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TechnoratiScientists Have a New Way to Reshape Nature, But None Can Predict the Cost
Synthetic biologists say their technology could tackle climate change and feed the hungry, but its dangers are terrifying
If you've never heard of synbio, you will hear plenty in the next decade. Synthetic biology now occupies roughly the same space on the public's radar that computing might have done in the 1960s or genetic modification in the 1970s - it's largely unheard of by anyone except the scientific community and its geeky observers. But as the pace of breakthrough in this area quickens, the sense of being on the edge of an extraordinary technological revolution is giving even the scientists involved vertigo.
Part of the reason why synbio has had so little attention in the British media is that most of the running is being made in America. There, a few key players are jockeying for position in a race that promises to make them wealthy in the way that computers did Bill Gates. With the arrival in the UK this week of one of those players, Craig Venter, for a string of public talks, the huge implications of synbio might finally begin to impinge on public consciousness here.
We didn't much like genetic modification (GM) by the time it reached trials in the UK in the 1990s, but that could come to look like a storm in a teacup compared to synbio. While GM was about adding or knocking out the odd gene, synbio is about using nature as a giant Meccano set, building entirely new organisms from bits of DNA called BioBricks in what's known as the bottom-up approach. Alternatively, there's Venter's method of stripping out DNA to find the simplest life form and then using that - like a car chassis - to add bits to achieve a bespoke design: this is the breakthrough he says he is on the point of achieving. In this brave new world, they talk of a future in which synthetic biologists will work much like graphic designers, building new organisms on their laptops and emailing them off to the gene foundry for construction.
The best guess is that we are a year or two away from the first commercial application becoming clear, but already huge money is being ploughed in. Venter and his colleagues are plastering every step of their research with sweepingly broad patent applications; it's a gold rush. By 2015 it's estimated that a fifth of the chemical industry (worth $1.8 trillion) could be dependent on synbio. But if that is to happen, the public have to be kept on side and persuaded that the risks with synbio - and it is a frightening science - are worth taking.
What leading synthetic biologists don't want is a public backlash and heavy-handed government interference. They talk of self-regulation - last week the J Craig Venter Institute in Maryland put out another set of proposals - while pushing their research so far ahead of the public debate that by the time we've all cottoned on to what they're up to, it will be too late to do much about it.
So beware of how we are being sold this scientific revolution with pledges to help Africa's poor and ease global warming. The poster child for synbio is the production of a cheap anti-malarial drug. There is a worldwide shortage of natural artemisinin, the most effective anti-malarial extracted from the wormwood tree, but synthetic biologists are on the verge of finding a way to insert the gene responsible for artemisinin into a strain of yeast which could then "manufacture" it in cheap, vast quantities. Further from development but equally plausible are bacteria that could mop up oil spills or extract heavy metal contamination from soil. The most tantalising possibilities might offer help with climate change: bacteria that could break down cellulose to produce ethanol, and even bacteria that could soak up carbon dioxide. Fuel from vast slurry pits of bacteria (they could always lob in a gene to make the smell palatable): the future is an industrialisation of nature.
Some of these promises will be much like the "golden rice" that was used to promote GM, with claims that it would alleviate chronic vitamin A deficiency across Asia, but which has yet to materialise. However, no one doubts that there will be dramatic and benign applications of synbio. The problem is that no one can predict what their price tag might be. How synbio could go wrong keeps even dedicated synthetic biologists awake at night; one, Drew Endy, at the Massachussets Institute of Technology, has said: "I expect this technology will be misapplied... and it would be irresponsible to have a conversation about the technology without acknowledging that fact." Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, talks of bioterror or "bioerror" - a mistake - that could lead to a million casualties in a single event by 2020.
The most frightening aspect of synbio lies in two dimensions of the science. First, after the upfront research costs, synbio has the potential to be a highly accessible technology much like electronics. Unlike nuclear technology, for example, it won't require expensive resources or unusual expertise. In a decade, thousands of laboratories and science graduates are likely to be able to practise synbio, making the task of regulating its use extremely difficult.
Second, creating fantastic bacteria in a contained laboratory is one thing, but what happens when they get out and cross with their wild cousins, mutating into organisms we had never foreseen? The whole point of this science is the development of large-scale use outside a lab, but can we predict what consequences releasing these new organisms could have? The answer is a resounding no. We know about less than 1% of existing bacteria, and have very little understanding of how they mutate. But what we do know is that bacteria survive almost anything - if some malevolent bacteria developed, they would be hard to kill off.
