian town of Dalkeith, is quietly improving the quality of scientists’ microscope slides by using inkjet-like technology to place samples on them with unprecedented accuracy. Meanwhile, the Intermediary Technology Institutes in Glasgow, taking a page from the comic book character Wolverine with his adamantium-plated skeleton, are studying potential reinforcement coatings for osteoporosis-ravaged bones.

In the past people were content simply to imagine such things, says Brendan Casey, chief executive of the Glasgow-based company Kelvin Nanotechnologies, but now “people expect delivery.” Delivery, in the case of Casey’s company, means fabricating materials in an ultramodern, stray-particle-free “clean room” in an old Victorian building at the University of Glasgow (where, Casey says, you become very adept at recognizing people in their jumpsuits and hoods). Sometimes clients know precisely what materials they need, he says, while other times they’ll say, “I’m not even sure if this is possible, but can you do this for me?”

Kelvin Nanotechnologies has been involved in research on so-called “labs on a pill” and “labs on a chip,” tiny chemical diagnostic and medicine-delivery devices within the body that eliminate such macroscopic clumsiness as time-release capsules, lengthy probes, and the need for many medicines to travel through the entire bloodstream. They employ precise fits between target cells and injected substances that Casey describes as “molecular Lego.” The ability to sort substances at the molecular level has applications from water flow in nine-inch pipes to fiber-optic cables. It also will likely mean the ability to regrow injured tendons along grooves created by nanomaterial within the body that melt away after use.

At the University of St. Andrews, the scientists of the Biophotonics Programme, aided by the fact that sufficiently small particles can be manipulated by light, are working with lasers as optical tweezers—the “ultimate sterile instrument,” one researcher calls them. Such instruments could decrease the odds of hospital infections by moving cells and microscopic dollops of medicine without the need for contact between flesh and solid instruments. Sufficiently fine-tuned tweezing, of a sort impossible with larger tools made from metal, may make it possible to deactivate tumors by identifying and destroying their stem cells. St. Andrews physicist Kishan Dholakia has high hopes for using molecular sorting and lasers to make more diagnoses at the chemical level rather than through patient observation.

Rather than looking at macroscopic phenomena, doctors of the future may be able to tag, track, and observe the cellular-level damage that is causing problems, whether it’s a perforated spleen or a misfiring nerve in the lower back. If that sounds too distant and speculative, St. Andrews researchers are already working with light-activated creams that speed wound healing and are less likely to leave scars than conventional bandages and stitches.

Defense of Mechanisms
Wonderful as all this is, it is gradual and piecemeal—not as frightening, terrible, or transformative as either the sci-fi optimists or the doomsaying activists would have it. And that makes it all the more ridiculous that such valuable work might be impeded by regulations or protests motivated by mostly imaginary or far-off scenarios. One reason the Scots are so optimistic about their potential to be big players in nanotech is their belief that wariness about cloning and stem cell research in the U.S. and a general aversion to biotechnology in continental Europe do not bode well for nanotech research in those places.

Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, along with various European green groups, have called for a moratorium on nanotech until it can be proven safe. At their urging, the European Commission last year began to consider whether nanotech fits under existing E.U. safety regulations or must be subjected to special reviews and controls. This sort of legal limbo tends to inhibit investment.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regards nanotech as a “combination product” that bridges the divide between pharmaceuticals, biological agents, and medical devices. That means nanotech must be proven safe and effective before approval and may risk being shuttled between different offices, but is not as yet presumed especially dangerous. The FDA concedes it has no regulatory authority over nondrug, nonfood products such as nanotech-incorporating cosmetics, a frequent target of unscientific health scares. It would not be surprising if the FDA eventually invites discussion of whether to expand its regulatory authority to cover nanotech uses currently outside its bailiwick or cedes such regulatory responsibility to other agencies. In 2006 the Berkeley City Council, often in the vanguard of green regulations, became the first U.S. locality to explicitly require tracking of production processes involving nanoparticles.

While nanotech has not yet attracted as much ire as biotech, nanotech researchers are worried by the negative tone of much of the press coverage biotech receives. Shortly before my visit to Scotland, the Roslin Research Institute—a source of Midlothian pride 11 years ago when it unveiled the cloned sheep Dolly—declined to participate in a BBC special about biotech because it was clear the show would take a “Frankenstein unleashed” approach, according to Harry Griffin, the institute’s former science director and CEO. I saw an ad for the broadcast, an episode of the BBC series Animal Farm, while I was in Scotland. In the sort of overt appeal to ignorance that has become the norm in media coverage of biotechnology, it suggested that what viewers don’t know about high-tech animal husbandry should be cause for alarm.

Among those making a conscious effort to stave off similar paranoia about nanotech are Richard Moore and Ottilia Saxl of the Institute of Nanotechnology in Stirling. Moore laments green activists’ “tendency to consider any of the risks and not the benefits.” He likens the recklessness of being overcautious about nanotechnology to regulators’ longtime resistance to portable defibrillators, once feared because of their potential misuse in inexpert hands but now so valued in the U.K. that they are routinely carried on garbage trucks and kept in other widespread places to make their rapid deployment possible. “There’s no medical device that’s free of risk,” he notes.

Suppose “you’ve got a disseminated brain tumor, and you’re offered nanoparticles or you’ve got three weeks to live,” says Saxl. “If you can actually minutely target these nanoparticles at the tumor, what a wonderful thing.” She has helped organize awareness-raising conferences on “bioinspired nanotechnologies” and nanotech’s environmental benefits (such as radically more efficient oil spill cleanups) because the sense that nanotech is “unnatural” could make it the next target of green or Luddite revulsion. “Lipids and other natural substances can be called nanoparticles,” she notes, “but companies didn’t want to call their work nanotechnology.”

Moore adds that people tend to assume that “natural” things are safe and that the products of industry are automatically a cause for concern. “We’re talking about manmade nanoparticles,” he says, “but we’ve had natural nanoparticles for centuries”—from volcanoes and other natural sources, spewed far and wide—with little concern except among those directly in the blast zone.

