Our currently common idea of software running on hardware works for machines, but not for brains. Our brains don't just store data in files. They modify themselves in response to strong inputs, laying down fresh patterns. This is why your memories of an incident can be modified by hearing another's version, or seeing a film of it. Brains form new routes for thinkingself-programming and self-hardwiring.
To reflect this, I think we will need a new category--liveware.
Like art, "living" is a property nobody can define exactly but everybody thinks they can recog nize. The virtue of live technology is the same as the dray horseit can look after itself, in its own fashion. Cropping grass, burning that grass for energy in its belly, relieving itself, the horse does a lot of its own maintenance. Liveware would similarly police its own act, and be able to make copies of itself in the bargain, just like the dray.
A bioteched piece of liveware should be patentable. Europeans generally recoil from patenting any "living invention," whether a gene, a cell, an engineered plant, or a human body part. In the United States, patents are commonly given. We shall see a major collision between voices of envi ronmentalism, "social justice" and religion, and international corporations like Monsanto. American patent expert Rebecca Eisenberg recently observed, "In the U.S., we think of the morality issue as outside the realm of the patent system."
This fundamental division will accelerate as business tries to patent genes and plant traits extracted from the tropical world. The Department of Commerce estimates that life patents will be worth $60 billion worldwide by 2010. This is a deep, gut issue, like abortion, and it is approaching quickly.
But what's patentable is also, alas, mutable. Once made, it can undergo mutation and make something we did not intend. That's evolution, folksbiological, social, psychological. As the title to Kevin Kelly's survey of these developments suggests, in many unsettling ways, the Biological Century will be Out of Control.
This very quality collides spectacularly with the pervasive scientific illiteracy of most indus trial societies, especially the United States. Throughout the early 1990s, the University of California at San Francisco waged a costly, ultimately unsuccessful battle with nearby residents simply to carry on research. They were routinely accused of letting loose infectious pathogens, toxic wastes, and radioactivity. In public hearings, one excitable citizen suggested that doing recombinant DNA work had produced the AIDS virus. Another declared on television her outrage that "those people are bringing DNA into my neighborhood."
By the time the public begins to see just how rapidly change can come, the Easy Era will be over, never to return.
Human Categories
Intention is the crux of the moral issues we will face. The abortion battles of our day will pale compared with the far more intimate and intricate capabilities that yawn just a decade or two away. In the United States, abortion hasn't gone away as an issueand the issue is essentially unchanged. The nature of biotech is change. What will happen, then, when changes come thick and fast, as they are already starting to?
Consider: Brahmins in India use amniocentesis to determine the sex of a fetus early on in pregnancy--and then preferentially abort the girls, because sons are more prized. This "genetic counseling" frames a typical conflict between our easy categories. Where does "reproductive choice" end when it systematically acts against females? If allowed to go on, we could produce harrowing population differences far from the near-50/50 balance of sexes, a testosterone-steeped society with ever-more crime and war. The questions can only get tougher.
And more subtle, as well. The first genetic tuneups will be for the elimination of inheritable diseaseskidney disorders, hemophilia, and the like. Such single-gene tailoring could appear by 2000. The pope will oppose it as the opening wedge, and the battle will be joined.
But it won't be settled, only broadened. Then will come genetic cosmetics: tailoring for eye and hair color, skin tint, maybe breast size (look at the implant industry today), and height. We do not know if these are controlled by single genes, but probably some are, and the others will prove to have only a few loci.
We're already familiar with the yuppie competition to get Junior into the very best kindergarten. What expense will parents spare if, a decade or two into the next century, they can tailor their children for beauty? A firm jaw for men, firm breasts for women? We all know that good-looking people do well. What parent could resist the argument that they were giving their child a powerful leg up (maybe literally) in a brave new competitive world?
This will outrage many. Science is being perverted, they will say. From the noble elimination of a hideous disorder, like hemophilia, we will descend to the mere pursuit of transient appearances.
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