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This article examines the status of nanomedicine, medical nanosensors, artificial organs, stemcells, genetherapy, molecular imaging and related topics. |
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Nanomedicine and the Future of Healthcare
April 7, 2007
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Energy, Entropy and Technology
April 7, 2007|
Since the dawn of the Industrial Civilization the growth of the economical system has become independent on the access to fossil fuels. From the first water mill to todays nuclear power plants human activity has been irreversible tied to the use of natural resources and fossil fuels. Based on current economical growth the expected growth in energy consumption is between 150-250 % to 2050. What implications will the future global energy situation have on the world system? |
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Eric Drexler – an unauthorized biography
April 7, 2007|
Since the ancient roman philosopher Demokrit introduced the concept of atoms as the fundament of matter, mankind has sought to control and manipulate the environment. The later alchemical ideas of the elements “earth, wind, water and fire” and the transmutation of metal into gold shows early interest in the complexity of nature. The evolution of the sciences cumulated with the academic disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology. Drexler fuses all these disciplines into the multi-disciplinary field of molecular manufacturing and nanotechnology. |
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“If you want to know K. Eric Drexler was born in Oakland, California in 1955 and grew up in the lush west-coast state of Oregon. His brilliant mind brought him to the east-coast ivory league Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1970’s. Inter-disciplinary interests lead him to molecular biology, biochemistry and computer science. Reflecting over the consequences of the ability to design and control structures at the size of cells and molecules, Drexler headed down the nanometer path. The academic atmosphere of these early years of Drexlers academic career provided the intellectual stimulus that would fuel a technological visionary. Drexler’s interest in propulsion technology resultet in technical papers on solar sails and later a patent using thin metal films for solar sail technology. Space exploration and colonization was topics covered in his paper “Solar Sailing ” from 1976. Drexler’s studies at MIT resulted in the first ever scientific article on molecular manufacturing published in 1981. Although many consider Richard Feynman speech “There is plenty of room at the bottom ” from 1959 to be the first technical approach to nanotechnology in it’s broadest sense, Drexler defines the possibilities with even greater detail. The article introduce the basic nomenclature of molecular manufacturing and propose a theory of replicating the protein folding mechanism of the DNA. Biochemistry had shown Drexler how the self-assembly of biochemical structures can be copied and used to build larger strucutures. This is what later would be called “wet” nanotechnology where micro- and nano-mechanical structures are built bottom-up using existing biological mechanisms found in nature. The growing fields of space technology, computer science and artificial intelligence introduced Drexler to Marvin Minsky. Minksy is the author of the best-seller “The Society of Mind ” from 1987 which is considered by many to be the definitive AI classic. The cornerstone of Minsky’s theory is the conception of minds as collections of enormous numbers of semi-autonomous, intricately connected agents that are themselves mindless. Drexler show how molecular nanotechnology will be essential for sufficient computing power for hard artificial intelligence. Minsky was also Drexler’s supervisor during his Ph.D in molecular nanotechnology. ETHOS FOR A NEW TECHNOLOGICAL PARADIGM. Science-ficition is often laughed at by those who conjure up images of 1950’s space-rockets, robots, and ray-guns. Sci-fi, the genre widely used in totalitarian regimes to covertly relay messages of dissidence has always been in the forefront of futuristic concepts. The technological wonders illustrated in Popular Science and sci-novels of the 1950’s turned into reality with the introduction of personal computers, satellites and mobile phones. Nanotechnology had it’s practical breakthrough with the invention of the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) in 1986. Since then it has been the instrument of choice for three dimensional measurements at the atomic scale. With the publication of Engines of Creation Drexler took his ideas further and transformed what earlier had been found in obscure science-fiction into a manifesto for a new technological revolution. Neither academia or the scientific community had seen so many radical ideas presented with such scientific precision. Who could imagine machines the size of molecules while the PC was considered a technological marvel? THE CRITICAL TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIMIST With Engines of Creation Drexler kills the myth of the Mad Scientist. The influence from Vannevar Bush post-war speech “As We May Think ” may have helped form the social consciousness of Drexler. Engines of Creation is not a naive praise of technology but a thoughtful analysis of the consequence of nanotechnology on industry, energy and war. Drexler was one of the first who understood the implications of nanotechnology and chose to inform the public about the enormous challenges posed by this breakthrough technology. Some of the most horrific applications of nanotechnology made Drexler consider his position as a technological whistle-blower. Would the population be able to rationally comprehend the prospect of infite material wealth, invisible surveillance drones and immortality? Concluding this state of deep contemplation Drexler was convinced that technological progress is inevitable, regardless of popular opinion and majority rule. Medical regenerative molecular nanotechnology could reanimate cryonically stored dead people. To secure the credibility of nanotechnology Drexler is said to have chosen not to be cryonically suspended post mortem. While preserving the scientific objectivity of nanotechnology Drexler would became a martyr. To further strengthen the credibilty of his work Drexler publish Nanosystems in 1992. The book is based on the 1991 Ph.D and clarify and expand on the theories propsed in Engines of Creation. Nanosystems is considered to be the best introduction to nanotechnology to date and wins the annual Association of American Publishers award for best computer science book the same year. NANOTECHNOLOGY SCEPTICS. Like the genius of Wilhelm Reich and Nicolas Tesla, Drexler produce theories for technologies that threaten the established scientific order. With the publication of the article “Trends in Nanotechnology: Waiting for Breakthroughs ” Scientific American tried to discredit Drexler and molecular manufacturing. The article results in a series of arguments about the feasability of molecular manufacturing. With Drexler’s humorous wit the article was dismantled and shown to lack the distinction between general nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing. Next in line to attack Drexler was Jeremy Rifkin, author of dystopian books like “The End of Work” dealing with aging and the automation and subsequent slashing of the workforce. “Entropy” explains the end of the world caused by the exhaustion of natural resources by economic growth. Rifkins complains about Drexlers lacking consideration of larger global changes that would out-weigh the progress within nanotechnology. Eric Drexler have no respect for the fear-mongering of Rifkin and comments “Why flog the carcass of Rifkin’s Entropy? Simply because today’s information systems often present even stillborn ideas as if they were alive. By encouraging false hopes, false fears, and misguided action, these ideas can waste the efforts of people actively concerned about long-range world problems.” The current ethical discussion over human repoductive cloning and regenerative use of stem cells calls for a new socio-ethical compass and Drexler help us dissiminate the widespread techoangst and long dead religious moral codes as obsolete. This leaves us with the question about how we relate to and approach the future. Should the Rifkinesqe visions of global collaps or Drexlers ideas of a society of abundance inspire our evolutionary path? THE DREXELIAN REALITY Fast-forward a few years, to the 21st century of today, and nanotechnology is considered an emerging technology with specialized scientific publications, media outlets and venture capital groups. Drexler’s work for the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and the Foresight Insitute has contiously shaped the developement of nanotechnology as a scientific discipline. Products using nanotechnology is hitting the market while Drexler ponders the next small thing that will change the world. The estimated growth in nanotechnology related industry is beyond comparison and may fuel the next economic boom. The ideas first proposed by Drexler is rapidly changing production methods in industries across the globe. From microelectromechanical systems to medical nanotechnology Drexlers ideas is put to practice. With the maturation of nanotechnology and nanoscience Drexler’s name will be remembered as one of the very first and finest visionaries of a coming technogical revolution and it’s impact on society. The intelligensia of today needs more visionary genius that can help us navigate through this increasingly turbulant world. “First they ignore you. |
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Undesirable World Futures: Things That Could, But Shouldn’t, Happen
April 7, 2007Armageddon, The Apocalypse, Ragnarok, Doomsday; the end of the world seems to have mesmerized mankind since the dawn of civilization. Eschatology, the branch of theology that is concerned with the end times, has formed the human psyche through its religious influence. To ensure the propagation and betterment of mankind we need less mythomania and zealots and more applied foresight to confront the actual problems that threaten to annihilate humans on a large scale.
CONTENT
1. INTRODUCTION
2. GLOBAL WAR
3. ECOLOGICAL DISASTER
4. GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS RUNS RAMPANT
5. US CIVIL WAR
6. AUTOMATION THE ROBOTIC THREAT
7. INFORMATION AND INFRASTRUCTURAL WARFARE
8. GLOBAL PANDEMICS
9. ENERGY CRISIS
10. GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN
11. GLOBAL TOTALITARIANISM AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
12. HAPPY ENDING OR THE WORLD ON FIRE, IS THERE A CURE?
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The western world need a common idea of a desirable global future. Fragmented interests seem to be locked in an end game where self-gratification justifies violence. Cultural nihilism systematically nurtured in established organizations are obscuring the view of the consequnces of human behavior on our fragile environment. The cumulative process of civilization could cause unparalleled destructive consequences in our lifetime.
Optimists and true belivers in progression consider the world to be predetermined for a better situation. Our collective effort to optimize comfort and happiness should result in exponential growth of general wellness in society, but unfortunatly reality seems to be more troublesome and hard to manage than that. The root of many of todays problems could be found in the broader society that we live in; war, poverty, lack of education, disease etc. These factors always cause social instability and give room for opportunistic individuals who take advantage of the discontent among the population
Most popular news media cover the disintegration and dysfunctions of society as spectacular and sensensational “Man Bites Dog” stories. To understand the real issues that might cause unprecedented damage to modern society another worldview need to emerge. Seeing through simple media lies and distortions enable individuals to rationally make decisions that delay or terminate unwanted development.
