Speculation, Innovation, Regulation

40 years of covering science and technology

Ronald Bailey from the December 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

“The Net has the capacity to improve all our lives. A user of the Net can already find a wide variety of information, from encyclopedia entries to restaurant reviews. Someday the Net will be the first place citizens turn to when they need information. The morning paper will be a printout, tailored to our interests and specifications, of articles posted worldwide; job hunters will look first to the Net; millions will use it to telecommute to work; and serious discussion will be given to the abolition of representative government and the adoption of direct democracy via network voting.…[W]e can see that something remarkable is happening, something that will change the world, something that has the potential to transform our lives. To ensure that our lives are enriched and not diminished, we must ensure that the Net is free.”

The New Biology

From the beginning, reason has had a strong interest in the biotechnology revolution. The nuclear engineer Winston Duke hailed the advent of “The New Biology” on the cover of our August 1972 issue. Amazingly ahead of his time, Duke sounded very much like today’s transhumanists (or as they prefer to be called these days, bioprogressives). Here he is explaining how to make a clone: “Insert an adult diploid nucleus into [an] ovum and simultaneously…remove the maternal haploid nucleus,” then “test tube growth to blastocyst and uterus implant.” This is exactly the procedure that Scottish biologist Ian Wilmut followed when he produced the sheep named Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal, in 1996. Duke even anticipated the possibility of producing genetically matched cloned tissues and organs for transplantation.

Duke also suggested that the British researchers Patrick Steptoe and Bob Edwards might succeed in producing the first “test-tube baby” within the year, if politicians and religious leaders didn’t get in the way. “Genetic engineering will soon make such conveniences as sex selection in offspring a trivial matter,” he predicted. He even speculated that biological research would eventually lead to physical immortality.

Nearly 40 years later, we know that Duke’s timeline for biological progress was a bit optimistic. The first test-tube baby was not born until 1978. Parents using in vitro fertilization (IVF) can now choose the sex of their children, but transplants derived from human embryonic stem cells have not yet been conducted (though the technique has been shown to work in animals). Immortality, alas, is not yet here.

In November 1985, I wrote a cover story about Jeremy Rifkin’s campaign to halt all biotechnology in its tracks. I opened the article with a pair of biotech scenarios slated for the 1990s, in which a patient is cured of colorectal cancer by means of a tumor vaccine and crops are protected from frost damage using genetically modified bacteria. Tumor vaccines are not yet available, and the project to develop ice-minus bacteria was dropped—in part because Rifkin’s opposition made it too expensive. On the other hand, I was correct in predicting crops genetically engineered to resist pests, hormones to boost milk production, and biotech hepatitis vaccines. Rifkin, meanwhile, has been an inspiration to the ongoing movements against genetically modified crops and human enhancement technologies.

In the December 1994 reason, the libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy reflected on recent headlines revealing that a 59-year-old British woman had borne two children using donated eggs. Instead of cheering a development that increased the range of women’s reproductive choices, a number of feminists had denounced it; they also attacked other emerging reproductive technologies, including sperm and egg donation, in vitro fertilization, embryo freezing, and surrogacy. Science and technology, they argued, were patriarchal tools to control women’s reproductive lives. McElroy reflected on the irony that feminist bans on new reproductive technologies would restrict rather than liberate the choices of women.

In November 1995, the physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford wrote a cover article titled “Biology: 2001.” He predicted that genetically engineered organisms would digest waste, biotech crops would resist pests and diseases, and drugs would be produced in “pharm” animals and plants. One of his more charming visions involved herds of genetically modified ants that would harvest corn and deposit each kernel in a granary while dispersing corn waste over the fields as fertilizer. Benford was confident that “mundane” measures with obvious market roles would encounter 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,” he wrote. “Even correcting human inheritable diseases will probably go through without major opposition. All this, perhaps within the first two decades of the new century.”

We now know Benford was too optimistic. Activists oppose releasing genetically modified bacteria, even those designed to clean up pollution or assist in mining, and they vigorously fight biotech crops of any sort. And with regard to fixing inheritable diseases, the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine bans biotech interventions if their aim is “any modification in the genome of any descendants.”

After Dolly the cloned sheep was born, President Bill Clinton hastily called for a ban on human cloning. In the June 1998 reason, the California attorney Mark Eibert defended cloning research as a way for incurably infertile people to safely produce genetically related children. Eibert worried that the fear of cloning was already bearing bitter fruit in the form of “unprecedented extensions of government power, based either on unlikely nightmare scenarios or on an unreasoning fear that humans were ‘not meant’ to know or do certain things. Far from protecting the ‘sanctity’ of human life, such an attitude, if consistently applied, would doom the human race to a ‘natural’ state of misery.”

