Genetic engineering -- which is to say recombinant DNA and related high-tech methods of genetic manipulation -- originated some 70 years ago as a prediction about the future.

Genetic engineers of today are becoming millionaires. They speak about new trade empires. They insist that those who have the vision and ability to master the potentials of genetic engineering will found new patterns of world domination. But this talk of empire and world domination was not always the focus. Molecular biologists began their profession with a far off vision to bring order out of the chaos of nature, including the chaos of human nature.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, and in the turmoil between the two great wars, the Rockefeller Foundation decided to use its vast resources to pursue a dream. They understood that the hereditary substance must be a chemical in the blood or in some other tissue and that the chemical could be identified and its structure determined. Their dream was that once the chemistry of heredity was known it could be manipulated in the laboratory much as chemists were making synthetic textiles and dyes that seemed to be superior to natural dyes and fibers.

The Rockefeller Foundation actually built a scientific culture -- what is today called molecular biology -- by mixing chemists and physicists and geneticists at places such as Cal Tech and binding them together with a clear mission and vision of the future, not to mention with generous financial and political support. This community was held together for the next many decades not simply by financial and political support but by the litany of a futuristic dream that may seem naďve today but that has been a potent motivator for that scientific culture even into the present.

Chemical control over the genetic code would bring the life forces on earth under the intelligent management of the molecular biologists and their patrons. Crops and livestock would be engineered to perfection. Wild species would be made to serve man rather than themselves. Even human beings would be thrust beyond the limits of natural selection and raised to a higher level through chemical eugenics. When Nobel laureate Jim Watson said recently, “in all honesty if scientists do no play God, who will?” he was speaking in this tradition.

For nearly 50 years each new generation of molecular biologists was recruited into a culture that basked in the boundless optimism of Bacon’s New Atlantis that science would one day create a Utopia, and they celebrated the deterministic faith of Descartes and Newton, and indeed or generations of alchemists, that once nature’s laws were discovered man could predict all future events and even become nature’s master.

For decades the molecular biologists were well funded and were making exciting discoveries and it meant little to them that much of society around them was beginning to see science and technology as a double-edged sword that could be used for bad as well as good. For one thing, science and technology had become bloody actors on the stage of the great World Wars, multiplying the scale of death and destruction many fold. Also, people of the 1950s and 1960s lived daily under the threat of nuclear war. Los Angeles and other cities were choking from automobile fumes. Acid rain was starting to eat at forests and lakes and at the treasures of history. Jacques Cousteau reported pesticides in the middle of the oceans. The overuse of DDT had demolished populations of the bald eagle. Medical advances seemed to prolong suffering as often as they improved the quality of life. Society around the molecular biologists was coming to see science as value neutral rather than as an unqualified blessing that did not need to be managed.

Quantum mechanics was probing deeper into the uncertainties of nature and ecological research was changing science’s understanding of the dynamics of plant and animal communities.

It was not until the 1970s that it began to dawn on molecular biologists that they had never discussed the potential negative side of the new powers that they were unleashing. And thus a flood of potential problems was raised all at once in the mid 1970s. Efforts were made to discuss the sudden flood of concerns at two short meetings, the famous Gordon and Asilomar Conferences. The leadership in science quickly realized that the concerns were too many and too complicated to deal with in such a manner, and publicity surrounding the conferences was threatening to their federal funding. So the leadership tried to develop guidance through a Recombinant Advisory Committee, the RAC, under the supervision of the National Institutes of Health.

The RAC, however, had its hands full simply with questions about the safety of rDNA laboratory experiments. It was in no position to think through and offer wisdom even on questions about the safety of ecologically viable GEOs, let alone on the socioeconomic and ethical issues. But the fact that there even was a RAC left the incorrect impression that someone with power was thinking about the implications of the new genetic technologies. The community of molecular biologists was persuaded by their leadership that their worries had been foolish and that everything was under control.