In this report I will try to describe some scenarios that are all too realistic to disregard as paranoid fantasies. These scenarios will try to stimulate people to reflect over the many undesirable situations that might arise in a world run for profit, on oil and by political demagouges. The coming 50 years will be a chessboard with many players and opposing interests, new rules and unimaginable drama
“Wishful thinking might bring comfort, but not security.”
- Charles M. Chafer
Many military analysts describe the current global situation as World War 4, referring to the Cold War as World War 3. WW4 is the so-called “war against terror” waged in an assymetrical battlefield where terrorist cells attack civilian and military targets across the world and dissapear as soon as the damage is done. Advanced military technology loose it’s edge when the target is hidden among civilian populations and the enemy is spread across the entire world.
The obvious ambition of the current US government is to have global military dominance through alliances with nations around the world and through military presence on a global scale. While China is growing in economic and technological power, USAUK is charging ahead on a global crusade to ensure geopolitical interests and “security”. Meanwhile China is laying the foundations for the most advanced and homogenous global super-power ever seen (See “China prepares for war with U.S. over Taiwan”, Bill Gertz Nov. 2000) The U.S. and China could rival each other in both economic, technological and military capacity within 10 years, and may eventually confront each other in a military campaign over Taiwan. Adding to this China could also easily be drawn into conflicts over North Korea.
The number of conflict hotspots around the world has reached an all-time high. In the past decade major hot spots have been Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosova, Afganistan, and Iraq. These sites are referred to as complex emergencies, trouble spots and conflicts. Old ones endure and new ones will appear. The Middles East, The African continent, India/Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea, China and Taiwan, Russian Republics and many other regions have the potential to escalate and start off chain-reactions of diplomatic and military maneuvers that could engulf the world in armed conflict. (See Preventing Future Wars, David Sanam Nyheim)
ECOLOGICAL DISASTER
When the Club of Rome released their report “The Limits To Growth” (Se “Beyond The Limits To Growth”) in 1972 the world was slowly becoming aware of the long-term consequences of industrial society. Dystopian theories of global warming, immense pollution, water shortage, unchecked population growth and subsequent energy usage have been proven to be slightly exagerated. In stead we are experiencing global warming, freak-weather, higher sealevels and a looming ozone hole. We have not seen the final consequences of pollution, deforestation and climate change; the planet is slowly changing, either due to human activity, by natural causes, or both.
The most drastic consequences of ecological change is not necessarily the first order consequnce but the second and third. Water shortage lead to conflicts over water (See Water Conflict Chronology, Pacific Institute), pollution leads to genetic defects and deforestation and environmental damage causes unknown diseases to jump from animals to humans. To understand the complexity of ecological change one need to study the interactions and relatedness in the global system.
Weather control systems like H.A.A.R.P. and the mysterious chemtrails phenomenon could be pre-cursors to how environmental change leaves us no choice but to override the natural system, replacing natural habitats and ecologies with synthetic weather systems and BioSpheres.How to Wreck the Environment”. The book deals with many types of geophysical warfare, the directed military intention of creating havoc using nature as a cataclyst
“The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of the environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy. Environmental instability is a situation in which nature has stored energy in some part of the Earth or its surroundings far in excess of that which is usual. To trigger this instability, the required energy might be introduced violently by explosions or gently by small bits of material able to induce rapid changes by acting as catalysts or nucleating agents.”
The largesse of mankind has brought the world to the edge of the abyss. The human race, and with it a great many animal and plant species, is already on an unavoidable course towards extinction in the relatively near future. The world’s carrying capacity has been exceeded and the question of whether we will survive is not so much if, but when. Once criticality is reached it will only be a matter of time for a single event to lead to a collapse of the global ecological system. Eventually there will be a rapid breakdown somewhere in the food chain leading to total economic and social collapse
GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS RUNS RAMPANT.
“The Erewhonians say that we are drawn through life backwards; or again, that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor. Time walks beside us and flings back shutters as we advance; but the light thus given often dazzles us, and deepens the darkness which is in front. We can see but little at a time, and heed that little far less than our apprehension of what we shall see next; ever peering curiously through the glare of the present into the gloom of the future, we presage the leading lines of that which is before us, by faintly reflected lights from dull mirrors that are behind, and stumble on as we may till the trap-door opens beneath us and we are gone.” Erewhon – Samuel Butler
From the first GM test fields to the public debate of today, genetically modified organisms have caused much controversy. The question still remains whetever GM crops harm the natural environment through cross-polination and damage the surrounding ecological crops. Crossed GM strains could threaten to wipe out existing natural stains.
Weaponized bacteria and virus are continously being tested in several laboratories around the world. The latest CIA report (See “CIA Says Experts See ‘Darker Bioweapons Future’”, Reuters) concerning biological warfare mention weaponized gene therapy vectors that can change both human and the natural world. Race based weapons has been circulated for years but no evidence is yet available. The latest breakthrough whithin synthetic viruses could lead to much more horrible concepts, one could easliy imagine a gene therapy weapons which remove sight or other human capabilities. (See “Virus built from scratch in two weeks”, Nature)
If the army manage to keep their hideous weapons isolated in laboratories the commercial market is racing ahead with GM food that might pose another serious threat. The FDA recently approved cloned livestock to enter the supermakets. Massproduced foodstuff made of cloned animals seems attractive to the food industry, but the consequences are still hard to comprehend. The idea of identical pieces of every foodstod harvested from homogenetic industrial crops of animals and plants makes the possibilites for disaster endless.
GM humans and neo-eugenics are being revitalized through IVF, Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnostics, sex selection and other reproductive technologies. John. H. Campbell describes this to be the next natural step for human evolution in his “The Moral Imperative of Our Future Evolution” (See below). The utopian ideas described by the aging Francis Galton in “The Eugenic University of Kantsaywhere” should be reexamined and might shed new light on the human drive towards perfection, and, on the other hand, it’s extinction. See Campbell’s possible triggers for uncontrolled GM humans below.
Table II Possible triggers for human autoevolution.
· Geneticists discover a gene which produces a very desirable effect when introduced into the human genome. For example, overproduction of a DNA repair enzyme might substantially delay aging or reduce the incidence of cancer.
· A human sperm bank develops an outstanding insemination service. It demands that its users join in programs of raising the offspring in accordance with its researched program of excellence and provide detailed information about the offspring’s genetic and phenotypic characteristics.
· The AIDS epidemic becomes really serious (e.g. the virus mutates to become transmissible by insect vector) or another new epidemic virus combines the lethality of HIV with high transmissibility. Society embraces programs of inserting a gene into the fertilized egg to make the offspring resistant (such as a coding sequence for a gene shears or antisense segments of the virus). Hereditary resistance to viruses could be developed even today.
· A wealthy person sponsors his/her own vision of human autoevolution with ten million dollars.
· The leader of some third world country decides to father a thousand or ten thousand offspring for political, social, military or egotistical reasons.
· A drug, hormone or growth factor treatment is developed to prevent neurological problems in very premature infants and is found to greatly enhance the development of mental capacity of all fetuses. Embryo engineering is born.
· An eccentric geneticist successfully clones an offspring with his genotype and captures world attention.
· Inevitable progress in reproductive biology makes it possible to induce parthenogenesis or to transplant a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated human egg. Unmarried women or wives of sterile men opt for this route to pregnancy and cause the technique to become accepted and widespread.
· The results of the human genome project supplemented by the analysis of the genetic variation in the human population convince thoughtful people of the imperative need to regulate the transmission of our genetic heritage to future generations.
· Countries finally forced to radically control their exploding population develop the ethos to detect superior genotypes and exclude them from the ban on reproduction. The largest countries of the world embrace stringent forced eugenics.
· Nuclear war elevates the mutational load to where controlled breeding and genetic engineering (such as large scale cloning of rare phenotypically normal offspring) become essential to maintain a sizable functional society.
Source: The Moral Imperative of Our Future Evolution, by John H. Campbell.
U.S. CIVIL WAR Many conspiracy theroists today speak of population control as a tool of hidden dictators. From Margareth Sanger to the overshoot-and-collapse models of the population bomb of the 70’s to the one-child policy in China, the political maxim is control of the population. When the population of China and India start moving, either escaping war or being pulled towards western living standards the scenarios of “The Camp of the Saints” could become closer to reality than our political system can handle. AUTOMATION AND THE ROBOTIC THREAT
The continously growth in industrial robots and automation of the workplace (See Evolution Robotics Super Toys Last All Summer Long, Plausible Futures Newsletter) will eventually lead to a major employment crisis. On top of the aging population this could topple societies, cause mass unemployment and ruthless welfare cuts. Meanwhile the robots continue to grow in both numbers and computing power.