More recently, reason’s Kerry Howley took reporting on reproductive issues to a new and more personal level. In her October 2006 story “Ova for Sale,” Howley contracted with a fertility clinic in Chicago to sell her eggs for $10,000. “Opponents of IVF have long warned that the bond between mother and child will be eroded by further advances in assisted reproduction, the implication being that mothers will eschew the time and labor of traditional pregnancies once they can outsource to the lab,” she wrote. “In practice, IVF seems to demonstrate the opposite extreme: Women value pregnancy to such a degree that they will spend lavishly to approximate the experience, adding expense, discomfort, and ethical quandary to the already burdensome ordeal of childbirth. The desire to stick to the traditional script of family is surprisingly robust, and reproductive technologies allow potential parents to follow that script even when nature erects barriers.”

Apocalypse Then

reason has generally been skeptical of the often apocalyptic claims of ideological environmentalism. But the magazine didn’t start out that way. Our cover story in July 1971, by the systems theorist Jay Forrester, declared it “certain” that “resource shortage, pollution, crowding, food failure, or some other equally powerful force will limit population and industrialization if persuasion and psychological factors do not.” Forrester was the creator of the World Dynamics computer model, the source for the doomsday predictions of the 1972 Limits to Growth study. Nearly 20 years later I spent a day with Forrester asking him about his predictions of imminent resource depletion. “I think in retrospect,” he testily told me, “that Limits to Growth overemphasized the material resources side.”

The chemist Ronald Merrill warned against “The New Anti-Science Movement” in January 1973. “The mainstay of the modern attack on science is the claim that technology is destructive; that progress has such dangerous sideeffects that it should be abolished, or at least limited,” he asserted. “The political implementation of these claims is accomplished primarily by means of the ‘Environmentalist’ movement.” Merrill was a bit cavalier about the effects of air pollution and water pollution, but he was surely right when he wrote, “One of the unpleasant by-products of a technological society is the close interaction of science and politics, as technical issues become politically relevant.”

In August 1978, an economist at Texas A&M named Philip Gramm wrote an article for reason called “Debunking Doomsday.” Gramm’s chief argument was that the world was not about to run out of petroleum—a bold claim to make in the era of the “oil crisis” and The Limits to Growth. And he was right: By the early 1980s, the price of oil had fallen from by two-thirds. Gramm, incidentally, eventually became a Republican senator.

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|11.27.08 @ 12:41PM|#

This train cannot be stopped this train cannot be stopped this train...

Future's lookin bright, got my polarized X and Gamma ray shades on!

|11.27.08 @ 5:27PM|#

What ever became of Lanny Friedlander? Did he disappear into a black hole after founding Reason?

Naga Sadow|11.27.08 @ 6:32PM|#

Blank space above asks a good question. A better question would have been "Where in hell is my flying car?".

Mad Max|11.27.08 @ 9:40PM|#

Some wonderful inventions which have improved and lengthened human life - we can expect even faster and more astonishing developments in scientific discovery so long as we maintain the legal, cultural and moral framework which sustains scientific progress.

On the subject of transhumanism - the benefits of full-blown transhumanism (at least to the extend advocated by its enthusiasts) have yet to be proven. There is the possibility of abuse if we design human beings, not just to have longer and healthier lives, but to serve some pre-planned role in the social order, like Aldous Huxley's Alphas, Betas, etc. Then there is the possibility of breeding docile human beings for servile labor, or aggressive and powerful human beings for military combat.

Or do we assume the scientific and political community is just too darn moral to fiddle around with humanity in such a way?

Just to be on the safe side, why not put all transhumanist research under the broad leadership of a single bioengineering corporation. That corporation can provide a broad canopy under which all the separate research projects can shelter. An umbrella, if you will.

johnl|11.28.08 @ 12:30AM|#

There was a long time when Durk Person and Sandy Shaw had a monthly column here. I see the are over at Liberty now. I used to subscribe to both. It looks like Liberty still has the blue and black layout. Wow.

|11.28.08 @ 8:41AM|#

That corporation can provide a broad canopy under which all the separate research projects can shelter. An umbrella, if you will.

Max, if this is a Resident Evil joke, color me impressed. If not, you suck.

Mad Max|11.28.08 @ 9:31AM|#

Epi,

Of course it is.

And - I know you do, but what am I?

|11.28.08 @ 10:03AM|#

You're a Tyrant?

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