This is scary stuff, but no one is seriously suggesting we can stop here. Even the most nervous synthetic biologists recognise that if they don't keep ploughing ahead, others without their scruples will: we need responsible scientists to alert us to the possibilities of this science. Besides, the promise of huge riches will keep driving development - Venter claims that if he pulls off his organism, it could be worth billions or even trillions of dollars in licensing deals.
Imagine if the engineers of 18th-century Britain could have foreseen the consequences of industrialisation. If they had been warned that it would bring untold wealth and comfort to millions, but would also disrupt human communities, lead to a terrible escalation of war and huge environmental degradation, how then would they have weighed the massive and momentous consequences? And how are we going to? In a couple of decades we could have a nature to organise entirely as we like - the scientist Freeman Dyson suggested black-leaved forests for more efficient use of sunlight in an article on synbio in a recent New York Review of Books. We could be busy creating our own biodiversity to replace the one we will have lost. We might have a "new, improved nature" which is more efficient in meeting our needs and ensuring the survival of future generations: is that a threat or a promise of salvation? And who are we going to trust to make that judgment call?
Madeleine Bunting is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. m.bunting@guardian.co.uk
© 2007 The Guardian
19 Comments so far
Show AllScience is a religion - in fact, an evangelical one. A religion in which the operant faith is that all problems can be solved, someday. All we have to do is keep going the way we are going.
Science also has very specific ideas of morality. There was a period when I was reading articles in neurology describing animal experiments. It was truly horrifying to read what was being done to these animals - or at least it was, for a while. It didn't take too long before I felt myself seduced into the amoral world of technical questions and the experimental exploration of their answers. The animals were no more alive, they were just - experimental objects. Perhaps more horrifying than what was being done to these animals was what I recognized in that liminal state in between these two ways of seeing. What I saw, was that my mind too had the ability to perceive in a moral vacuum, but that I could only be truly aware of it for that moment, as the transition occurred.
An amoral world in an evangelical envelope that makes it's form of relating to the world the one of predominant, and given the overbearing arrogance of the scientist, generally only, value.
And then, it's not as if science and technology just pop out of nowhere. Does anyone do nutritional biochemistry anymore? No. Why not? Because there's more money in the production of techniques relevant to the production of drugs. The science that we are producing is being systematically warped by those who fund it. One Stanford molecular biologist came to a talk and made the initial obligatory comments about how there are genetic factors involved in the phenomena that he was going to talk about, and that there are environmental factors. Every talk you go to, they'll start out that way. He then continued, "My research is in the genetic aspect of the problem." Shrugging his shoulders, he said, "I don't know, I just find it more interesting." I wonder if he really believed that. Convenient, it certainly was, given that the only money available was for the study of the genetic side of the problem.
I used to be a mathematical physicist. I left. A beautiful house, I decided. Architecturally perfect; but one in which no one lives. And it's that very emptying out, and the identification of those who engage in the activity with that empty structure, that allows those inculcated in its techniques to create horrors.
In time, I concluded that this much vaunted science is not even knowledge. It is certainly power; but it's not knowledge. Knowledge has a kinship to certain transcendent powers, like Love, Compassion, Non-Violence; but science - it knows nothing of these.
The problems run very deep. I'm now a psychologist. I don't think there's any way but for people to be changed, one by one.
I think you can only find this acceptable (not attractive) if you have been conditioned in a chemically hazardous environment. If you have taken a piece of earth and restored it through organic methods, restored yourself through the elimination of environmental toxins and actually see, feel, and taste the difference (it takes a few years) you might have an understanding of what is at stake. Even in the artifical chemical mess we live in you can see and know things you will never learn or understand from a laboratory. I hope the people envolved in this science live long enough to see thier mistakes.
wishiwasinagreenstate -
Good question. The key difference between synbio and current genetic engineering which allows you to grow insulin in yeast is that in synbio EVERY gene is controlled. The orginal bug is going to be stripped down to a bare minimum that can be kept alive in highly artificial conditions. You actually start with a cell that has no genes and reintroduce a minimal set of genes to support life, plus the ones you've engineered to do the job.
