The Future (39 page)

One need not believe in a deity, however, in order to entertain the possibility that the web of life has an emergent holistic integrity featuring linkages we do not yet fully understand and which we might not risk disrupting if we did. Even though our understanding of hubris originated in ancient stories about the downfall of men who took for themselves powers reserved for the gods, its deeper meaning—and the risk it often carries—is rooted in human arrogance and pride, whether or not it involves an offense against the deity. As Shakespeare wrote, “
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” For all of us, hubris is inherent in human nature. Its essence includes prideful overconfidence in the completeness of one’s own understanding of the consequences of exercising power in a realm that may well have complexities that still extend beyond the understanding of any human.

Nor is the posture of fundamentalism unique to the religious. Reductionism—the belief that scientific understanding is usually best pursued by breaking down phenomena into their component parts and subparts—has sometimes led to a form of selective attention that can cause observers to overlook emergent phenomena that arise in complex systems, and in their interaction with other complex systems.

One of the world’s most distinguished evolutionary biologists,
E. O. Wilson, has been bitterly attacked by many of his peers for his proposal that Darwinian selection operates not only at the level of individual members of a species, but also at the level of “superorganisms”—by which he means that adaptations serving the interests of a species as a whole may be selected even if they do not enhance the prospects for survival of the individual creatures manifesting those adaptations.
Wilson, who was but is no longer a Christian, is not proposing “intelligent design” of the sort believed in by creationists. He is, rather, asserting that there is another layer to the complexity of evolution that operates on an “emergent” level.

Francis Collins, a devout Christian who headed the U.S. government’s Human Genome Project (which announced its results at the same
time that Craig Venter announced his), has bemoaned the “increasing polarization between the scientific and spiritual worldviews, much of it, I think, driven by those who are threatened by the alternatives and who are unwilling to consider the possibility that there might be harmony here.… We have to recognize that our understanding of nature is something that grows
decade by decade, century by century.”

Venter, for his part, is fully confident that enough is already known to justify a large-scale project to reinvent life according to a human design. “Life evolved in a messy fashion through random changes over three billion years,” he says. “We are designing it so that there are modules for different functions, such as chromosome replication and cell division, and
then we can decide what metabolism we want it to have.”

As with many of the startling new advances in the life sciences, the design and creation of artificial life-forms offers the credible promise of
breakthroughs in health care,
energy production,
environmental remediation,
and many other fields. One of the new products Venter and other scientists hope to create is synthetic viruses engineered to
destroy or weaken antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These synthetic viruses—or bacteriophages—can be programmed to attack only the targeted bacteria, leaving other cells alone. These viruses utilize sophisticated strategies to not only kill the bacteria but also use the bacteria before it dies to replicate the synthetic virus so that it can go on
killing other targeted bacteria until the infection subsides.

The use of new synthetic organisms for the acceleration of
vaccine development is also generating great hope. These synthetic vaccines are being designed as part of the world’s effort to prepare for potential new pandemics like the
bird flu (H5N1) of 2007 and the so-called swine flu (H1N1) of 2009. Scientists have been particularly concerned that the H5N1 bird flu is now only a few mutations away from developing an
ability to pass from one human to another through airborne transmission.

The traditional process by which vaccines are developed requires a lengthy development, production, and testing cycle of months, not days, which makes it nearly impossible for doctors to obtain adequate supplies of the vaccine after
a new mutant of the virus begins spreading. Scientists are
using the tools of synthetic biology to accelerate the evolution of
existing flu strains in the laboratory and they hope to be able to predict which new strains are most likely to emerge. Then, by studying their blueprints, scientists hope to preemptively synthesize vaccines that will be able to stop whatever mutant of the virus subsequently appears in the real world and stockpile supplies in anticipation of the new virus’s emergence. Disposable biofactories are being set up around the world to
decrease the cost and time of manufacturing of vaccines. It is now possible to set up a biofactory in a remote rural village where the vaccine is needed quickly to stop the spread of a newly discovered strain of virus or bacteria.

Some experts have also predicted that synthetic biology may supplant 15 to 20 percent of the global chemical industry within the next few years, producing many chemical products more cheaply than they can be extracted from natural sources, producing pharmaceutical products, bioplastics, and other new materials. Some predict that this new approach to chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing will—by using the 3D printing technique described in
Chapter 1
—revolutionize the production process by
utilizing a “widely dispersed” strategy. Since most of the value lies in the information, which can easily be transmitted to unlimited locations, the actual production process by which the information is translated into production of Synthetic Biology products can be located almost anywhere.

These and other exciting prospects expected to accompany the advances in synthetic biology and the creation of artificial life-forms have led many to impatiently dismiss any concerns about unwanted consequences. This impatience is not of recent vintage. Ninety years ago, English biochemist J. B. S. Haldane wrote an influential essay that provoked a series of futurist speculations about human beings taking active control of the future course of evolution. In an effort to place in context—and essentially dismiss—the widespread uneasiness about the subject, he wrote:

By contrast, Leon Kass, who chaired the U.S. Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, has argued that the intuition or feeling that something is somehow repugnant should not be automatically dismissed as antiscientific: “In some crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power completely to articulate it.…
We intuit and we feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear.”