Scenarios span from the creation of a leisure society where manual work has been abolished and comfort machines sooth the human condition (See www.whywork.org/) to a Terminator-like robotic apocalypse. Both Jeremy Rifkin and recently Marshall Brain (See Robotic Nation) consider the evolution of automation to be the end of the manual workforce. There’s simply nothing left to do for humans when robots have reached sufficient computing power and mechanical sophistication. This could take place in a timeframe of 20 years, soon aftwards many projection of computing power points to a Singularity. The all encompassing super artificial intelligence that indefintely becomes smarter and more aware of it’s own existence and powers. (See The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era, Vernor Vinge) INFORMATION AND INFRASTRUCTURAL WARFARE Modern largescale society is completely dependent on infrastructure for the transmission of information. The number of nodes connected to this global system of information flow is accellerating with every new electronic device produced. Modern warfare; from psychological operations and propaganda to advanced battlespace material all rely on electronics. Military systems are heavily protected against jamming. The civil society, which seems to be the battleground of the future, is vulnerable to slight interruptions in infrastrucuture performance. The blackouts in Northern America, and soon afterwards in Denmark and Italy all seemed non-related. The common dominator in these incidents is seen in the immediate effects on society. PICTURE: Microwave weapons researcher Edl Schamiloglu sits in front of the Pulserad-110A accelerator, which his lab at the University of New Mexico uses to produce single 100-nanosecond pulses of electron beams, each pulse emitting hundreds of megawatts of power. SOURCE: The Dawn of the E-Bomb, IEEE Spectrum. Anti-infrastructural weapons, that paralyse key functions of society, could seem like a mild-threat compared to recent solar storms. The Internet seems invincible, having survived Y2K, millions of virus attacks and various political supression. The Internet illustrates how distributed networks of information transfer could learn a lesson to large organizations when it comes to persistency. |
| GLOBAL PANDEMICS.Eaxctly where AIDS, the West-Nile Virus, SARS, Ebola or any other emerging disease seems to be coming from is still an unanswered question. From the academia comes the theory of “ecological defense mechanism”, from the speculatives comes “military experiment gone awry”. The vectors of transmission are different, but all very deadly. STD’s, mosquito’s, air-born virus or not – if not contained they spread across populated areas with expontential speed. If SARS or Ebola becomes pandemic the world will freeze to a standstill and could, in the worst case, cause war. The recent West-Nile season in the US is over, but for the virologist there is the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo and the wait for the next SARS case. Republic of the Congo: Officials Confirm Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever Outbreak ————————————————– Health officials on Fri 14 Nov 2003 confirmed Ebola hemorrhagic fever asthe cause of 11 deaths in the northern forests, signaling the Republic of Congo’s second outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever this year. Bloodspecimens from corpses suspected to have been infected with Ebola virushave tested positive, national public health chief Damase Bozongo said. “Wecan now affirm that Ebola [virus is the cause of the outbreak],” he toldreporters. A World Health Organization spokesman, Boniface Bibousse, alsoverified the [cause of the] outbreak in the Cuvette West region, sayingthat WHO was sending 2 epidemiologists to the area on Sat 15 Nov 2003.First reports from the remote northern region emerged 31 Oct 2003. Ebolahemorrhagic fever, one of the world’s deadliest viral diseases, causesrapid death through massive blood loss in up to 90 percent of thoseinfected. In June 2003, Republic of Congo health authorities announced theend of an Ebola epidemic that killed over 120 people in the same CuvetteWest region. That epidemic — believed to have been started by contact withinfected gorilla flesh, which is eaten in parts of sub-Saharan Africa —broke out in January [2003].The WHO says Ebola hemorrhagic fever has killed more than 1000 people sincethe virus was first identified in 1976 in western Sudan and in [theDemocratic Republic of the Congo] this country’s larger, eastern neighbor. Source: www.promedmail.org |
| ENERGY CRISIS Economic growth, the prerequisite for capitalism, is dependent on energy. Oil and gas will reach global peak production within the next 10-20 years (See ASPO sees conventional oil production peaking by 2010, Oil&Gas Journal). This fact is not proparly recognized within the poltical community. The lacking planning for this milestone could cause dramatic consequences, bordering on the collapse of the industrialised world.
When the prices of energy skyrocket due higher demand than production the commodities market will go amok. After a period of increasing prices, the autorities will have to enforce blackouts. This is already a reality in many large cities. The resulting effects on industry is hard to imagine. The geographic location of industry will no longer be based on the access to cheap labor but on the access to reliable sources of energy. The auto industry and the transport sector will crumble when the price of gas equals the car. GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN The protagonist in the fascinating fictional story “Operation Economic Depression” fights a worldwide conspiracy that plan to control the money supply and create conditions for a global market crash. Confronting the Patriarchs–a super-secret society of the world’s wealthiest families—the main character struggle to unravel the scheme before millions of investors are ruined and the world is plunged into another Great Depression. (See “Operation Economic Depression”, Ed Thorne – Palisade Press) The ownership of money seems to be be controlled since the Knights Templar and the dynasties of Venice established the European banking system and later through the private banking cartel called the Federal Reserve. While the U.S. economy is being destroyed by war mongering presidents (in generational succession) certain interests always stands to gain. On March 18, 2003, World War Three Began The corruption of the core economic instruments have had devasting consequences for stock markets. Enron and the rest of corrupted private industry has become nothing less than the whores of governments and will continues to do so until the corrupt plug is pulled. Widespread corruption will eventually cause the need for drastic counter-meassures. When these counter-meassures only produce more corruption the solutions seems to be hard to find. World Bank and IMF corruption scandals in former Soviet Republics and elsewhere are only the beginning of this story. GLOBAL TOTALITARIANISM AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER From the atempt to infiltrate the Freemasons in Europe by Adam Weishaupt in the late 18th century seceret societies has played a crucial role in the development of modern society. The myriads of operative secret socities of today could easily be the front for cabal with ambitions of global dominance under their rule. Many consider this idea a classical paranoid conspiracy theory, dubbed The New World Order. Looking at the literature on this phenomenon makes even the serious history geek shiver. Fascism, democracy and capitalism goes hand in hand with secret societies – from the Bilderberger Group, Skull and Bones and the “Committee of 300” secret powers are pulling the strings from their board rooms. What their real aims are – only they know.
HAPPY ENDING OR WORLD ON FIRE, IS THERE A CURE? “The word UTOPIA stands in common usage for the ultimate in human folly or human hope — vain dreams of perfection in a Never-Never Land or rational efforts to remake man’s environment and his institutions and even his own erring nature, so as to enrich the possibilities of the common life. Sir Thomas More, the coiner of this word, was aware of both implications. Lest anyone else should miss them, he elaborated his paradox in a quatrain which, unfortunately, has sometimes been omitted from English translations of his Utopia , the book that at last gave a name to a much earlier series of efforts to picture ideal commonwealths. More was a punster, in an age when the keenest minds delighted to play tricks with language, and when it was not always wise to speak too plainly. In his little verse he explained that utopia might refer either to the Greek ‘eutopia’, which means the good place, or to ‘outopia’, which means no place”. –Lewis Mumford (in The Story of Utopias , 1922). Modern scientific futurology has its root in the utopian litterature of earlier centuries. Our conception of the future can be traced to famous authors like Plato “Republic”, Francis Bacon “The New Atlantis”, Aldous Huxley “Island” and “Brave New World”, Ursual Le Guin “The Dispossessed”, B. F. Skinner “Walden”, Francis Galton “Kantsaywhere” – worlds where utopias and dystopias are examined and explored with rich imagination. To avoid the many catastrophic endings our world confronts we need to form desirable future ideals, worlds where our highest ambitions and needs are fullfilled. The Hedonistic Imperative (See “The Naturalisation of Heaven”, David Pearce) builds utopian universes on the marvels of technological progress. Utopian Studies Journal gives an impressive overview of the many facets of utopian future studies. Utopian litterature is descriptive of future worlds where we might want to live; these sentiments should be impleneted in our normative behaviour, political institutions and commercial community. To counter the threats this world faces concerned inviduals need to know what is desirable and act accordingly.
If everything else fails, our only escape may be the final frontier – space. |
NEWS SOURCES* Corruption News* ReliefWeb
ARTICLES* Doomsday Scenarios Threatening Life on Our Planet, Stanislav Grof* We’re All Gonna Die!, Wired* 20 Ways the World Could End, Discover* SARS, Bioterrorism and the Media, New Dawn Magazine* Preventing Future Wars, David Sanam Nyheim RESOURCES:* Apocalypse, the Evolution of apocalyptic belief and how it shaped the western world, PBS.* The Atomic Clock, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists |
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Nanowar Scenarios and the Future of Warfare
April 7, 2007The media coverage of the recent opening of the MIT Insitute for Soldier Nanotechnologies was mostly confined to articles with a clear news angle. A deep information-rich analysis of the consequences of military nanotechnology on the stability of the world system is rare in mainstream media. This report will examine some consequences of this disruptive emerging technology on military affairs.
The phenomenon of war has fascinated and killed men from prehistory to the agricultural revolution and the subsequent organization of resources. Already in 1929 Maurice Davie noted in his anthroplogyThe Evolution of War , “war is the business of half the human race.” Probing further into the logic of war Joseph Tainters “The Collaps of Complex Societies” raise the question of whatever environmental factors or the failures of group decision-making is the main cause of war. Philosophy student Doyne Dawsons “The Origins of War: Biological and Anthroplogical Theories” look at the functions and causality of war. From the invention of gunpowder to the development of nanotechnology, the logic of war is as cynical as ever.