No Pants, No Implants
In the U.S., despite our flirtation with paranoia about biotech and our routine panics over pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, our resilient gee-whiz attitude toward machines may yet make our country a haven for unbounded nanotech. But we will have to be watchful of those who seek to smother it as a potential monster long before it has had a chance to yield anything remotely resembling the dreams of the optimists or the nightmares of the detractors.

Given people’s instinctive unease about strange things entering their bodies, we may be better off if the American public becomes enamored of relatively trivial nanotech applications, such as the now-omnipresent stain-resistant pants, before taking much notice of the far more beneficial medical uses. Biotech endures in the U.S. largely because people are accustomed to seeing it used in corn, soybeans, wheat, and other staples of the food supply before opponents had really spread their message. Similarly, we may find that a nation long accustomed to unnaturally clean pants is more receptive to nano-based treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s.

Today’s researchers can only dream of someday possessing the technology to make self-construction by nanobots more efficient than a macroscopic process for making nanobots. Only then could they begin to dream of making the self-construction process propagate itself so rapidly that it constituted a widening menace. Worrying at this stage about the theoretical potential for nanotech to destroy the world—or to transform us into shape-shifting gods—is a bit like worrying that if we engage in laser research we might someday create a laser weapon so powerful that it could destroy the entire planet. There’s a long way between here and there, and those distant prospects should not cause us to hobble people taking tiny steps in far more benign directions.

Todd Seavey edits HealthFactsAndFears.com for the American Council on Science and Health and blogs at ToddSeavey.com.

Decrying the "Pursuit of Unnecessary Things"

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin has written a provocative column, "The Endless Pursuit of Unnecessary Things," on his always interesting Dot Earth blog. The title is from a line attributed to Adam Smith: "An investment is by all right-minded people to be commended, because it brings comforts and necessities to the citizenry. But, if continued indefinitely, it will lead to the endless pursuit of unnecessary things." (I confess my usual sources of Smith arcana could not turn up this quotation anywhere online, but no matter, let's assume Smith wrote it.) Revkin uses the quotation as a launch point for a discussion of sustainable development. He sums up his concerns in two questions:

How many people will inhabit Earth in the next few generations? How much stuff—energy, land, water, marine life—will they consume?

Let's look first at Revkin's population concerns. World population increased from about 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6.5 billion today. Along the way, Malthusians predicted that massive famines would occur. They didn't. Food supplies increased faster than population growth and food became cheaper and more abundant. In addition, the amount of land devoted to farming barely changed. As a consequence of growing food security and the spread of improved public health and medical technologies, global human life expectancy more than doubled. Perhaps the Malthusians are at last right? There are good reasons to think not.

Globally fertility rates have been falling since the 1960s. What does this mean for the future? At the Transvision 2007 conference, Jerome Glenn, head of the United Nations' Millenium Project and author of its annual State of the Future report, pointed out something what I've been saying for years—that the U.N.'s low variant trend appears to be the path that world population is following. If that trend holds, Glenn noted, that would mean that world population would grow to about 8 billion in 2050 and start declining to 5.5 billion in 2100. That's a billion fewer people than currently live on the planet.

So if overpopulation isn't the problem, then perhaps overconsumption is? Americans are held up as the poster children of overconsumption and Revkin's column plows that well-worn furrow with its meditation on "the endless pursuit of unnecessary things." But before looking to see what things are unnecessary, let's look at the resource consumption trends that worry Revkin. He quotes long-time limits-to-growth proponent and current President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science John Holdren on the challenges of sustainability. Holdren (along with his colleagues Paul Ehrlich and John Harte) famously lost a bet with economist Julian Simon that prices of a basket of mineral resources valued at $1,000 and chosen by Holdren et al. would increase between 1980 and 1990. They didn't. Holdren and his colleagues mailed a check to Simon for $576.07.

Revkin also mentions land. So what's happened with trends in land usage? A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that "among 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and Agriculture Organization's comprehensive Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, no nation where annual per capita gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative rate of growing stock change." Biotech tree plantations would enable humanity to produce all the timber we need on an area roughly 5 percent to 10 percent of the total forest today. This would mean that more of the Earth's forests could remain in their natural states.

Similarly, the amount of land needed to grow enough food to feed a person has plummeted from about one-and-a-quarter acres in 1950 to about half an acre today. Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, finds, "If the world farmer reaches the average yield of today's US corn grower during the next 70 years, ten billion people eating as people now on average do will need only half of today's cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia. This will happen if farmers sustain the yearly 2 percent worldwide yield growth of grains achieved since 1960, in other words if social learning continues as usual."

And what about water? Americans are using less water per capita too. Water withdrawals peaked in 1980 and have been flat since. All kinds of innovative techniques for stretching freshwater supplies are being developed. An example of that is the low-cost drip irrigation systems designed by International Development Enterprises that can reduce the cost of irrigation in poor countries from about $6,000 per acre to about $37. In addition, strides are being made in developing seawater agriculture.

Overconsumption of marine resources is an institutional problem—fisheries are open access commons which encourage wanton plundering. If a fisher doesn't take a fish, the next guy will, so fishers have no incentive to leave fish in the sea to replenish themselves. This can be changed via privatization and by the expansion of aquaculture.

What about non-renewable resources? This is a tougher issue. Even as workers in modern societies have shifted from manufacturing to service jobs, the raw stuff used to make goods has not declined. We are, however, getting far more value and services out of the stuff we do use. For example, between 1980 and 2000, the amount of stuff consumed in the European Union 15 was essentially flat while their economies grew by 50 percent. As the poor in the developing world become wealthier, they will want better housing, transport, and modern energy supplies. Can the world's resources meet their desires? Again, there are good reasons to think so.