In
Chapter 2
, the word “creepy” was used by several observers of trends unfolding in the digital world, such as the ubiquitous tracking of voluminous amounts of information about most people who use the Internet. As others have noted, “creepy” is an imprecise word because it
describes a feeling that itself lacks precision—not fear, but a vague uneasiness about something whose nature and implications are so unfamiliar that we feel the need to be alert to the possibility that something fearful or harmful might emerge. There is a comparably indeterminate “pre-fear” that many feel when contemplating some of the onrushing advances in the world of genetic engineering.

An example:
a method for producing spider silk has been developed by genetic engineers who insert genes from orb-making spiders into goats which then secrete the spider silk—along with milk—from their udders. Spider silk is incredibly useful because it is both elastic and
five times stronger than steel by weight. The spiders themselves cannot be farmed
because of their antisocial, cannibalistic nature. But the insertion of their silk-producing genes in the goats allows not only a larger volume of spider silk to be produced, but also allows the farming of the goats.
^§

In any case, there is no doubt that the widespread use of synthetic biology—and particularly the use of self-replicating artificial life-forms—could potentially generate radical changes in the world, including some potential changes that arguably should be carefully monitored. There are, after all, too many examples of plants and animals purposely introduced into a new, nonnative environment that then quickly spread out of control and disrupted the ecosystem into which they were introduced.

Kudzu, a Japanese plant that was introduced into my native Southern
United States as a means of combating soil erosion, spread wildly and
became a threat to native trees and plants. It became known as “the vine that ate the South.” Do we have to worry about “microbial kudzu” if a synthetic life-form capable of self-replication is introduced into the biosphere for specific useful purposes, but then spreads rapidly in ways that have not been predicted or even contemplated?

Often in the past, urgent questions raised about powerful new breakthroughs in science and technology have focused on potentially catastrophic disaster scenarios that turned out to be based more on fear than reason—when the questions that should have been pursued were about other more diffuse impacts. For example, on the eve of the Bikini Atoll test of the world’s first hydrogen bomb in 1954, a few scientists raised the concern that the explosion could theoretically trigger a
chain reaction in the ocean and create an unimaginable ecological Armageddon.

Their fearful speculation was dismissed by physicists
who were confident that such an event was absurdly implausible. And of course it was. But other questions focused on deeper and more relevant concerns were not adequately dealt with at all. Would this thermonuclear explosion contribute significantly to the
diversion of trillions of dollars into weaponry and further accelerate a dangerous nuclear arms race that
threatened the survival of human civilization?

For the most part, the fears of microbial kudzu (or their microscopic mechanical counterparts—self-replicating nanobots, or so-called gray goo),
are now often described as probably overblown, although the executive director of GeneWatch, an NGO watchdog organization, Helen Wallace, told
The New York Times Magazine
, “It’s almost inevitable that there will be some level of escape. The question is: Will those organisms survive and reproduce?
I don’t think anyone knows.”

But what about other questions that may seem less urgent but may be more important in the long run: if we robosource life itself, and synthesize life-forms that are more suited to our design than the pattern that has been followed by life for 3.5 billion years, how is this new capability likely to alter our relationship to nature? How is it likely to change nature? Are we comfortable forging full speed ahead without any organized effort to identify and avoid potential outcomes that we may not like?

One concern that technologists and counterterrorism specialists have highlighted
is the possibility of a new generation of biological weapons. After all, some of the early developments in genetic engineering, we
now know, were employed by the
Soviet Union in a secret biological weapons program forty years ago. If the exciting tools of the Digital Revolution have been weaponized for cyberwar, why would we not want some safeguards to prevent the same diversion of synthetic biology into bioweapons?

The New and Emerging Science and Technology (NEST) high-level expert group of the European Commission wrote in 2005 that “The possibility of designing a new virus or bacterium
à la carte
could be used by bioterrorists to create new resistant pathogenic strains or organisms, perhaps even engineered
to attack genetically specific sub-populations.” In 2012, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity attempted to halt the publication of two scientific research papers—one in
Nature
and the other in
Science
—that contained details on the genetic code of a mutated strain of bird flu that had been modified in an effort to determine what genetic changes could make the virus more readily transmissible among mammals.

Citing concerns that the detailed design of a virus that was only a few mutations away from a form that could be spread by human-to-human transmission, the bioterrorism officials tried to dissuade scientists from
publishing the full genetic sequence that accompanied their papers. Although publication was allowed to proceed after a full security review, the U.S. government remains actively
involved in monitoring genetic research that could lead to new bioweapons. Under U.S. law, the FBI screens the members of
research teams working on projects considered militarily sensitive.

Among the few lines of experiments specifically
banned
by the U.S. government are those involving
federally funded research into the cloning of human beings. As vice president, not long after the birth of the first cloned sheep, Dolly, in 1996, when it became clear that human cloning was imminently feasible, I strongly supported this interim ban pending a much fuller exploration of the implications for humanity of proceeding down that path, and called for the creation of a new National Bioethics Advisory Commission to review the ethical, moral, and
legal implications of human cloning.

A few years earlier, as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on
Science, I had pushed successfully for a commitment of 3 percent of the funding for the Human Genome Project to be allocated to the study of extensive ethical, legal, and social implications (they are now referred to as ELSI grants), in an effort to ensure careful study of the difficult questions that were emerging more quickly than their answers. This set-aside has become the largest
government-financed research program into ethics ever established. James Watson, the co-discoverer of the double helix, who by then had been named to head the Genome Project, was enthusiastically supportive of the ethics program.