Defense spending has accelerated the evolution and transfer of advanced technology. DARPA developed the Internet that caused the information revolution (IT/Internet) that later caused a civilian technological powershift. Alvin Toffler explore this with great detail in “War and Anti-War, Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century”. Under this paradigm we live with constant threats of asymetrical warfare waged by knowledge warriors with offensive technology. Toffler reminds us that this is the nature of the threat that has to be adressed, sooner rather than later.
The effects of military spending on nanotech would be similar to information technology, namely more rapid development of nanotech for civilian use. The US Department of Defense 2003 budget worth $379 billion (reaching cold-war levels) has nanotechnology as one of six major research areas. After the National Science Foundation, the DoD is the largest supporter of nanotech research. As part of the National Nanotechnology Initiative’s $710 million 2003 budget, the DoD is committing $201 million for research in nanoelectronics, magnetics, nanomaterials, and detection and protection against chemical, biological, radiological and explosive threats.
The US may be the present world leader in nanotechnology, but it’s not the only country with big defense budgets. Japan, the world’s second largest military spender, is far behind the United States with an annual defence budget of $49 billion, followed by Britain with $36 billion. The top five spenders–the United States, Japan, Britain, France and China–account for about 62 percent of total world military expenditures. The United States now accounts for 43 percent of world military expenditure. Long-term potential enemies of USAUK, including China and Iran (See Nanotechnology Studies Committee), has already invested in nanotech research centers and may in the future gain significant nanotech capabilities. Although a small part of these military budgets are used for nanoscience research – civilian research budgets will produce results that easily can be transferred for military purposes.
To counter the threat of increasingly sophiscated warfare – satellites and UAVs has become the eyes and ears of the army and intelligence agencies of the world. (See “Attack of the Drones”, BetterHumans) Al Martin, a central iran-contras figure, reported late 2002 about UAVs the size of large soccerballs that hovered and asked for ID papers. According to Mr. Martin this craft was showcased at a secret sales meeting between the US and Chinese military. (See Al Martin RAW) Rumors aside, s cientists are applying nanoscience in aviation technology to improve precision and strength of sensors. Nanotechnology will change defense systems en masse – from the aviation industry to the security/intelligence/surveillance industry and beyond.
INDEX.
1. MILITARY NANOTECH APPLICATIONS
2. DEFENSIVE NANOBOTS?
3. DANGEROUS HEADLINES OF THE FUTURE
4. NON-LETHAL NANOWEAPONS?
5. THE LOGIC OF NANOWAR SCENARIOS
6. 4 NANOWAR SCENARIOS
7. INTERVIEW WITH EDWIN THOMAS, INST. FOR SOLDIER NANOTECHNOLOGIES
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The phenomenon of war has fascinated and killed humans from prehistory to the agricultural revolution and the subsequent organization of resources. Already in 1929 Maurice Davie noted in his anthroplogy The Evolution of War, “war is the business of half the human race.” Probing further into the logic of war Joseph Tainters “The Collaps of Complex Societies” raise the question of whatever environmental factors or the failures of group decision-making are the main cause of war. Philosophy student Doyne Dawsons “The Origins of War: Biological and Anthroplogical Theories” look at the functions and causality of war. From the invention of gunpowder to the development of nanotechnology, the logic of war is as cynical as ever. Defense spending has accelerated the evolution and transfer of advanced technology. DARPA developed the Internet that caused the information revolution (IT/Internet) that later caused a civilian technological powershift. Alvin Toffler explore this with great detail in “War and Anti-War, Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century”. Under this paradigm we live with constant threats of asymetrical warfare waged by knowledge warriors with offensive technology. Toffler reminds us that this is the nature of the threat that has to be adressed, sooner rather than later. Military spending on nanotech would have the same effect as with information technology, namely more rapid development of nanotech for civilian use. The US Department of Defense 2003 budget worth 9 billion (reaching cold-war levels) has nanotechnology as one of six major research areas. After the National Science Foundation, the DoD is the largest supporter of nanotech research. As part of the National Nanotechnology Initiative’s 0 million 2003 budget, the DoD is committing 1 million for research in nanoelectronics, magnetics, nanomaterials, and detection and protection against chemical, biological, radiological and explosive threats. The US may be the present world leader in nanotechnology, but it’s not the only country with big defense budgets. Japan, the world’s second largest military spender, is far behind the United States with an annual defence budget of billion, followed by Britain with billion. The top five spenders–the United States, Japan, Britain, France and China–account for about 62 percent of total world military expenditures. The United States now accounts for 43 percent of world military expenditure. Long-term potential enemies of USAUK, including China and Iran (See Nanotechnology Studies Committee and “Order for SEM to Iran”, Obducat), has already invested in nanotech research centers and may in the future gain significant nanotech capabilities. Although a small part of these military budgets are used for nanoscience research – civilian research budgets will produce results that easily can be transferred for military purposes. To counter the threat of increasingly sophiscated warfare – satellites and UAVs has become the eyes and ears of the army and intelligence agencies of the world. (See “Attack of the Drones”, BetterHumans) Al Martin, a central iran-contras figure, reported late 2002 about UAVs the size of large soccerballs that hovered and asked for ID papers. According to Mr. Martin this craft was showcased at a secret sales meeting between the US and Chinese military. (See Al Martin RAW) Rumors aside, scientists are applying nanoscience in aviation technology to improve precision and strength of sensors. Nanotechnology will change defense systems, from the aviation industry to the security/surveillance/intelligence industry and beyond. |
| 1. MILITARY NANOTECH APPLICATIONS Information technology and the Internet has been a precursor of military transformation and have changed the priorities of many defence budgets. Nanotechnology will enable completely new types of defense systems and offensive weaponry. Applied nanotechnology in defense systems range from individual soldier enhancement to completely new surveillance and intelligence gathering tools. Ultra-thin sheets interwoven with sensors can be stretched across miles and give high-resolution surveillance of miniscule changes in temperature, sound or air-quality. Bacterium-sized devices could convert high explosives into inert substances, a technique that would neutralize even nuclear weapons. Most western countries have, with some hesitation, established civilian nanoscience research institutes the last 5-10 years. Today military research institution across the globe is looking at possible military applications of nanotechnology. The most interesting application area is wihtin the materials sciences, where the aim is to reduce the weight of ammunition/food storage and strenghten the properties of equipment. An anti-corrosion nanocoated painting is already being tested on navy vessels. To be able to practically deploy nanotechnology in the armed forces scientists need to mass-produce large quantities of the desired nanomaterial. The genereal term “nanofoundries” refers to all bulk production at the nanoscale. Silicon transistors, and later MEMS, have been produced in bulk since the 1960’s. Today several methodes exist to mass-produce carbon nanotubes and some will probably become commercially viable within the next few years. 2. DEFENSIVE NANOBOTS? To be able to construct machines that operate at the nanoscale, current top-down approaches are cumbersome. This is why many consider the bottom-up approach more promising to build nanoscale devices. The Protonic NanoMachine Project at the Osaka University Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences in Japan is looking at the self-assembly, regulation, conformational switching, force generation, and energy transduction of biological macromolecular complexes. Their aim is to use machinery found in nature to power artificial nanomachines. Military uses of nanodevices could be in parts for smaller robots, systems for containment of dangerous weapons or in-vivo medical devices for soldiers. Self-organization of desired nano structures is crucial for the eventual mass-production of nanomachines. Without self-organization mass production of nanomachines, which work flexibly and precisely at the same time, is impossible. No matter how useful individually made nanomachines could be, there would be no practical applications without large-scale production. The outcome of their studies on protein nanomachines is expected to produce useful knowledge to eventually form a basis for design principles for artificial nanomachines. Biology and mechanical physics is merging to form nanobiotechnology. The use of nanotechnology for detection and defense against biochemical weapons has interested scientist a long time. Combining biocehcmical sensors for early warning with antimicrobial nanoemulsions for treatment would make the soldier practically invulnerable against toxic warfare. The biopharmaceutical NanoBio Corporation produce water/oil emulsions that employ uniformly sized droplets in the nanometer (10-9 meter) range. The nanoemulsions destroy microbes effectively without toxicity or harmful residual effects. The classes of microbes eradicated are virus (e.g., HIV, Herpes), bacteria (e.g., E. coli, Salmonella), spores (e.g., Anthrax), and fungi (e.g., Candida albicans, Byssochlamys fulva). This is an example of the many commercial civilian companies working on dual-use technology. The range of dual-use and multi-purpose nanotechnology would grow as commercial interests look into nanoscience. Many readers may shake their heads in disbelief to this information. Head of unit for nanosciences and nanotechnologies in the European Commission Renzo Tomellini recently said to Cordis News that he “… believes that books and articles have contributed to fears about nanotechnology. Some have combined invisibility, movement and the possibility of reproducing and learning, to create hypothetical ‘nano-robots’. As presented, these fears are not realistic, are beyond science fiction, and have little or nothing to do with nanotechnology…” I agree with Tomellini’s cautionary advice. It still makes me wonder how he can dismiss the many reports and analysis that mention weapons that nobody in the civilian research community have the nerves to even dream up? |
