Biology: 2001

Understanding culture, technology, and politics in "The Biological Century"

Gregory Benford from the November 1995 issue

(Page 7 of 7)

To orient ourselves, I would call "mundane" the measures that have obvious market roles right away, and little social resistance. This includes pollution policers, simple bathroom cleaners, crops that resist pests and herbicides, pharm animals, "designer" plants (blue roses, low-cal fruit), bacterial mining, and the like. Even correcting human inheritable diseases will probably go through without major opposition. All this, perhaps within the first two decades of the new century.

The battles will begin in earnest with conceivable but startling capabilities. The list is long. Big changes in our own genome. Harnessing natural behaviors to new tasks (the acacia antcorn harvesting marriage). Designer animals, like a green Siamese cat to match your furniture, or even a talking collie (and what would it say?). These may preoccupy the middle of the next century.

Even further out would be major alterations in the biosphere, and in us. Adapting ourselves to live in a vacuum or beneath the sea, or to convert sunlight directly into energy, would alter the human prospect beyond recognition. Changing homo sapiens to something beyond will be a step fraught with emotion and peril. Such issues will loom large as the Biological Century runs out. And what could lurk beyond that horizon? The mind boggles.

All these are mere glimpses of what awaits us. A century is an enormous span, stretching our foresight to the full. Reflect that H.G. Wells's The Time Machine appeared only a century ago, in 1895. Biotech, as Aldous Huxley foresaw in Brave New World (1932), can usher in as profound a revolution as industrialization did in the early 19th century. It will parallel vast other themesthe expansion of artificial intelligence, the opening of the inner solar system to economic use, and much, much more.

The Achilles' heel of predictions is that we cannot know the limitations of a technology until we get there. A 19th-century dreamer might easily generalize from the forthcoming radio to envision sending not merely messages by the new "wireless," but cargoes and even people. Matter, after all, is at bottom a "message."

But there's more to it than that, and the awesome radio didn't develop into a matter transmitter, which is no closer to reality than it was then.

So undoubtedly I'm wrong about some of these analogy-dreams, particularly the timing. What I will bet on is that, despite the current fashion for "nanotechnology"artifice on the scale of a nanometer, the molecular levelbiotech will come first. It is easier to implement, because the tiny "programs" built into lifeforms have been written for us by Nature, and tested in her lab.

In fact, some of the most interesting prospects of nanotech- like thinking come from biological materials. The basic mystery in biology is how proteins figure out how to fold themselves, which determines myriad biological functions. An obvious long chain molecule to fold and use as a con struction material is DNA itself. A self-replicating "bio-brick" could be as strong as any plastic.

Consider adding bells and whistles at the molecular level, through processes of DNA alteration. Presumably one could then make intricately malleable substances, capable of withstanding a lot of wear and able to grow more of itself when needed.

It isn't fundamentally crazy to think of side-stepping the entire manufacturing process for even bulky, ordinary objects, like houses. We have always grown trees, cut them into pieces, and then put the boards back together to make our homes. Maybe we will someday grow rooms intact, right from the root, customized down to the doorsills and window sizes. Choose your rooms, plant carefully, add water and step back. Cut out the middleman.

Whether such dreams ever happen, it seems clear that using biology's instructions will change the terms of social debate before nanotech gets off the ground.

The rate of change of our own conception of ourselves will probably speed up from its present already breakneck pace. The truly revolutionary force in modern times has been science, far more than "radical" politics or the like. This seems likely to be even more true in the future.

Yet the above examples underscore the implications of leaving genetic choices to individuals. Society has some voice in defining boundaries, surely. But typically we arrive at consensus slowly, whereas biotech speeds ahead. Perhaps here we see the beginnings of a profound alteration in the essential doctrine of modern liberal democratic ideology. There may be genetic paths we will choose to block. How do we recognize them, quickly?

Our species has made enormous progress through swift cultural evolution. Now that quick uptake on changing conditions can come from deep, genetic change. We will hold the steering wheel, however shaky our grip, and not pitiless, random mutation.

We will emerge from a Biological Century with a profoundly different world view. Perhaps some new technology will promise to shake our foundations in the dawn of the 2100s, too. Merci fully, we cannot see that far.

Our prospect is wondrous and troubling enough. It is as though prodigious, bountiful Nature for billions of years has tossed off variations on its themes like a careless, prolific Picasso. Now Nature finds that one of its casual creations has come back with a piercing, searching visionand its own pictures to paint.