People do not get rich just by doing more of the same—they get rich by doing things better, cheaper and with less stuff over time. As Stanford University economist Paul Romer argues, humans become wealthier by improving the recipes for how we make stuff. Sand and iron used to be just building materials; now we use them to make computer memory. As described above, there are strongly positive trends in the future supply of renewable resources, such as food, fiber, wood, and so forth.

The vast majority of non-renewable material flows are used in construction (housing and infrastructure) and energy production. There is no likely future shortage of construction materials. In addition, fossil fuels will not run out in the 21st century. However, humanity will either have to figure out how to control the pollution produced by fossil fuels or shift away from them because of their deleterious effects on the environment, including their contribution to man-made global warming. There are good reasons for optimism with regard to pollution control. Air pollution in the U.S. has been declining for decades and even China's notoriously bad air pollution may be decreasing. Supplying adequate clean energy is the central challenge to future human well-being. Fortunately, the ideas for sustainably improving and increasing energy, food, and any other form of industrial production are far from being depleted.

Revkin entertains the suggestion by Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor that we should all relax and stop working so hard and instead "opt for a new economic and social vision based on quality of life, rather than quantity of stuff." Quality of life can have all sorts of dimensions, but one important aspect is increased leisure and access to learning. And that's what people in modern societies have done throughout the last couple of centuries, plus getting all the nifty new stuff.

In a 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research study, economists Jeremy Greenwood and Guillaume Vandenbroucke found, "Over the course of the last century there was a precipitous drop in the average length of the workweek, both in the marketplace and at home. In 1830 the average workweek in the market place was 70 hours. This had plunged to just 41 hours by 2002. At the same time there was a 9-fold gain in real wages." In other words, people in modern societies aren't working harder, they're working better. So what do we do to fill up all those extra hours of leisure? Perhaps we buy "unnecessary things" with which to entertain and enlighten ourselves. And then there is that horrible suspicion that most people actually like to work.

Which bring us to the question: Just what are all those "unnecessary things" that allegedly clog our shopping malls? Which does Revkin think we should want to give up? He mentions not a single product—yet the implication is that the mandarins of good taste and restraint know best what the rest of us really need. Our cellular phones? Our iPods? Our pink sunglasses? Our kids' paint-by-number set? The 246 varieties of dog food and 165 kinds of cat food, and even Valentine gifts for your favorite mutt? Necessity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And in fact, consumers in markets winnow out all kinds of unnecessary things every day.

The Malthusian meme always insists "things just can't go on like this." Of course, if "things can't go on like this," then they don't. Humanity changes course and things get better. At least that has been the story of the last two centuries and the evidence is that it will be the story of the 21st century as well.

Disclosure: I think that the cat toys my wife bought for our two felines are unnecessary. And does she really need that many pairs of black shoes?

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

Perfect (Bio)Chemistry

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:25:00 EST

No luck on Match.com? Angry that eHarmony excludes gays? Too gentile for jDate? Your prayers have been answered:

A new dating service that launched this week for Boston-area singles claims that it can get the chemistry right when fixing up potential mates -- literally. ScientificMatch.com uses DNA samples from customers to match them with others who have different alleles for major histocompatibility complex genes.

MHC proteins sit on the surface of cells and detect pathogens, but they also appear to play a role in sexual attraction. In sniff tests of dirty t-shirts, people tend to be most attracted to the scent of the shirt whose owner has different MHC alleles from the sniffer. One explanation is that this phenomenon evolved to promote genetic diversity between mates.

For $1,995 and a cheek swab sent off for DNA analysis, customers can find the love of their lives, or so says Eric Holzle, a Massachusetts engineer and long-time dater. Kerry Grens spoke to him on December 11, the day the site went live. At the time, he was driving, and didn't know if anyone had signed up.

Read an interview with the founder here.

NB: For the record, reason's resident biotech early adopter Ron Bailey is already married, ladies. So don't go getting any ideas.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Ron Bailey in Guatemala, Talking Biotech Crop Blues

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:03:00 EST

In October, reason's science correspondent Ronald Bailey gave a couple of talks at Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala. The topic was how crop biotechnology can spark a new Green Revolution which will help feed hungry people in developing countries.

Click the image above to see one of Bailey's lectures plus an interview with the man himself.

Wilhelm Reich: 50 Years in Hell and/or Heaven

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:08:00 EST

Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich had his books burned by the U.S. government in the 1950s and died in prison 50 years ago, in prison basically for refusing to agree with the FDA that his work and devices had no medical value. The Boston Globe notes the opening of his personal paper archives at Harvard, and a possible trend in revival of interest in and furthering of his research.

The Wilhelm Reich Museum.

A devotee's history, with links.

A skeptic's analysis of Reich, with links.

The FBI on Reich.

Robert Anton Wilson's harrowing and wonderful play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell.

I operated a cloudbuster once. I cannot authoritatively state whether it had any effect on the weather.

Gene Master

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:15:00 EDT

Craig Venter is not a man who is inclined to underestimate himself. But then why should he? He beat the government's science bureaucrats in the race to decode the human genome. Fueled by $3 billion in taxpayer money, the federal Human Genome Project had waddled along for years until Mr. Venter, in 1998, managed to come up with private funding for a $300 million parallel research effort, Celera Genomics. He announced that his team would sequence the genome -- mapping the three billion DNA base-pairs that make up all 26,000 or so human genes (plus tracking long stretches of currently unknown function) -- three years ahead of the government's schedule and at a tenth of the cost. And he did.

One of the five genomes that Mr. Venter's team sequenced was his own. A Life Decoded is a kind of second sequencing, in prose instead of proteins this time around. Mr. Venter not only traces the events of his life but also maps the future of biomedicine as he sees it.

Mr. Venter's early life was hardly that of a science prodigy. While growing up in a town just south of San Francisco, he proved to be a mediocre student. His eighth-grade report card (reproduced in "A Life Decoded") shows an average grade hovering between C- and D+. "Some parents may, perhaps, find some hope on seeing similar report cards from their children," he wryly notes.