In fact any number of authors were thinking and writing about the implications, and about the potential health and environmental risks as well as the potential benefits. But even when the authors were respected thinkers, they had no real power. The politicians and industrialists who did have power either assumed that the scientists were going to oversee themselves, or they were persuaded by assurances that no oversight was necessary, or they attended to small legalistic details.

Thus there has been a history of some 70 years of official neglect of the need to govern genetic engineering. For the first nearly 50 years the governance issue was neglected because the molecular biologists and most of society were thinking in completely idealistic, Utopian terms. Then for the next quarter of a century or so during which the need for governance was recognized and was indeed hotly debated at least in terms of risks to health and the environment -- there was nevertheless a complete neglect of broader issues, and there was no meaningful course of action for the governance of either the health and environmental risk issues or of the broader socioeconomic and ethical issues that could be thought of that was politically palatable.

The biotechnology community tends to present a united face to the public. It has made suggestions and promises regarding the governance and oversight of genetic engineering in various stages. In retrospect one sees largely a chronicle of naďve expectations and failures. These suggestions have included the following:

1. Genetic engineering will require no outside oversight because molecular biologists will be able to predict all the outcomes of their projects with scientific certainty. This was believed from the 1930s into the 1970s. Then as the actuality of gene-splicing entered laboratories some molecular biologists began to realize that they did not understand even all of the biological implications of their work, let alone the socioeconomic and ethical consequences.
2. No oversight is necessary because any adverse consequences will be of small magnitude. This argument was invented in the latest 1970s and is still sometimes being made. But it has been unconvincing to many who have studied the nature of genetic engineering and its commercialization.
3. There may be risks, but molecular biologists, the scientific community, will organize to oversee themselves. This plan failed because of economic, career, and philosophical conflicts of interest among scientists. The RAC at NIH for example lacked the expertise to make even many important technical decisions, it had a huge workload, and it was not isolated from government and science politics.
4. Genetic engineering should be restricted to a great government-run research compound. It was quickly realized that this would be impossible. The technology is too portable, and there were intense political pressures to spread its use throughout industry.
5. Government regulatory agencies will oversee biotech. This idea was popular during the 1980s. But at best, regulatory agencies could only oversee particular types of projects and only once they had been submitted for review. Bureaucrats do not have the training, authority, or professional prestige to give broad guidance, or the resources or authority to site-visit research laboratories. Even with regard to the narrow issue of the safety of particular commercial projects, the experience has been that the regulatory agencies were not isolated from political pressures. Thus they have been highly criticized for not using proper scientific criteria in making regulatory determinations.
6. The marketplace and the courts will regulate biotech. This is the prevailing attitude as society enters the future. But the idea that the marketplace can provide wisdom is a supernatural and ideological assumption. The marketplace has given us Pokemon, child prostitution in Thailand and elsewhere, dangerous imbalances of trade, and convoys of gas guzzling SUVs, as well as Madonna and John Travolta to balance these. The courts for their part are not designed to offer leadership on complex scientific and socioeconomic matters; their decisions are too often in favor of those who can spend the most on lawyers: and judges are not always insulated from political and ideological biases and pressures.
7. Government cannot oversee, so NGOs will have to. This was the conclusion of a recent report by the RAND Corporation for DARPA. But NGOs have their own problems and limited resources. The RAND report gave no hint of how to deal with these.

Society is being driven into the biotech future in a vehicle that from the perspective of the public and many of us in science has an accelerator but no brakes and no steering wheel. The foot on the accelerator is obvious. It is the drive for riches. It is the need to pay debts owed to bankers and investors. It is success in getting enormous public subsidies from federal and local governments and private foundations. It is the persisting distorted belief that biotech can end hunger and malnutrition and provide other sorts of simple solutions to complex problems. It is the drive for empire.

But where is there any foot on the brake and where is there room on the steering wheel for the hand of the public?