This means the bug that is produced this way, in contrast with conventional genetic modification techniques, is much LESS likely to be able to escape and survive in the wild, cross-breed with "wild cousins", or do anything else out of control. Because the basic gene set has been stripped down to a bare minimum that is completely accounted for and thoroughly studied, it is much less likely that there will be unexpected interactions or hidden complexity that leads to unintended consequences of introducing engineered genes.
Another point is that this is no way to make a hardy, virulent super-biological weapon that is going to escape from the lab and wipe out humanity (or panda bears).
In other words, compared with conventional genetic modification, which is actually not particularly dangerous in itself (but certainly can be misused), synbio is actually better controlled, better understood, and inherently less risky, as well as less well-suited to making the most dangerous biological weapons.
True foods network has a lot of information on this site. The crops section and information about the technology of altering trees points out some of the problems and why there are concerns.
True Food Now!
http://www.truefoodnow.org/crop/
To be quite honest, most of the stuff the author mentions sounds pretty close to what we are doing already. I don't feel that the author has used enough science in this article to describe exactly why this is more dangerous than techniques we already employ. For example, insulin is now manufactured from bacteria. It is not the only drug made this way, so I don't know why using yeast to make an antimalarial is problematic. We already use bacteria to clean up soils and extract heavy metals from soils. There is a whole field (bioremediation) dedicated to the study of (existing or, sometimes with plants,somewhat genetically modified) microbes and plants as tools for cleaning up pollution. Just how different would synbio toxic waste eating bacteria be from the ones we already use? I don't know because the author doesn't fully explain.
I agree with most of the posters here. We're not ready for this kind of technology. Our track record at using technology to abuse nature and ourselves makes me CERTAIN that we'll screw-up this time again. Chernobyl was just the tip of the iceberg. There were thousands of "incidents" reported (not widely) in nuclear facilities and in the process of handling and transporting nuclear material.
What Madeleine Bunting is saying is that this is MUCH more dangerous than anything we've been playing with before. A toxic or radioactive "spill" has certain range and duration of influence. You can agguably deal with it. A bacterial or viral "spill" is, basically, impossible to contain. Sure, there can be dozens of incidents where nothing significant would happen. Bacteria just dies outright or dies after it consumed material it was designed to consume. Problem here is the assumption that it won't adapt and go after something else. It's the assumption that the company that wants to market it will "know" exactly what is going to happen outside the laboratory environment.
Most people heard a story about cockroaches being the only ones to survive nuclear war. Not true. Bacteria, BECAUSE of it's simplicity is most likely to survive. Complex life forms, ( humans & cockroaches included) are first to go in most "Extinction Level Event" scenarios. Scientist are still hoping to find living bacteria on Mars and certain Jupiter moons. To think that you can control this kind of life form is laughable. Ask any doctor.
At the end, this all boils down to our view of ourselves and our place in the universe. Are we here to live "with" the nature or are we here to "use" nature for our "needs". What is "progress"? Is it going to make me happy to buy a smaller cell-phone or bigger TV? Should I really care about "growth" of the economy when standard of living for average person has been declining for 40+ years?
Some psychologists define happiness as:
- Fulfilling work and work environment
- Deep, fulfilling, and varied contact with spouse, family and friends/acquaintances
- General well-being (health?)
I generally agree with this view except for the omitted self-improvement factor & relationship with the environment/nature factor. My point is that we already have all the tools and all the growth we need to make ourselves happy and we're not doing that. Investor class is the only one that really needs another "growth engine" like this to multiply their earnings.
So, please, don't tell me that I stand in the way of progress. Don't tell me that the corporations will act responsibly and that the $hit won't hit the fan. Even if you're in the top 0.1 % of the income bracket and you stand to win another $100 mill. on top of the $100 mill. that you have, through investing in this field. Even if you think that this would make you genuinely happy. It won't make you happy when you or your kids die. And it makes me really angry that you're risking my life and my kids life 'cause of greed.
Finally, I agree that "genie" is out of the bottle already.
The fact is that the current crony capitalist model that rules the world is incapable of handling this properly. This kind of technology can only be used for off-world projects. Maybe for terraforming. Even then, with great care. Releasing any of that stuff here puts a clock on our survival.
I dunno, i don' think you have to rape something to understand it, or figure out it doesn't like being raped. Once you drive something into extinction it is a little late an apology.