After barely managing to graduate, he moved in the early 1960s to Southern California, bodysurfing at Newport Beach during the day and working nights at a Sears, Roebuck warehouse. Then an Army draft notice arrived; Mr. Venter enlisted in the Navy. "It never dawned on me that I might end up in Vietnam." Trained as a hospital corpsman, he was shipped to Da Nang, the site of a vast U.S. air base not far from North Vietnam. It was, Mr. Venter says, a "university of death." He treated hundreds of young soldiers who had been grievously wounded and mutilated. This experience, Mr. Venter says, gave him focus: He wanted to save lives. So after the Navy, he started over by going to community college intending to go on to medical school. But when he got to the University of California, San Diego, he was diverted by a brilliant mentor, the biochemist Nathan Kaplan, who saw Mr. Venter's raw talent for science and persuaded him to go into research.

And so he did, concentrating on the working of adrenaline hormone receptors for his doctorate at UCSD and then continuing his research at the School of Medicine at the State University of New York in Buffalo throughout the 1970s. Ultimately, though, he felt trapped by "a weak academic culture" in Buffalo. "I was still driven by my experience in Da Nang, and I wanted to accomplish so much more." Ironically, given his future run-ins with government researchers, Mr. Venter accepted a position in 1983 at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., where he would embark on a "new career in molecular biology" with a well-funded lab, he says. "The techniques and interests I picked up in Bethesda had a profound influence on the rest of my life, laying the foundation for my future interest in reading genomes. I was in scientific heaven."

It is at this point that "A Life Decoded" turns captivating, as Mr. Venter describes his transformation, over the course of a decade, from an NIH-boosting molecular biologist with a "suspicion that pure science would not thrive in a commercial setting" to a genome-obsessed researcher who decided to take chance on the commercial sector.

Mr. Venter's prose reaches a high pitch when he describes the tension and excitement of racing to the genome finish line. But the writing also gets excited whenever discussing a certain J. Craig Venter's heroic struggle against self-serving, risk-averse government bureaucrats on one side and, on the other, short-sighted businessmen whose greed would force him into "endless battles" with his "supposed backers" once he left the NIH in 1992.

In Mr. Venter's telling, James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA and the first head of the government's Human Genome Project, is a sneaky apparatchik. The author claims that Francis Collins, who now runs the project, is a self-righteous and backstabbing manipulator who tried to block Mr. Venter's progress at every turn, threatening to cut the funding of any researcher who cooperated with him. One of Mr. Venter's sweetest revenges comes when the government sequencing team that had so publicly predicted he would fail eventually adopted his methods. Specifically, they implemented whole genome shotgun sequencing, which fragments a genome into pieces that can be rapidly sequenced and then put into proper order by sophisticated computer programs. This technique speeded up sequencing 20-fold.

Mr. Venter's privately funded enterprise, Celera Genomics, began sequencing the genome in September 1999 and completed it nine months later, three years ahead of the government's schedule, as promised. The leaders of the public genome effort panicked when they realized that Mr. Venter would win. A compromise was offered. If he agreed to a draw, then Mr. Venter and the government team would together announce the completion of the human genome at a White House ceremony. This historic event, presided over by President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair via video link, took place on June 26, 2000.

Throughout "A Life Decoded," Mr. Venter inserts brief, boxed descriptions of what was found in his own genome, under headings such as "My Asthma and My Genes" and "My Waistline and Diabetes." Surprisingly, he does not have the dopamine receptor gene variant (DRD4) associated with novelty-seeking and risk-taking. He apparently does have genes that raise his risk for late-onset Alzheimer's disease. By publicly unveiling his entire genome, Mr. Venter wants to counter privacy concerns about genetic information; genes are just information that can help people understand themselves better, he says, and can be used to guide the prevention and treatment of disease.

Since winning the genome race, Mr. Venter has not slowed down. He has combined his love of sailing with an ambitious effort to sample the genetic makeup of the microbes that inhabit the oceans. In 2007, his team announced that they had discovered in seawater samples more than 400 new microbes and six million new genes, doubling the number known to science. In addition, Mr. Venter has established a biotech company, Synthetic Genomics, which aims to create designer organisms to produce fuel and clean up pollution. Mr. Venter wants to bring humanity to "a new phase of evolution, to the day when one DNA-based species can sit down at a computer to design another."

That day is drawing closer. In June, Mr. Venter announced that his team had successfully transplanted the genome from one bacteria species to another. Mr. Venter is widely expected to reveal before long that an artificial genome made of genes constructed at a lab bench has been successfully installed in a microbe.

Readers may cock a skeptical eyebrow at Mr. Venter's admiring account of his life so far—perhaps one day he will discover the gene for braggadocio—but "A Life Decoded" is invaluable as a behind-the-scenes account of biomedical research and scientific infighting during a momentous time.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books. This article orginally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Open Thread: Ode to the Enhanced, or Whatever Floats Your Boat

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 18:33:00 EDT

As Barry Bonds swings his way toward Hank Aaron's home-run record and the Tour de Farce straggles to a close, the Los Angeles Times' Joel Stein pens an "Ode To the Enhanced":

In a more enlightened age, when the risks and the costs of these medical miracles come down, we'll look back on Bonds' triumph as a victory for all of us. We'll see our booing of him as symptoms of a silly, Luddite phobia of manipulating our own bodies. I'm sure there was an equal outcry when makeup was invented. And hair dye and the Wonder bra. How our ancestors went on, I have no idea.

Bonds is not using a corked bat, which many players have, just as plenty of pitchers have scuffed balls. He has simply redesigned his body. Like so many of us have. Medicine, surgery and genetic engineering are no more an affront to God than drinking the protein shakes he didn't leave on the vine. And until we accept that, we're going to keep losing to those we call cheaters.

So next week, I'll be watching Bonds with my Lasiked eyes, free of the scar that was laser-pulsed from my nose, while I run a hand through my Rogained hair. And of course I'll be holding -- because it makes me feel better -- a beer.