| 3. DANGEROURS HEADLINES OF THE FUTURE Atlantic Monthly recently published “Headlines over the Horizon” written by defense and technology analysts at the RAND Corporation. Apart from the usual hotspots of future wars; the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Russia (See also “Russia as a Security Disaster Area: Possible Conflicts and Interventions in 2015” PDF, The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis) and Africa – technology was the real shocker. The RAND researchers fears high-altitude anti-satellite nuclear attacks at some 250 commercial and military satellites critical to the western infrastructure. The retalitatory crosshairs from such attacks could be targeted at high-technology countries like Russia and China but also Pakistan, North-Korea, and even Iran. According to RAND researcher future soldiers deployed in urban guerilla warfare will use hand-held computers and micro-robots for real-time battlespace command and control. MEMS-enabled smart dust (See the Plausible Futures Newsletter Oct. 2002, “InfoWar, NanoWar and Exotic Weapons”) and the use of mind-controlled insects to gather information is also covered. Since RAND has the guts to publish this, the really juicy classified stuff would at least include genetically engineered nanoenhanced war dogs/animals. Rats are already used to clear minefields. Research done at the State University of New York on remote controlled rats might be an indicator of where this technology could lead. (See “Here comes the ratbots”, BBC) 4. NON-LETHAL NANOWEAPONS? Most adults remember rubber bullets, first used in the late 1960’s in Palestine and later Northern-Ireland. Non-lethal weapons caused much more controversy in the 1990’s when they became fashionable among civilian police. After much secrecy the government admitted research on; very low-frequency sound generators that would be tuned to incapacitate humans, sticky foams and “calmatives” that would immobilize or sedate adversaries, specially cultured bacteria that would corrode and degrade components of weapons systems, optical munitions that would cripple sensors and dazzle, if not blind, soldiers, acoustic beam weapons that would knock them out, netting and shrouds that would thwart the movement of aircraft, tank, and armored vehicles. (See “The Soft Kill Fallacy”, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) These and many other related technologies have already been demonstrated at a proof-of-concept level. The proposed technologies raised questions about compliance with international agreements and still many fear black-budget research into these technologies. Nonetheless, government laboratories and private contractors are pursuing numerous similar programs. (See “Wonder Weapons”, US News and World Report and “Weapons of Mass Compliance”, LAWeekly) All these futuristic concepts could be realized sooner with nanotechnology. Due to size-reduction electromagnetic weapons could be integrated into existing handguns. Nanoparticles could be coated on bullets for more punch or other non-lethal properties. To be able to comprehend the complexity of the possible developments of nanotechnology for military purposes the following scenario planning process was exercised. |
| 5. THE LOGIC OF NANOWAR SCENARIOS Scenario planning found its first practical applications within military planning. The need to have contingency plans ready in case anything went wrong was critical to avoid large losses (there’s always worst case scenarios). Today wargaming and simulations of future battlefields are built using as much empirical “realworld” data to ensure a high degree of realism. Future military planners should be able to determinate the statistical probability of a desired goal with increasingly high accuracy. Scenario analysis had its commercial breakthrough with the Royal Dutch/Shell Group (See Storying Corporate Futures: The Shell Scenarios) when it helped them reduce their losses in the oil crisis of the 70’s. Kees Van Der Heijden’s book “Scenarios, the Art of Strategic Conversation” gives a thrilling and educational view of the world of corporate planning. While strategic thinkers and informed decision makers have many tools at their disposal, scenario planning stand out as the most practical one. For a detailed perspective on how scenario planning is applied in the military, see “The use of Scenarios in Long Term Defence Planning”. The military approach to scenario planning utilizes a set of hypothetical situations for the employment of military forces. The situations are specified in terms of geographic, military and civil parameters. Military capability requirements are determined from assessments of the ability to achieve mission objectives. This article cannot describe the complete process of a succesful scenario planning exercise, but let me describe the general structure. To approach a complex problem you need to aggregate reailty or create abstract worlds where the problem appears and therefore hopefully can be solved. In these carefully consistancy-checked stories, your problem and solution can be played out. To increase the consistancy (scenario logic) and plausibility of your scenarios several methods exits. The US west-coast mileu around the Global Business Network use methods described by Peter Schwartz in the book “The Art of the Long View”. The Swedish company Kairos Future has their own method called TAIDA, short for Tracking, Analysing, Imaging, Deciding and Acting. The list of scenario consulting companies is as long as the different approaches. Some universal concepts can still be found in the fundaments of scenario planning. The world according to a scenario planner is basically following tracks along driving forces (economy, politics, technology, demography, environment etc.) and is continously scaling along dimensions of uncertainty. This is illustrated with the classical 4-cell cross of scenarios. Each cell should contain stories where driving forces and uncertainty has played out differently. Scenario planning involves concepts as “enablers” and “inhibitors” that produce the uncertainty that distinguish the different scenarios. It’s essential that scenarios are a group process where information gathering and brainstorming is closed in a loop of continous reality-checks. The scenario below is therefor not a properly designed scenario, this is my worldview applied to nanowars using scenarios. |
| 6. NANOWAR SCENARIOSPARADIGM.The underlying paradigm of these scenarios for nanowars is the continously evolving nanoscientific paradigm, the permanent existence of violence and armed conflict among increasingly more technological sophisticated countries with decreasing amounts of natural resources. DRIVING FORCES.I’ve grouped the driving forces as global and local, this is to distinguish between driving forces on the marco-level and on the specific forces driving the weaponization of nanotechnology on the “local” level.Primary driving forces (global):· The access to services depleting natural resources (oil/gas, clean water, fresh air etc.) for an increasingly populated and industrialised world.· The scientific and technological race towards nanotechnology enabled industry and defense applications.· Incidents like 9/11 and the resulting asymmetrical global war (overt and covert)Secondary driving forces (local):· Nanoscience and industrial diffusion of applications in existing products.· Miniaturization of existing information/defence technology.· Global wireless high-speed communications and surveillance technology UNCERTAINTY.The uncertainties of the scenarios are scaled along the degree of diffusion of nanotechnology (X) and the balance between offensive and defensive use of the nanoweapons (Y). Enablers: the promise of nanotechnology. Inhibitors: the funding and brainpower needed for further progress WILD CARD / CRITICAL UNCERTAINTYMajor nanotech breakthrough that would give the power to blakmail for complete global power, e.g. Singularity/AI, controlled Grey-Goo type weapons, genebomb etc. INDICATORS / MILESTONESIndicators work as precursors and gives early warning of an impending trajectory in the scenario. When an “indicators” is proven to cause the expected scenario turn, it becomes a “milestone”. Indicators are continously coming from private and governement research laboratories around the world. 20 YEARS TIMELINE2005: first deployed nanoenhanced battle suit2015: most western armed forces rely on nanotechnology for defensive purposes2025: first conflict where defensive nanotechnology is used to counter an offensive nanoweaponPREDICTABILITY.“Very Low” to “Low” predictability due to the early stages of most nanoscience and lacking information on defense spending on nanotechnology.FUNDINGGovernment, Military, IndustryINFLUENCEThe development of nanotechnology for military purposes will slowly influence all areas of existing industries, from production to the consumer.POTENTIAL PLAYERS.US, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Schweitz, Japan, Russia, China, India, Singapore, Taiwan, South-Korea. |
OFFENSIVE HIGH DIFFUSION – “COLD NANOWAR”This world is slowly developing towards complete penetration of nanotechnology in all parts of society due to much open-source research into nanotechnology. In 2010 most military powers (China, N-Korea, Iran) has proven control over many applications of nanotech. USAUK, Russia, China and some European countries has built destructive nanoweapons. The prolifiration of nuclear arms has almost completely been controlled because of new anti-nuke protection nanosystem deployed in all western cities. Although most people feel safe, the elite has retreated to private submarines and space camps to avoid the ravages of nanoweapons among criminals and terrorists. The increasingly critical energy crisis is driving industrial society to the maximum of its capacity. Energy demanding industry has grown with the progress of nanotechnology. Much progress has been done with nanoenergy methods but not enough to counter the burst of energy consumption feeding the wave of new products made possible by nanotech. High diffusion leads to several nanoweapon test-sites that resemble the nuclear test sites of the cold war. The awsome weapons create an intense atmosphere where high-level diplomacy keeps confrontations at a distance on a day-to-day basis. This scenario is a miultipolar stalemate scenario, but has the potential to develop into full-scale nanowar. See the movie “The Animatrix” and the comic book “Judge Dredd, Future Crime” to get some visuals to this scenario. OFFENSIVE LOW DIFFUSION – “NANO UNDERGROUND”The nature of this world is characterised by as much patent wars as nano wars. USAUK protected companies have constant legal battles with non-allied nanotech research trying to contain the technology. Much of the technology is restricted to a few government-funded projects, much are “black budget” and classified. China, N-Korea and other non-allied countries has increased competitive intelligence gathering on nanotech and rumors are circulating of large scale bulk purchases of Wilson’s DoubleCore tennis balls (which contain nanomaterials from InMat) and Eddie Bauer pants (containing nanocoatings) for reeningeering at underground laboratories in non-allied countries. Due to the restrictions on access to nanotechnology, many robot-enthusiasts and general techno-freaks buy second-hand nanofabrication equipment to produce defensive technology against government nanotech based surveillance systems. DEFENSIVE HIGH DIFUSION – “NANOPEACE