"Science" is just the systematic-understanding of what "is". The only alternative to Science is to advance what "isn't".
I say 'in for Pence, in for Pound' when presented with such Frankenstein-phobia. We are indeed going to bite-the-apple, so to speak -- and it isn't 'poisoned' of-itself, it just "is" and has always-been (although our own Nature may be poisonous...only Time is telling, and being Human your "bet is placed" already).
You will notice how few scientists show any kind of ethical behaviour...The satire is swiftian!
these scientists never advance a new development without firsdt assuring us its safe and will aid mankind. But look atr their trackrecord: plastics now pollutte land and sea; chemicals pollute land and sea anmd hjave infiltrate our food in forms like ADHD causing additives; nuclerpower was going to givre us energy too cheap to meter before it Chernobyl and depleted uranium radiated peopel in russia and IraQ; gm FOODS...Going to feed the poor...now nobody wants it except Mmonsanto...on and on each new ';development' proves to be a disaster that is very hard to eradicate once ity gets out into nature and human society....
This level of scientific engineering supposes that human process can artifically alter natural systems without unintended consequences. WHAT A BIG LIE. It is demonstrated over and over again by comparison with nature that science is corrupted and negligable. For instance, after 40 years of pesticide use (ddt and the adverse effects that are far to broad to mention here) to control mosquitos that spread malaria, we now know that we create a bigger better mosquito, that natural predators and entire eco systems, along with human physiology are negatively altered. We actually produce disease mechanisms by it use. Now the glow-in-the-dark monkey makers have a new plan. The plan, similar to the GE/GM plan is full of greed and corruption. Where I live, people have passed local ordinances to keep thier living areas free from genetic engineering. What I object to most is the issue of manufactured consent. Technology has surpassed the human capacity for ethical behavior.
MARK ABRAM__ You made some good points about not succumbing to scare talk abour symbio organisms. Look where the fake fear factor got the nation in the Iraq invasion, even though the facts showed no reason to take action. Of course, we always need to be vigilant in watching new developements but reason must prevail. Almost every major new method or invention has had it`s detractors, and some have not proved out well. However, without our scientists and inventors, we would still have a very plain existence, and would not be tossing ideas back and forth on CDs, for instance.
SIOUXROSE__Great to hear your interesting comments on messing with our world. We never know when another source of knowledge will have the answer to a problem we may be facing. I do hope this type of scientific work can be sorted out and the workable parts used if they are deemed safe, as I have seen the benefits on my farming operation. These seeds allow us to stop all of the dangerous spraying and chemical application that has been done for many years so we may gain one place and lose another. At any rate it all bears watching and hopefully people can work it out sanely. I am also concerned with gene altering in people or animals as that seems to be where something could get out of hand if care is not taken.
Although vastly under-rated LOVE is the thing frequently absented from the scientific and/or biogetic lab. Nature, in contrast, spent millennia working out combinations that work. In my view this ultra-business-oriented, grossly materialistic supreme court made a mistake on a par with the decision to drop the atom bomb, in granting to for-profit bio-genetic companies the INTELLECTUAL copyright to genes!
Although some in this forum belittle the work of spiritualists, Edgar Cayce's readings remain recorded and preserved at the A.R.E (Association of Research and Enlightenment) in Virginia Beach. As a trans-medium his consciousness could travel outside of space and time. (He was a Pisces native and a natural mystic like another Pisces, Einstein.) In any case, Cayce warned about the misuse of genetic engineering in the U.S. He explained that the grotesque half-human/half-animal creatures we see in myth WERE actual beings that came out of Atlantean laboratories.
Keep in mind our recorded records go back at max about 5000 years, and yet we have fossil remains of human forms that hail back half a million years.
Interesting books on civilizations of advanced scientific merit that pre-dated our own are found in: The Wisdom and Teachings of the Far East.
ZERO POINT: I am glad you made that comment to Mark Abram. I am so tired of science arguing that it can control all experiments, that its considerable trespasses can be dismissed as acts of good will, etc. Human beings have NO business playing with MOTHER NATURE'S long-established genetic codes. These constitute a bank that is being robbed, as so many other sacred things in these disgusting years led by moral midgets disguised as macho leaders. They are TAINTING the entire human race. In an era of such unmitigated spiritual bankruptcy, nature's secrets ought not be pried open. It is a RAPE on a grand scale!