What say you, Hit & Run readers?

Is Bonds simply a cheater? Is Joel Stein being ironic? Or post-9/11 ironically unironic?

What self-directed evolution will you be undertaking this weekend?

And if you're not interested in that topic, then fire away on whatever floats your boat.

Natural Born Communists?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:01:00 EDT

Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. A recent study by a team of researchers headed up by University of California-San Diego political scientist James Fowler suggests that we may all have Robin Hood tendencies. Experimental economists and psychologists from around the world have been watching how people play various economic games as a way to probe the bases of human cooperation. One of the more interesting discoveries is that in economic games some people - altruistic punishers - will take fairly big hits to their winnings in order to reduce the ill-gotten gains of cheaters. Games with altruistic punishers elicit more cooperative behavior among players. In addition, other researchers have found that players will happily spend some of their own winnings in gambling games in order to reduce the "undeserved" winnings of other players.

In re-analyzing some earlier studies, Fowler and his colleagues suggested "that egalitarian motives are more important than motives for punishing non-cooperative behaviour." In other words, people are really more interested in enforcing income equality than they are in punishing cheaters. To tease out motives, Fowler and his colleagues devised a game in which there was no possibility of reciprocity or cooperation. Their hypothesis was that people would spend some of their incomes to equalize the incomes of other players.

In their game, participants (120 college students) were assigned to groups of four anonymous players. At the outset each received a randomly generated sum of money. The payoffs are shown to all the players who are then given an opportunity to give "negative" or "positive" tokens to other players. Each token cost one monetary unit. Giving a negative token to another player reduced the recipient's winnings by 3 monetary units and giving a positive token to another player increased the recipient's winnings by 3 monetary units. After each round, the anonymous group members were randomized to prevent reputation from influencing decisions. Keep in mind that choosing to cut or to boost the incomes of other players is costly and yields no material gain, so self-interested subjects should have no incentive to engage in it. So what happened?

Their latest study in the journal Nature reports, "Individuals who earned considerably more than other members of their group were heavily penalized." On the other hand, players who earned a lot less than other group members received substantial gifts. A majority of players (68 percent) chose to cut the earnings of other players at least once, 28 percent did five times or more, and some fanatic levelers (6 percent) slashed at the incomes of their richer fellows ten times or more. But the game didn't just bring out spitefulness. Perhaps even more amazingly, a majority of players (71 percent) also paid, with no expectation of gain, to increase the incomes of other participants at least once. More generous players (33 percent) did so five times or more, and some saints (10 percent) boosted other players' earnings ten times or more. The researchers note, "Most (71 percent) negative tokens were given to above-average earners in each group, whereas most (62 percent) positive tokens were targeted at below-average earners in each group."

Also, players who earned ten monetary units more than the group average received a mean of nearly 9 negative tokens. In contrast, players who earned at least ten monetary units less than the group average received a mean of only 1.6 negative tokens. The opposite was the case for those earning ten monetary units or less. They received 11 more positive tokens on average while those earning more than ten units received a mean of only 4 positive tokens. Finally, the researchers report, "On average, the bottom earner in each group spent 96 percent more on negative tokens than the top earner and the top earner spent 77 percent more on positive tokens than the bottom earner." In other words, the poor spent a good bit of their meager incomes on reducing the incomes of the rich while the rich kindly reduced their wealth to endow the poor with more resources. Interestingly, the study does not report any gender differences in behavior.

Assuming that these research findings are valid, how did this innate drive toward enforcing income equality come about? It's hard to see how an inborn drive could arise in Pleistocene hunter gatherers such that people spend their scarce resources to reduce other people's resources promotes either individual or group survival. Or is enforcing equality really all that different an activity from punishing non-cooperating cheaters? Perhaps early in human evolution, large differences in income actually correlated with cheating and thus automatically merited punishment. Another puzzle is if humans are instinctively egalitarian, how did early hierarchical civilizations in which the incomes of priests and kings were significantly higher than those of peasants come about at all? Finally, finding that humans have an innate tendency toward enforcing a norm of income equality would explain the persistent attraction of communism, progressive tax rates, the demand for universal government-supplied health care, minimum wage laws and other such destructive modern leveling ideologies and policies.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Plight of the Bumblebee

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 06:40:00 EDT

Beekeepers in at least 24 states are reporting a huge number of empty honeybee hives this spring. Strangely, few dead bees are being found in the hives, so it appears that the hives are empty because bees are not returning from foraging. Since honeybees are the hard working pollinators of a lot of American crops, this is really bad news. But the cause for what is being called "colony collapse disorder" (CCD) is not at all clear.

Unfortunately, honeybees in the United States have been under pressure in recent years by new infestations of parasites, especially the varroa mite. The varroa mite, which sucks bee blood and which may pass along infectious diseases, was first identified in Java in the early part of the 20^th century. The mite has been spreading around the globe and apparently made its way to Florida around 1987. Mites are now found throughout the United States and controlling them has become a major concern of beekeepers.

In their sadly predictable knee-jerk fashion, environmentalist ideologues cannot resist making biotech crops the bogeyman in this unfolding agricultural tragedy. The Sierra Club recently launched a letter writing campaign to Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) hinting that biotech crops may be responsible for CCD. The Sierra Club writes: "The cause of CCD is unknown. Although factors being considered include pesticides, mites, microbial disease and habitat decline, there's a possible link that's not being investigated. Highly respected scientists believe that exposure to genetically engineered crops and their plant-produced pesticides merit serious consideration as either the cause or a contributory factor to the development and spread of CCD. In searching for the cause of massive honey bee losses nationwide, we must leave no stone unturned to find the answer."