In the last couple of years biotech has been moving into the courts and to diplomatic round tables. Today’s perplexing issues were all completely predictable to one who understood the science together with the socioeconomics. But such understanding was not widespread due to the limited nature of media understanding, reporting, and discourse, industry’s massive not-to-worry public relations campaign, and due to the fact that few people were studying the developing technology from the range of angles required.

Next are a few examples of the predictable problems that seem to many to have come on unexpectedly.

1. Inflamed ambition and the high costs of biotech research have favored corporate mergers and buy-outs -- now groups are suing life science companies for monopolistic practices.
2. The National Academy of Science and government encouraged industry to adopt biotechnology, and government regulatory agencies have thus long been under instructions to help promote biotech. Thus agencies are now being sued for not rigorously regulating the industries.
3. Genetic patents are easy to break, and thus with the cooperation of government and industry patenting practices have been developing that many find offensive and fundamentally at variance with democratic traditions. These may even become more complicated as more and more challenging cases make their ways through the courts.
4. Nations are resorting to oblique legal means to try to force other nations to accept their biotech patents and untested products, thus straining foreign relations.
5. Organisms interbreed and disperse, and these phenomena have led to court cases concerning “biocontamination” and have raised perplexing questions about ownership and liability.
6. Biotech increases the race to develop biological weapons. Yet desires for industrial confidentiality have led the chemical and pharmaceutical industries to try to block international efforts to ban germ warfare, leading to various problems in international security and relations.
7. University researchers in biotech and other highly competitive and highly “concept-based” areas of research have come to commonly bypass informed consent procedures and other patient safeguards and thus patients have been abused and their universities have been penalized and also are being or will be sued.

And today’s legal and contractual issues are only the tip of an iceberg. It would not be the best use of the remaining time to make a laundry list of future challenges that can be expected. The main point to be made in closing is that, as I have discussed in a number of publications (see my website), various structural elements have long been in place and are emerging that are bound to cause problems for the rest of our life times. These structural elements involve:

1. The technical nature of genetic engineering and the characteristics of reproducing populations.
2. Technical and social dimensions of patenting and of attempts to capitalize living systems.
3. The scientific (philosophical, ideological) mind-set of genetic engineers.
4. The organization of their community in terms of career ladders, funding, relationships between universities, industry, and government.
5. The nature of the industry in terms of financing, of reliance on “concepts,” of competitive ambitions and pressures.
6. Historical experiences and their effects on perceptions within the industry of definitions of benefits, risks, ethics, social functions, definitions of “the public.” and even their definition of “science” and their abilities to interact with other scientists and to weigh criticism.

Let me end by saying that while the study of all these factors will take a great deal of work, biotech in one form or another will remain all for the rest of human history. Some truly wonderful biotech developments will emerge from the endlessly sloshing sea of hype and this will provide incentives to push ahead. There will continually be efforts to own and to change life in one way or another. Some genetic engineers will continue relentlessly to pursue the old dream of making order from what they consider to be the chaos of nature. Others will continue relentlessly to pursue the newer dream of becoming millionaires, or even of becoming the captains of a new commercial world order. Baring some horrible genetically engineered plague that destroys the medical research infrastructure, medical biotechnology will continue even if agricultural biotech fades away. What can citizens do to assert their rights in this future of genetically engineered crops and wild species, patented life, promises to clone humans and control sex, to genetically fingerprint the population, and even to reengineer our species? Progressively more people are running out of patience and are calling for a moratorium on at least some forms of genetic engineering, and perhaps a moratorium would provide sufficient pressure to persuade the industry to allow some governance from outside their community. But others consider a moratorium too severe, or at least not to their temperament. Their task will be to find other ways to get a foot on the brake and a hand on the steering wheel.

Philip J. Regal
Professor, University of Minnesota
Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Department
1987 Upper Buford Circle
St. Paul, Minnesota 55108
(612)343-5590 -- Home & answering machine
(612)624-6777 -- Department FAX
http://biosci.umn.edu/~pregal/phil.html -- home page
http://biosci.umn.edu/~pregal/biosafety.html -- biosafety entry page shortcut

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