What is stunning is that this capability is on the ground now and
rapidly becoming more accessible. Now it may turn out that we will
simply end up giving Mother Nature a huge laugh as she processes this
massive burst of biological change through the wonders of natural
selection. The astonishing thing is just how easily this all left
the lab.
This is early days, but the topic of human diddling with biology is
about to become a public concern. No one can pretend oversight when
a kid can and does go at it and produces a problem. That is surely
coming
How about blueberries modified to express Viagra?
Glowing Plants:
Awesome Kickstarter or Creepy Biotech?
By Tom Philpott
Mon Jun. 10, 2013
If you're like me, the
concept of synthetic biology—the application of engineering
techniques to the building blocks of life—is pretty hard to get
your head around. I get synthesizing, say, material to make clothes
out of. But synthesizing new life forms? Apparently, while I stand
slack-jawed, the novel technology is quickly going mainstream.
Here's the New York Times:
Hoping to give new
meaning to the term "natural light," a small group of
biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to
develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that
can replace electric street lamps and potted flowers luminous enough
to read by.
What could be more
innocuous than plants that generate useful light? And moreover, the
"glowing plants" project isn't the work of a big, bad
multinational like Monsanto or a corporate-funded academic lab,
the Times notes, but rather a "small group of hobbyist
scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories
springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough
to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement."
And they're not
financing the project by tapping Wall Street or big banks, but rather
the democratic cash-raising method of our age par excellence, the
Kickstarter campaign. The project launched April 23 with a goal to
raise $65,000; it has already exceeded $480,000 in pledges,
aided by glowing—so to speak—reports in Tech Crunch, Fast
Company, and Forbes,as well as the promise that anyone who
commits at least $40 will "receive seeds to grow a glowing plant
at home."
What could possibly go
wrong? Well, I don't know much about the science of creating living
lamps. But I do think it's important to think out the broader
implications of synbio—as the novel technology is known—and ask
questions about how its release from the lab into the world is
regulated. Which is evidently pretty lightly—this consortium is
casually promising to distribute glowing seeds to hundreds of people.
I can't think of a
better source for examining the promise and perils of synbio than
this much-cited 2007 essay by the eminent physicist—and
climate change skeptic—Freeman Dyson. In it, he laid out a
rosy vision for what he called the "domestication of
biotechnology." Here's Dyson:
There will be
do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to
breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of
pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of
pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too.
Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives
and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living
creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big
corporations prefer.
And what about the
obvious dangers—what if these God-like "housewives and
children" (ugh) turned away from conjuring cuddly creatures and
start creating ones designed to bare their fangs, monsters instead of
pets? You don't even need to presume malicious intent to find reason
for concern: What if some novel beast designed for cuteness escapes,
goes rogue, and turns out to have unintended malign powers? Then
there are the obvious questions: What if these new life forms behave
in ways we can't predict—or mutate in ways we can't
predict—altering food chains or larger biosystems? Dyson
acknowledged the "real and serious dangers" of synbio, and
allowed that "rules and regulations will be needed to make
sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others."
But he waved off that task—not his problem. "I leave it to our
children and grandchildren to supply the answers," he cheerfully
declared.
But regulating novel
technologies has proven difficult here in the United States.
Genetically modified seeds burst onto US farm fields in the mid-'90s
with a notoriously lax regulatory process, as I showed in this
post. Still, the process is time-consuming, and it has been
known to occasionally at least delay particularly
problematic crop varieties, like new ones genetically rigged
to withstand not one but two herbicides. Next came
nanotechnology, which takes advantage of the fact that common
substances like silver behave differently when they're really, really
small. Nanotech is now ubiquitous, showing up everywhere from
underwear to toothpaste. But as the Pulitzer-winning investigative
journalist Andrew Schneider showed in an eye-opening 2010 series,
the small stuff poses significant risks, has received little
independent testing, and is barely regulated.
The excellent watchdog
org ETC Group, which seeks to place novel technologies under
democratic oversight, has launched a rival "Kickstopper"
campaign to halt such projects until a proper regulatory regime can
be put into place.
In the spirit of
Professor Dyson, let me offer a prediction for the future. I imagine
that synbio's current reputation as a democratic technology dominated
by well-meaning amateurs will last just long enough to convince
people that it requires little or no regulation. While this
laissez-faire regime congeals into a settled fact, big agrichemical,
pharmaceutical, and life-sciences firms will quietly take it over,
eventually dominating the research and deployment of Dyson's wondrous
toys. Monsanto has already bought its way into the space—in
January, it bought an R&D lab from and entered a
research collaboration with Synthetic Genomics, a company that uses
synthetic microbes to "improve crop productivity."
Unless we have a
serious national reckoning on synbio, what we risk leaving our
children and grandchildren is the knotty problem of trying to
convince an entrenched, little-regulated industry that the power of
generating life forms should be used for the broad interests of
society, not the narrow ones of shareholders.
No comments:
Post a Comment