The vast majority of current biotech crops are enhanced with genes for herbicide tolerance (to ease weed control) and B.t. toxin to kill caterpillar pests. In its anti-biotech letter, the Sierra Club lists a number of studies that it suggests will show that biotech crops are harming bees. It either has not read the studies it cites or it's hoping nobody will actually read them. For example, the first study from the "highly respected scientists" the Sierra Club cites actually contradicts the notion that biotech crops hurt bees.

First, the study reports an experiment in which bee colonies were allowed either to feed from biotech herbicide-resistant oilseed rape (canola) or unenhanced varieties. The researchers begin by noting that ‘herbicide resistance is one of the most commonly-used traits in commercial cultivars of transgenic crop plants" and add that bees "are extremely unlikely to be harmed by these plants." The experiment bears out that prediction. "There were no significant differences that could be attributed to plant type in worker bee mortality, foraging activity, foraging preferences or colony health (bee population, brood area, presence of diseases or hive food stores)," report the researchers.

What about biotech crops enhanced for insect resistance by splicing in the B.t. toxin gene? The story is the same. The researchers evaluate various experiments in which bees fed on insect-resistant crops and conclude "B.t. transgene products are very likely to be safe for honey bees and bumblebees."

Another study cited by the Sierra Club worries about ecological risks posed by insect-resistant biotech crops. That study includes the Cornell University researcher, John Losey, who infamously poisoned monarch butterfy larva in the lab by force-feeding them B.t. corn pollen that was heavily sprinkled on milkweed leaves. In 1999, Losey's monarch research was published in Nature and provoked a firestorm of anti-biotech agitation complete with flocks of activists women at anti-biotech rallies dressed fetchingly as butterflies. Two years later six studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed Losey's research to be a bogus stunt with no relevance to field conditions. The lead PNAS study concluded "the impact of Bt corn pollen from currentcommercial hybrids on monarch butterfly populations isnegligible."

So what does the Losey study cited by the Sierra Club letter say about biotech crops and bees? First, it notes "documentation for the EPA registration shows that pollen from Bt corn has no effect on survival of either larval or adult domesticated bees." Oddly, the study goes on to cite research from 1990 by Vandenberg on the effects of one variety of B.t. toxin on bees. Odd, because there were no biotech crops way back then. Vandenberg's research was on a B.t. toxin commonly used by organic farmers and even at high concentrations it only reduced adult bee longevity. This was not a study of biotech crops.

The fourth study referenced by the Sierra Club letter makes some suggestions for further research but notes that current research finds that honeybees actually preferred herbicide resistant oilseed rape, perhaps because the biotech variety produced more nectar. In any case, the experimenters detected no difference in the diversity pollinators and their foraging behavior between the biotech and unenhanced crops.

The Sierra Club also lists a 2005 study that evaluates the effects of B.t. toxin, deltamethrin and imidacloprid insecticides. Keep in mind that in this experiment B.t. toxin is not fed to bees in the form of biotech crops but as plain old toxin in syrup. Even so, the study found that B.t. toxin did not affect bee mortality, syrup consumption or learning capacities, although foraging activity was reduced. However, both of the synthetic insecticides affected syrup consumption and foraging activity and deltamethrin also reduced bee learning capacities. But here's the kicker: "Our study suggests that for honeybees, synthetic insecticides such as deltamethrin may induce a greater hazard than [B.t. toxin] protein, potentially expressed in B.t. corn pollen."

Being interested in what the most recent research says about the effects of insect resistant biotech crops on bees, I looked at the 2006 review cited in the Sierra Club letter. In that review I discovered that all of the data cited find no observational differences between bees that fed from biotech crops and those that didn't. The review does cite studies from the 1960s and 1970s in which bees forced to eat actual B.t. bacteria or spores died. Checking the references in that review turned up a 2003 study in which pollen from B.t. corn was fed to bees and wax moth larvae. The researchers found no significant differences in all the parameters tested between bee larvae fed transgenic B.t. corn pollen and non-transgenic corn pollen. However, since B.t. toxin is targeted to caterpillars, it was expected that the moth larvae that ate B.t. corn pollen would die and they did.

Again, didn't the Sierra Club folks read the studies they cited? If they had and they were honest, they'd be a lot more sanguine about the effects that biotech crops have on bees. In any case, the Sierra Club managed to overlook plenty of other studies that consistently find that biotech crops do not harm bees and other non-target insects.

By the way, colony collapse disorder is not confined to biotech-friendly United States. Hives are collapsing in biotech-free Europe too. The head of the German beekeeper's association says there has been a 25 percent drop in bee populations in Germany. Bizarrely, one particularly irrational German beekeeper blames biotech corn even though the Germany's biotech corn is only 0.06 percent of the total crop. Last week, the Irish Times (subscription required) reported that in Britain 30 per cent of hives inspected so far have been lost and that hundreds of thousands of colonies have collapsed in Spain. Beekeepers in Poland, Greece, Croatia, Switzerland, Italy and Portugal have also reported heavy losses.

A very interesting and disturbing comprehensive analysis of CCD by bee researchers from Florida and Pennsylvania failed to pinpoint the cause, but did note that several live bees taken from nearly collapsed hives were massively infected with a number of viruses and fungi. Of course, it is possible that at the margins, biotech crops may be somehow harming bees, but the overwhelming evidence suggests that it would be far more scientifically profitable to look elsewhere for why colonies are collapsing. Leaving no stone unturned in the search of the causes of CCD is a good idea, but as even the studies cited in the Sierra Club's dishonest letter make clear, a lot of the biotech stones have already been turned over and nothing harmful was found. Evidently it is more important for environmentalist ideologues to bash biotech and mislead the public and policymakers than it is to actually find out why bees are disappearing.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: When I was growing up on my family's farm my father had over 30 hives of bees. Because I'm a big wimp, I never enjoyed helping him to rob the hives of their honey, though I must say that locust and sourwood blossom honey are particularly tasty. As I recall I sold my Monsanto stock 8 years or so ago. I own no stocks in bee or honey companies and I am not in the pay of Big Honey or Big Pollination.