CORPS”The competitive marketplace has developed every available application of nanoscience to the consumer market, and the defense sector is continously phasing their products into civilian circulation. The horrible prospect of offensive nanoweapons made all countries involved with nanotech research to agree upon a moratorium on offensive nanoweapons described in the “Nanoweapons Treaty” of 2009. UN Weapons Inspections Teams are continously controlling research institutions around the world. Due to several major breakthroughs with nanotechnology in the energy sector much of the impending energy crisis was avoided. The western world has reduced its dependency on oil and gas because of new energy storage and alternative energy sources. Some hostilities have been reported between rivaling western companies developing nanoweapons. Most global companies have installed nanotech protection systems to avoid industrial espionage but also to protect employees from potential attacks from competing companies. DEFENSIVE LOW DIFFUSION – “SLOW BURN”Among the allied countries (USAUK, NATO) only Russia has some offensive weapons. Nanotech is mostly used in communications, space, and the traditional engineering sectors. Nanotechnology didn’t live up to its expectations and many of the anticipated breaktroughs never appeared, and was shown to be impractical for mass production and even on the proof-of-concept level. The defensive applications of the still emerging field of nanoscience are found in improved battlesuits, sensors and surveillance technology. Most military research is transferred for civilian use and little effort is put into offensive weapons due to the slow progress and technical difficulties involed in research and production of nanotechnology for military purposes. |
7. AN INTERVIEW WITH EDWIN THOMAS, DIRECTOR OF MIT INSTITUTE FOR SOLDIER NANOTECHNOLOGIES (ISN) What technology are you currently considering most promising for invisible fabrics? (See “Being Invisible” Wired) ISN is not working on invisible fabrics, because it’s camoflauge. The army is obviously interested in camoflauge, they work it and probably industry is working on it. All of the research we do at MIT is non-classified. So when you work on something like making people invisible, or whatever, it has to be classified. If you succeed, this would really be remarkable and it would also be such an advantage that it would be highly classified. What you are refering to is probably the Japenese article on the web about seeing-though something. What I think they have is cameras that are looking at the person, while controlling cameras on the back and displaying on the front. It’s quite an elaborate thing. Someome standing still could look transparent or invisible, but how would this person move, run around, and have all this stuff on him. I think the stuff has to be not on them but away from them to be able to look at them. I’m sure DARPA must work on this [. The group in Japan is working on cameras and projectors so it’s hardly nano. What do you think the will be the first applications coming out of ISN? Some of those nanocoatings will come fairly early. Because you are taking an existing object which are valuable and your are increasing it’s functionality by just applying a thin coating. It’s so-called “low hangin fruit”. You can imaging doing it, scaling it up and manufacturing it. Maybe having it tried out with soldiers in a year or two. How do the ISN coperate with the rest of the army for netcentric warfare? What I think they want to do is make the soldier a node on a network. This battlesuit has to have a lot of communications built into it, both in reciecing and transmitting information. They you have to make sure the solider don’t transmit his position to the enemy. Broadcasting radiation somebody might be able to say “There’s a bunch of soldiers over there in the wood” They can’t see them but they can find them from their radio signals. What other countries are currently studying nanotechnology for military/defence purposes? Sounds like Norway is just beginning to do a little bit of it. I know the British is interested. It’s a new thing and I think the US is really taking a lead in trying to do this. A lot of people are visiting us, asking questions and are curious. To see if this is this real and if it makes a difference? If it looks real, and it looks like to be a very valuable thing to invest in other countries will probably start doing this. China is world leading in several areas of nanotechnology. Iran has a ”Nanotechnology Policy Studies Commitee”. Do you think weaponized nanotechnology could fall in the wrong hands, like WMD of today? Could offensive nanotechnology lead to an arms race similar to that for the nuclear bomb? How could waponized nanotechnology cause imbalance in the world system? “A weapons race with nanotechnology!? We do everything for defensive purposes; we’re trying to make soldiers survive better. I guess everybody can think of evil things to do with nanotechnology. Protetcing people are not evil.” Thomas Edwin assures us. |
The Future of Designer Babies
April 7, 2007The idea of the perfect human has been around a long time. From Tao Te Ching to Nietsche and Galton, many great minds have described certain desirable and non-desirable qualities of man. Until recently, all human reproduction resulted from sexual intercourse, and couples had to be prepared for the luck of the natural lottery. Now powerful new technologies are changing the reproductive landscape and challenging basic notions about procreation, parenthood, family, and children. Recent scientific discoveries within the field of human genetics and reproductive technologies have revitalized many timeless thoughts about human perfection.
PGD, or preimplantation genetic diagnosis marries the recent advances in molecular genetics and assisted reproductive technology. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis enables physicians to identify genetic diseases in the embryo, prior to implantation, before the pregnancy is established. PGD obviate the need for screening during a pregnancy and hence prevent the physical and psychological trauma associated with possible termination.
Every person or couple contemplating children wants healthy offspring, yet knows that offspring characteristics cannot be guaranteed in advance. New screening and selection technologies are now changing this situation. Prenatal diagnosis is occurring earlier and for a wider range of conditions. In the future techniques to alter genes for both therapeutic and nontherapeutic purposes will become available. Whether couples may or must use these techniques raises important questions about the scope of procreative liberty.
Selection techniques now rely on carrier or prenatal screening to identify persons at risk for having handicapped offspring. Today carrier screening mostly occurs in high-risk subgroups, but will eventually touch most couples, as carrier tests for cystic fibrosis and other common conditions become routinely available. Couples aware of their carrier status may then decide not to reproduce, use donor gametes, or adopt. They may also seek prenatal diagnosis and terminate pregnancy if they do conceive. As the ability to diagnose more genetic conditions earlier and less invasively grows, prenatal screening will eventually affect most pregnancies. Chorion villus sampling, which occurs at 10–12 weeks of pregnancy, is replacing amniocentesis at 14–18 weeks as the prenatal diagnostic method of choice for women at risk for chromosomal and genetic conditions. Sixty-five percent of pregnancies in the United States are now screened for alpha fetal protein, an indicator for neural tube defects such as spina bifida and anencephaly. 1 As tests to identify fetal cells in maternal blood are perfected, the genetic condition of every fetus will be diagnosable at 7–8 weeks by a simple blood test. It is likely that such tests will become a routine part of prenatal care, followed often by pregnancy termination when the test is positive. Genetic diagnosis of preimplantation embryos, now occurring in clinical experiments, will also be available. (See “Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies”, Assisted Reproduction.)
Edwards and Gardner successfully performed the first known embryo biopsy on rabbit embryos in 1968. In humans, PGD was developed in the United Kingdom in the mid 1980s as an alternative to current prenatal diagnoses. PGD is presently the only option available for avoiding a high risk of having a child affected with a genetic disease without facing the dilemma of pregnancy termination following positive prenatal diagnosis. In 1989 in London, Handyside and colleagues reported the first unaffected child born following PGD performed for an X-linked disorder. As of May 2001, more than 3000 PGD clinical cycles have been reported. These cycles were performed at more than 40 centers around the world, and almost 700 children have been born, thus demonstrating the reliability and safety of the procedure.
Couples who elect to have PGD undergo an in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos are formed as usual in the laboratory. Embryos are then biopsied with very fine glass needles and tools under microscopic observation and control to obtain one or two sample cells (blastomeres) for genetic analysis using either specialized DNA amplification or fluorescent hybridization systems. Embryos whose biopsy results are normal are then available for immediate transfer into the uterus, with additional embryos (if available) frozen for subsequent transfer. Experiences with PGD in humans have documented the safety and efficacy of this technology for preventing genetic disorders and producing the births of normal children.
PGD was first used in the early 1990s to screen out embryos carrying the mutations that cause inherited diseases such as Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. The clinics offering it as a way of improving pregnancy rates look instead at whether the right number of chromosomes is present. Having extra chromosomes or fewer than normal is known as aneuploidy, and most aneuploid embryos die early in pregnancy (the notable exception being Down’s syndrome). The older a women, the more likely aneuploidy is: while about one per cent of embryos from women in their 20s and early 30s are aneuploid, in women over 40 the figure is over 50 per cent.
Many of these embryos look normal on visual inspection, which is why in the mid-1990s researchers suggested using PGD to spot aneuploid embryos. In theory, this should increase a woman’s chances of getting pregnant and having a healthy baby, because only normal embryos will be implanted. This is the basis on which a growing number of clinics are offering this form of PGD, and ever more patients are demanding it, despite a price tag of up to ,000 per IVF cycle.
Current uses of PGD range from sex selection (family balancing or as a stem cell source) and ensuring that inherited diseases are avoided. PGD can be offered for 3 major groups of disease, including (1) sex-linked disorders, (2) single gene defects, and (3) chromosomal disorders. Down Syndrome, X-linked diseases (Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy), chromosomal translocation, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Tay Sachs Disease, Hemophilia, Huntington Disease and Cystic Fibrosis and many other genetic diseases can be avoided using PGD.