Ok, how many shares does Mark Abram own in synbio companies?
This article is not about scaring anyone to be completely against the technology- it is about proceeding cautiously, and to let it evolve in it's own time, after a lot is known about ourselves.
If we go about it recklessly, as we have done with industrial waste and emissions of all kinds, we may be be extinct before we can say "Monstanto seeds"
Another breathlessly alarmist article about reckless corporate Frankensteins unleashing unspecified dangers, written by a journalist, not a scientist, precisely from the point of view that she does not know what there is to be afraid of here, but it sure can be made to sound scary. And so we are to be told that anyone who would be considered an environmentalist must oppose synbio, and so it is to become a matter of orthodoxy for "the Left" to denounce this "terrifying" technology and shout down anyone who says, Hey, wait a minute.
The whole article is suffused with phrases like "no one knows" and "no one can predict," yet somehow, it seems anyone can predict that some rough beast is about to be born.
In fact, we do know a few things, and what we know tells us that these fears are wildly inflated. They are bad science fiction.
Bunting's first complaint is that the possible beneficial uses of this technology, such as cheaply producing antimalaria drugs, cleaning up oil and heavy metal spills, or efficiently producing biofuels, amount to "an industrialisation of nature." Oh, the horror! What else can one say?
Second, she wonders "what happens when [synbio organisms] get out and cross with their wild cousins, mutating into organisms we had never foreseen?" But that is generally pretty unlikely to happen. Synbio bugs are going to be highly simplified, not adapted to living in the wild, and hardly capable of mating with "wild cousins." But suppose it is possible that somehow an artificial gene could cross from a synbio bug into a wild type. How likely is that to be disastrous? If the gene would confer some huge reproductive advantage on the wild bug, why didn't nature find that gene by random mutation and recombination, which happens all the time?
Bunting closes with an emotional, horrifying image concocted from a misquotation of the generally eccentric Freeman Dyson, who pointed out that "leaves should be black." Dyson was not proposing we turn the Earth black instead of green. The point is just that it is possible to improve on nature for narrow human purposes, such as harvesting the energy of sunlight. But this illustrates the central error of assuming that human creations are going to overrun the biosphere. If black leaves, containing more pigments than just chlorophyll, would be more effective at capturing solar energy, they would also be more costly for the plant to produce. The question is, Why aren't leaves black? Surely nature would have done this by now if it were advantageous in the struggle for survival. I think we can predict that black-leaved plants, while possibly more useful for human agricultural purposes, would not outcompete green leaved plants in the wild.
They should never have allowed the patenting of life forms or any other biomatter. This should all be done in the public sphere. The only profit should be in the manufacture and distribution of what's developed by public institutions. This goes for pharmaceuticals as well.
"Instead of taking this opportunity to blame science, let's put the blame on where it belongs–unfettered greed."
This is the gist of the article -- the difficulty of arresting development because of the enticements of profit.
Kelmer, the problem is not the far-right's "religion of science", which some of the atavists on CD apparently have adopted. There is no "religion of science" -- the problem is & remains that public goods have been shunted aside by business & by the buying of government. The US government rapidly funded science students & programs after Sputnik was launched primarily to fuel the aerospace & munitions industries.
It was & remains those involved in science who have been most alert to the dangers as well as the rewards, who have done most to try to combat the overeager exploitation of scientific techniques for material or national advantage.
The problem is the religion of science makes it blasphemy to criticize science and "progress."
We are supposed to regard all scientific investigation as inherently good while ignoring the consequences.
Heroin and cocaine--over the counter substances--now the blight of many cities. But that's ok because the answer is always more science.
Global warming caused by science--that's ok because the answer is always more science.
When they tested the atomic bomb they took bets on whether it would cause the atmosphere to explode.
They tortured and burned witches for far less.
The ball was dropped when Darwin's theories were used to fuel the vivisection industry "its ok to torture members of other species to death-the benefits! the benefits!" Just like a thief would justify stealing by citing the benefits.
Scientists are often to infantile to understand moral concepts--they think the way to help a homeless man is to kill a family and take their house(the morality of vivisection).
As long as people tolerate science as the solution to all problems and its inherent disrespect for nature-you can expect more problems.
Instead of taking this opportunity to blame science, let's put the blame on where it belongs--unfettered greed.