Discuss this article here.

Diagnosing Your Demise

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:02:00 EDT

At age 23, Katharine Moser took the genetic test for the Huntington's disease (HD). The news was not good. She has the version of the HD gene that will eventually rob her of her ability to walk, talk, swallow and think. The gene that will cause Moser's illness was inherited from grandfather through her mother. Everyone carries the gene, but only those who have a segment that repeats three bases of genetic code cytosine, adenine and guanine (CAG) many times will get it. People with fewer than 35 GAG repeats will not suffer the disease; however, people with more repeats will inevitably succumb to it. The more repeats, the sooner the onset of the disease. In Moser's case, her HD gene has 47 CAG repeats which means that she is likely to begin experiencing symptoms by the time she reaches her mid-30s. In many ways, Moser is blazing a trail for the rest of us. Improved genetic testing will tell more and more of us about our future health and likely ends.

Hold on a minute. Don't we already know a lot about our future health and how our lives are likely to end without all that fancy new genetic technology? We all know that we're going to die. More than half of us will die of heart disease or cancer. Using actuarial tables we can figure out your chances of making it to any specified age. For example, actuarially there is a 50 percent chance that I will live just another 25 years. Damn! On the other hand, longevity researcher Thomas Perls at Harvard offers a longevity calculator that takes into account lifestyle, family history and so forth. My score, including my less-than-exemplary drinking, exercise and red meat habits: a 50 percent chance of making it another 31 years. Life insurance companies already make pretty good guesses how long you're likely to live based on family medical history and lifestyle habits, so who needs genetic testing?

The problem is that life expectancy calculations are an average. The Wharton Life Expectancy calculator gives me a 50 percent chance of living an additional 31 years too. However, there is a 25 percent chance that I will die in 23 years. On the other hand, there is a 25 percent chance that I might have as long as 41 more years. The difference of 18 years matters.

Future tests, including genetic tests, could narrow the range of your specific life expectancy. In addition, such tests will be able to tell what your greatest risks are. Right now, tests look for disease risks based on specific genetic flaws. For example, altered BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes boost the chance that a woman will have breast cancer by 3 to 7 times. People with the APOE4 variant of a gene involved with cholesterol transport are at increased risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Unlike the HD gene, having the APOE4 variant is not a guarantee of future illness. The environment also plays a big role. One study suggests that drinking alcohol increases the risk of AD for carriers of the APOE4 allele. Recent research indicates that the herpes virus that causes cold sores may also interact with the APOE4 allele to increase the risk of AD.

In addition to environmental influences there are gene interactions that affect a person's risk of AD. For example, some research hints that carriers of both the APOE4 and a version of the CYP46 gene have a 10 times greater than average risk of AD. (Other research casts some doubt on this conclusion.) Nevertheless, researchers are developing data banks that compile possible associations between various genes and the risks of disease. Genetic researchers are already investigating which sets of genes, called haplotypes, combine to increase a person's risk of various diseases including cardiovascular disease. One can imagine in the not too distant future, say ten years, when a comprehensive panel of genetic tests will identify a variety of disease causing and health promoting haplotypes. You may test "positive" for haplotypes that increase risk for kidney cancer and deep vein thrombosis and for others which reduce your risk of Alzheimer's disease and diabetes. Analyzing such genetic information may put narrower limits on your life expectancy.

Of course, the new tests will also give you options for stalling the arrival of the Grim Reaper. For example, if it turned out that you carry two copies of the APOE4 allele, you may choose to cut back on your drinking in order postpone dementia. And if you carry the breast cancer enhancing variant of BRCA1, you will make sure to get frequent mammograms and MRIs and perhaps you will even choose to have prophylactic mastectomies. But what if the genetic tests give you information that amounts to a death sentence? That it turns out that there is nothing much you can do to avert your pre-ordained doom? In a sense, we all are already in that situation because right now sooner or later death is inevitable.

However, some ethicists and physicians argue that genetic testing should not be made widely available because there are so few effective medical treatments. They claim that letting people know more about the health risks they face will turn them into a bunch of miserable hypochondriacs. In other words, they believe that genetic ignorance is bliss. And many people apparently agree with the naysayers. Katharine Moser is unusual since only about 20 percent of people who are at risk of Huntington's Disease get tested. I believe that Moser made the right choice. Knowledge is power. Moser may not be able to do much about preventing the onset of HD, but she can arrange her life now to be as fulfilling and interesting as possible. She will not postpone vacations, education, visits with friends, and career plans. Because of her genetic knowledge, Moser has put her life into overdrive.

Genetic testing and other biomedical advances will some day provide all of us with a great deal more knowledge about when our lives are going to end. So here's the question: assuming that future genetic testing, combined with a sophisticated biochemical analysis of your past environmental insults, could accurately narrow your life expectancy down to a specific number of years, would you want to know how long you have left? I answer unequivocally, yes. I really want to know (barring accidents) if I'm going to live only 23 years or 41 more years, or even worse, if I'm going to drop dead in the next year. Attempts to restrict access to predictive genetic tests on paternalistic grounds must be strenuously resisted. In the near future, you will not only know that the Pale Rider is headed your way, you'll also have a pretty good idea when he will show up.

Disclosure: Because of my robust thanatophobia I have already availed myself of whole batteries of modern biomedical tests (very few genetic) including a 64-slice heart scan, a whole body MRI scan, a variety of blood tests including ones for homocysteine, C-reactive protein, glucose resistance and prostate specific antigen, a sonogram to check for gallstones, and colonoscopies (during which a polyp was removed). I have asked my physician to let me know when tests for APOE alleles and Chagas' disease become commercially available. And rather than let insurance companies decide what tests I can and cannot have, I paid out-of-pocket for many of them. I am happy to report that the 64-slice heart scan showed that, contrary to claims made by some critics, I actually do have a heart, and it's in remarkably good shape. Rumors that I am in the pay of Big Testing are false. Finally, the death clock says that I will die on September 4, 2027.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Medievalizing Biotech Regulation

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:57:00 EST

"We are proposing a new regulatory institution in Washington, DC," said Francis Fukuyama, professor of political economy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and author of Our Posthuman Future. "It's been a long time since anyone has done that."