Demographic Consequences of Reproductive Technologies.
The reasons for selecting the sex of your child vary. The Chineses one-child policy has caused a major market for sex selection services. The effects of such policies on the demographic characteristics of the population cause controversy. Since the male population is associated with higher income and living standards many opt for male children. The resulting male/female imbalanced ratio could cause massive emmigration of Chinese males looking for females elsewhere.
In the West potential parents choose the sex of the children based on so-called “family balancing” rethoric. Ensuring that you have both male and female kids is by many considered vanity. Parents have used sex-selection to produce donor kids for their existing kids with an organ-disorder. Many of these advances become precedent for future applications of reproductive technologies.
People with inherited diseases often learn to live with the disability and accept imperfect genetics as a part of life. Blind parents have chosen to ensure that their offspring also will be blind. Accepting the genetic diversity of mankind is essential to an ethical approach to reproductive technologies. Accepting differences in humans doesn’t bother most people when they try to ensure healthy kids. The slippery slope of reproductive technologies starts where “ensuring healthy kids” ends and “human enhancement” begins.
From the Oneida Community to Transhumanism.
John Humphrey Noyes lead the human selective breeding programme taking place in a North American bible communist community, Oneida, between 1869 and 1879. It was probably the first such breeding experiment of the modern era, and for this reason, we might expect it to have been influential for the subsequent eugenics movements. Although it attracted much attention in its day, its longer-term influence seems to have been surprisingly slight, largely because its specific context meant that it was not a model that provided an acceptable way to reach eugenics goals. (See “A Nineteenth-Century Experiment in Human Selective Breeding”, Nature 2004)
The idea of the Oneida Community was to breed superior children by encouraging the mating of the healthiest, most intelligent males and females. After much debate, Noyes had become convinced that “a scientific breeding program could be adapted to the needs of the Oneida community” (Kephart and Zellner, p.84). This practice of stirpiculture, then, can be regarded as a derivation of the principle of eugenics — attempts to improve hereditary qualities; selective breeding. Although no such term was known at the time of the Community, this is exactly the concept that Noyes and his people adopted. Only certain people were allowed to become parents, and these were hand-picked by a special committee. Nearly ninety percent of Community babies born in an eleven-year span were carefully planned by such a committee. During the time of the program, no defective children were born, and no mothers died as a result of childbirth. (See “The Oneida Community”, Religious Movements).
Similar ideas are presented in Galton’s “The University of Kantsaywhere”. Pearson (1930, pp. 411 ff.) has published the surviving fragments of Kantsaywhere, a short utopian novel Galton wrote in 1910, just before he died. In this fantasy, a young Englishman finds himself in “Kantsaywhere,” a country that has instituted highly effective eugenic practices. Preeminent among these are two examinations administered by the local “Eugenic College.” First is a largely medical “Pass Examination” which must be taken by everyone and passed to gain State permission to marry and have children. A sufficiently high pass on this entitles one to compete in the further “Honours Examination,” with four equally weighted parts measuring a) medical fitness; b) ancestral quality; c) anthropometric quality; and d) aesthetic and literary skill. The anthropometric tests in this examination are exactly like those from the South Kensington Laboratory. The “aesthetic and literary” section includes assessment of aesthetic judgment, as well as more standard examination tasks such as essay writing.
To imagine a modern Oneida Community or University of Kantsaywhere is a challenging task. People today are used to genetic tests and family planning. The basis for a new eugenics movemement should be individual freedom of choice. The development of more powerful reproductive technologies speed up the possibilites of human enhancement. If parents were given the option to select for cognitive capabilities, height, hair and eye color, strength and other phenotypical features – do you think they would choose not to use it?
Transhumanists promote the view that human enhancement technologies should be made widely available, and that individuals should have broad discretion over which of these technologies to apply to themselves (morphological freedom), and that parents should normally get to decide which reproductive technologies to use when having children (reproductive freedom). Transhumanists believe that, while there are hazards that need to be identified and avoided, human enhancement technologies will offer enormous potential for deeply valuable and humanly beneficial uses. Ultimately, it is possible that such enhancements may make us, or our descendants, “posthuman”, beings who may have indefinite health-spans, much greater intellectual faculties than any current human being – and perhaps entirely new sensibilities or modalities – as well as the ability to control their own emotions. (See “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity”, Nick Bostrom)
Death as Curable Disease.
Aging is a three-stage process: metabolism, damage, and pathology. The biochemical processes that sustain life generate toxins as an intrinsic side effect. These toxins cause damage, of which a small proportion cannot be removed by any endogenous repair process and thus accumulates. This accumulating damage ultimately drives age-related degeneration. Interventions can be designed at all three stages. However, intervention in metabolism can only modestly postpone pathology, because production of toxins is so intrinsic a property of metabolic processes that greatly reducing that production would entail fundamental redesign of those processes. Similarly, intervention in pathology is a “losing battle” if the damage that drives it is accumulating unabated. By contrast, intervention to remove the accumulating damage would sever the link between metabolism and pathology, and so has the potential to postpone aging indefinitely. We survey the major categories of such damage and the ways in which, with current or foreseeable biotechnology, they could be reversed. Such ways exist in all cases, implying that indefinite postponement of aging–which we term “engineered negligible senescence”–may be within sight. Given the major demographic consequences if it came about, this possibility merits urgent debate. (See “Critiquing the immutability of human aging”, PubMed)
Understanding and manipulating the genetics of aging would also cause enormous consequences. If aging is caused by a set of genes and these genes were to be found the ability to re-set the “death-clock” would be very tempting. Gene therapy on adults or genetically modified kids with expected life spans of, say, 200 would cause incredible consequences on pensions, insurance and other vital parameters of modern life.
Stem Cells and Gene Therapy.
Human stem cell lines from genetically flawed human embryos have been created by US scientists. The team that produced the mutant lines at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago believes the cell lines will help shed light on genetic diseases and could be used to test new treatments.
The team is the first to announce the creation of human embryonic stem cell (ESC) lines from embryos with specific genetic diseases, However, other groups around the world have also been racing to develop mutant ESCs, one group in the UK has already created a line for cystic fibrosis.
The US cell lines were produced from embryos left over from in-vitro fertilisation procedures. The embryos were discarded after genetic screening revealed they had defects. The immortal lines generated include several for diseases caused by single gene mutations, including some muscle and blood disorders. (See “Mutant human stem cell lines created”, New Scientist)
Establishment of embryonic stem cells derived from mutant embryos provides new opportunities for studying and treatment of human genetic disorders, gene therapy, pharmaceutical development and toxicological screening technologies. Stephen Minger, director of the stem cell biology laboratory at King’s College London, UK, agrees that such mutant ESCs could help scientists better understand certain diseases and test treatments. But he adds each line will have “greater or lesser merit” depending on the disease.
Saving the World with Genetic Enhancement.
As biomedical science progresses, ever more effective medical technologies are devised for the treatment of illnesses, and this is, of course, a good thing. But how do we feel about the use of such technologies by people who are healthy to start with in order to become more than healthy? Many such enhancement technologies are already widely available. Cosmetic surgery is used for aesthetic enhancement of the body, beta-blockers such as Propranolol by musicians to block the physical symptoms of performance nerves, thereby enhancing the quality of their playing, and the antidepressant Prozac is used as an agent of what Peter Kramer has called cosmetic psychopharmacology, or alteration of personality, to make people less shy, less compulsive, more confident. We have to assume that with time more enhancement technologies will become available – many more, employing surgery, genetics, pharmacology, and heaven knows what else, directed in particular at cognitive function and longevity. (See “Enhancing human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications”, Nature 1999)
Further advances within biotechnology, gene therapy, genetic engineering, stem cells and PGD will cause massive demographic changes. People would live longer, healthier and more intelligence lives. People would be able to have multiple educations and multiple careers and would thus become more knowledgeable and experienced than contemporary humans. This will lead to better problem solving and more efficient organizations, and subsequently the possibilty of ending war, hunger and diseases. The final reasonable exit left for mankind out of the mess we call earth, is through genetic enhancement.
When the genetics of intelligence (g, or General Intelligence) is understood parents would face the dilemma of choosing to live with a brighter kid than themselves. The difference between “high-investement parenting” and “high-intelligence parenting” could change. Society would have to undergo a dramatic change of the perception of human qualitities. New lines of work would ensue after a generation of high-intelligence parenting. New types of schools and new communities would naturally follow in the wake of widespread genetic enhancement of humans.
A new debate and a subsequent new ethics for the evolution of humans is of critical importance for the survival of modern civilization.
Redesigning Humans: Choosing our genes, changing our future by Gregory Stock
Thanks to Matt Nuenke for comments and transcription.
—In the past year, I have debated various aspects of the advanced reproductive technologies Redesigning Humans predicts with those who strongly oppose them. Given my belief that such technologies are inevitable (indeed, the subtitle of the hardcover edition of this book was Our Inevitable Genetic Future), I often wondered whether those who advocated banning them really thought this could stop them. Most such individuals I’ve asked have readily admitted, at least in private, that these innovations will eventually arrive, but they still think it’s important to try to block them.