What needs regulating? Human biotechnology. Fukuyama unveiled his plan for a new agency at a conference held at the Rayburn House Office building on Capitol Hill. The blueprint for the new biotech regulatory agency being proposed by Fukuyama and Swiss technology consultant Franco Furger is laid out in a 400 page book, Beyond Bioethics: A Proposal for Modernizing the Regulation of Human Biotechnologies.

Why do we need a new biotech regulatory agency? Because bad things have happened? Not at all. In fact, Fukuyama wants to put his proposal in play now so that the denizens of Capitol Hill can simply pull it off the shelf and enact it into law when some sort of biotech scandal erupts. The proposed agency is explicitly modeled after the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA). Fukuyama's new agency would not just regulate the safety and efficacy of new biotechnologies, but also rule on their ethical propriety. According to Fukuyama, biotechnology is "galloping ahead" and it's time to move from ethical discussions to regulation and "social control."

Furger discussed some recent developments to illustrate how biotech is galloping ahead. For example, a Texas fertility clinic is now offering embryos for sale; researchers have manufactured mouse sperm from stem cells; and others have inserted human cell nuclei into rabbit eggs to try to produce stem cells. Furger said that he was listing these activities, "not to say that they are reproachable. Some may be acceptable and some not." He asked, "But how do we make that determination?"

Fukuyama explained that the new agency would regulate anything having to do with assisted reproduction techniques (ART). This would include IVF, ooplasm transfer, sex selection either by pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) or sperm sorting. The agency would also regulate research involving human reproductive tissues including all embryonic stem cell research and anything dealing with human developmental biology.

"Biotech has reached point where existing regulators, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, can't handle it," declared Fukuyama.The agency would be guided by a set of ranked ethical principles. Its first concern would be the well-being and health of children. Second, ensuring equal access to ART for infertile couples. Third, protecting the well-being of and health of women. Fourth, promoting therapeutic uses of ART over enhancement uses. Fifth, making sure that patients and research subjects give their free informed consent to procedures. And finally, advocating for regulations to limit the commercialization of human eggs, sperm and embryos.

Fukuyama would completely ban human reproductive cloning, the creation of human animal chimeras for the purpose of reproduction, germline genetic modifications, any procedure that would alter the genetic relationship of parents to children, and the patenting of human embryos.

The new agency would regulate research cloning, PGD, sex selection of embryos, and the commercialization of certain elements of human reproduction such as the sale of eggs, sperm and embryos. It would consist of a set of commissioners, appointed by the president and advised by a board consisting of various stakeholder groups such as patients, ART practitioners, scientific community and the biotech industry. Fukuyama also introduced a novel set of mechanisms for consulting with the wider public including deliberative panels and a consultative college of consisting of randomly selected members of the public who convene to consider regulatory issues over the internet.

Instead of inhibiting research and the development of new treatments, the new agency could spur them on, suggested Fukuyama. For example, he asserted that Britain is ahead of the United States in human embryonic stem cell research because of the HFEA's regulations. Fukuyama is just plain wrong about that. The Guardian reported last week, "Excessive bureaucracy imposed by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority [is] prohibiting development in stem cell research and threatening Britain's position as a world leader in the field." The Guardian quoted stem cell researcher Alison Murdoch, director of the Newcastle Centre for Life fertility clinic, as saying, "The way the government has handled the work we do is to regulate it to the point that it looks like it's got barbed wire around it."

But what about the larger question: Do we really want a federal agency making and imposing ethical decisions about human reproduction? Consider the wretched history of federal and state regulation in this area. In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Laws that outlawed "every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion." The Comstock Laws authorized the U.S. Post Office to confiscate any publications providing advice on contraception and condoms shipped through the mail. The first eugenics law was passed in Indiana in 1907 and eventually laws allowing the forced sterilization of "unfit" people were adopted by 30 states. Infamously, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927. By the 1960s, some 66,000 Americans had been forcibly neutered.

In the last half of the 20^th century, the U.S. Supreme Court finally stepped in to overrule state interference in the reproductive decisions of Americans. In 1965, the Court found unconstitutional the Connecticut law prohibiting use of birth control by married couples in Griswold v. Connecticut. In 1967, the Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that the laws in 16 states banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. In 1972, the Court struck down in the case of Eisenstadt v. Baird a Massachusetts law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people. And of course, the Supreme Court found prohibitions on abortion unconstitutional in 1973 in Roe v. Wade.

The HFEA, the model for Fukuyama's new biotech regulatory agency, has similarly interfered with the reproductive decisions of British people. The HFEA has told couples that they could not select the sex of embryos to be implanted. Even now the parents wanting to use PGD to insure that their children will not be burdened with an inherited genetic disease must apply for permission from the HFEA. And the HFEA has banned paying women for providing eggs to be used in research.

Fukuyama's agency would rule not only on safety and efficacy but on moral questions surrounding human reproduction. Some possible techniques are objectionable and should be banned, e.g., any attempt to create a half-human half-chimp baby. On the other hand, Fukuyama wants to ban ever allowing parents to safely choose genes that would tend to give their children healthier immune systems, stronger bodies and cleverer brains.

It turns out that the proposed agency is largely just a vehicle for Fukuyama to impose his moral choices on other people. What Fukuyama is proposing is a step backward to the bad old days in which strangers get to vote on what kind of children their fellow citizens will be allowed to bring into the world. A government bureaucracy, rather than parents, would get to make eugenic decisions. As the sorry history of attempts to regulate human reproduction shows, the truly moral thing to do is fiercely resist this proposal.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Welcome to Biotech Park

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 12:03:00 EST

National Review Online

Read this review at National Review Online.