013—Even the European position against human germline engineering itself may be thawing. In December 2002, building on the September 2000 AAAS meeting mentioned in chapter 8, the International Forum for Biophilosophy met in Brussels to consider the ethics of inheritable genetic modifications (IGM) in humans. The members concluded, “No interpretation of human dignity has been identified that stands in the way of the development of IGM. The so-called right to be born with a human genome that has not been modified by artificial means was not recognized here as being a clear and a compelling right.” They then commented, “Knowing that IGM will provide a variety of possibilities, ranging from purely therapeutic to pure enhancement, an urgent need exists to study the ethical aspects of access.” Such a dramatic and rapid shift from the Council of Europe’s harsh pronouncements in 1997, which opposed the development of IGM altogether, surprised me.
The morality of destroying or modifying embryos is central to discussions of all germinal choice technologies. So far, this issue has surfaced primarily in debates about therapeutic cloning or the use of human embryos for medical research, but neither germline engineering nor IVF can escape this concern, since they, too, destroy embryos. I did not deal with this at length in the hardcover edition, because I felt that the debate so hinged on deeply held philosophical and religious beliefs about the personhood of early-stage embryos — an arcane dispute in which discussion changes few minds. But in the past year I’ve been asked about the issue so often that I will now offer a few thoughts on it.
Critics of embryo research frequently claim that an embryo is a nascent person and that such research must be banned because it is tantamount to human experimentation. Proponents, on the other hand, insist that a mere speck of undifferentiated cells deserves no special protection, regardless of its potential to become a person — or persons, for that matter, since for about two weeks an embryo can split into two or more independent embryos, which is how identical twins arise. In fact, two separate embryos, apparently destined to become fraternal twins, sometimes bump together in the fallopian tubes and fuse into a single embryo, forming one individual with patches of cells from both lineages. In essence, such a person is two genetically distinct people melded into one. To avoid such conundrums, the term “pre-embryo” is used in Britain to describe an embryo during those first two weeks of relative plasticity, and medical research and embryonic stem cell work is allowed only during this period. But to invest either pre-embryos or embryos in a petri dish with personhood, based on their “potential” to develop into a human being, too readily dismisses the realities of the path from conception to birth.
Christian theologians may assert that with the magical meeting of sperm and egg a new human life has been created and infused with a soul, and that after that union, anything we do to interfere with the natural unfolding of an embryo’s potential is wrong — from extracting it from a woman’s womb to pouring it down the drain. But a united sperm and egg are hardly sufficient to create a new life. A third element, one we often take for granted, is needed: a mother. Without attachment to a warm and nurturing womb, no embryo has ever developed into a child. Outside the body, no embryo can develop for more than a few days. Some IVF labs can coax development as far as a tiny dot of a few hundred cells, but beyond that, the signaling and nutritional demands are too complex. Without the mother’s magic, this little fleck of cells will die, just like virtually all eggs and sperm. Someday science may construct an artificial womb capable of taking over the mother’s role, but such a development is far beyond our present understanding of the life-giving dance of mother and developing fetus.
In my view, those who argue that personhood resides in some disembodied cluster of cells — outside the unbroken cycle of intimate connection between mother and child extending back to the first glimmerings of human life — are ignoring this biological continuity. To argue that a woman is simply the instrument by which a life is shepherded to its childhood seems an odd assertion, especially for those who hold dear the value of family.
It is reasonable to debate about when a growing embryo nestled in a mother’s womb becomes invested with full individual rights that may trump even the welfare of the mother. Some will maintain that those rights are immediate, others that they come at birth. But to infuse personhood into a speck of cells in a petri dish, cells that by themselves will never be anything more, is largely dogma. In my opinion, to use such an abstract assertion to block biomedical research directed at real people who have real diseases and real suffering shows disregard, not respect, for human life and dignity.
004—Yet the road to our eventual disappearance might be paved not by humanity’s failure but by its success. Progressive self-transformation could change our descendants into something sufficiently different from our present selves to not be human in the sense we use the term now. Such an occurrence would more aptly be termed a pseudoextinction, since it would not end our lineage. Unlike the saber-toothed tiger and other large mammals that left no descendants when our ancestors drove them to extinction, Homo sapiens would spawn its own successors by fast-forwarding its evolution.
005—Many bioethicists do not share my perspective on where we are heading. They imagine that our technology might become potent enough to alter us, but that we will turn away from it and reject human enhancement. But the reshaping of human genetics and biology does not hinge on some cadre of demonic researchers hidden away in a lab in Argentina trying to pick up where Hitler left off. The coming possibilities will be the inadvertent spin-off of mainstream research that virtually everyone supports. Infertility, for example, is a source of deep pain for millions of couples. Researchers and clinicians working on in vitro fertilization (IVF) don’t think much about future human evolution, but nonetheless are building a foundation of expertise in conceiving, handling, testing, and implanting human embryos, and this will one day be the basis for the manipulation of the human species. Already, we are seeing attempts to apply this knowledge in highly controversial ways: as premature as today’s efforts to clone humans may be, they would be the flimsiest of fantasies if they could not draw on decades of work on human IVF.
Similarly, in early 2001 more than five hundred gene-therapy trials were under way or in review throughout the world. The researchers are trying to cure real people suffering from real diseases and are no more interested in the future of human evolution than the IVF researchers. But their progress toward inserting genes into adult cells will be one more piece of the foundation for manipulating human embryos.
008—Professional sports offers a preview of the spread of enhancement technology into other arenas. Sports may carry stronger incentives to cheat, and thus push athletes toward greater health risks, but the non-sporting world is not so different. A person working two jobs feels under pressure to produce, and so does a student taking a test or someone suffering the effects of growing old. When safe, reliable metabolic and physiological enhancers exist, the public will want them, even if they are illegal. To block their use will be far more daunting than today’s war on drugs. An anti-drug commercial proclaiming “Dope is for dopes!” or one showing a frying egg with the caption “Your brain on drugs” would not persuade anyone to stop using a safe memory enhancer.
Aesthetic surgery is another budding field for enhancement. When we try to improve our appearance, the personal stakes are high because our looks are always with us. Knowing that the photographs of beautiful models in magazines are airbrushed does not make us any less self-conscious if we believe we have a smile too gummy, skin too droopy, breasts too small, a nose too big, a head too bald, or any other such “defects.” Surgery to correct these non-medical problems has been growing rapidly and spreading to an ever-younger clientele. Public approval of aesthetic surgery has climbed some 50 percent in the past decade in the United States. We may not be modifying our genes yet, but we are ever more willing to resort to surgery to hold back the most obvious (and superficial) manifestations of aging, or even simply to remodel our bodies. Nor is this only for the wealthy. In 1994, when the median income in the United States was around ,000, two thirds of the 400,000 aesthetic surgeries were performed on those with a family income under ,000, and health insurance rarely covered the procedures. Older women who have subjected themselves to numerous face-lifts but can no longer stave off the signs of aging are not a rarity. But the tragedy is not so much that these women fight so hard to deny the years of visible decline, but that their struggle against life’s natural ebb ultimately must fail. If such a decline were not inevitable, many people would eagerly embrace pharmaceutical or genetic interventions to retard aging.
The desire to triumph over our own mortality is an ancient dream, but it hardly stands alone. Whether we look at today’s manipulations of our bodies by face-lifts, tattoos, pierced ears, or erythropoietin, the same message rings loud and clear: if medicine one day enables us to manipulate our biology in appealing ways, many of us will do so — even if the benefits are dubious and the risks not insignificant. To most people, the earliest adopters of these technologies will seem reckless or crazy, but are they so different from the daredevil test pilots of jet aircraft in the 1950s? Virtually by definition, early users believe that the possible gains from their bravado justify the risks. Otherwise, they would wait for flawed procedures to be discarded, for technical glitches to be worked through, for interventions to become safer and more predictable.
In truth, as long as people compete with one another for money, status, and mates, as long as they look for ways to display their worth and uniqueness, they will look for an edge for themselves and their children.
People will make mistakes with these biological manipulations. People will abuse them. People will worry about them. But as much could be said about any potent new development. No governmental body will wave some legislative wand and make advanced genetic and reproductive technologies go away, and we would be foolish to want this. Our collective challenge is not to figure out how to block these developments, but how best to realize their benefits while minimizing our risks and safeguarding our rights and freedoms. This will not be easy.
Our history is not a tale of self-restraint. Ten thousand years ago, when humans first crossed the Bering Strait to enter the Americas, they found huge herds of mammoths and other large mammals. In short order, these Clovis peoples, named for the archaeological site in New Mexico where their tools were first identified, used their skill and weaponry to drive them to extinction. This was no aberration: the arrival of humans in Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, Hawaii, and Easter Island brought the same slaughter of wildlife. We may like to believe that primitive peoples lived in balance with nature, but when they entered new lands, they reshaped them in profound, often destructive ways. Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine and an expert on how geography and environment have affected human evolution, has tried to reconcile this typical pattern with the rare instances in which destruction did not occur. He writes that while “small, long-established egalitarian societies can evolve conservationist practices, because they’ve had plenty of time to get to know their local environment and to perceive their own self-interest,” these practices do not occur when a people suddenly colonizes an unfamiliar environment or acquires a potent new technology.
Our technology is evolving so rapidly that by the time we begin to adjust to one development, another is already surpassing it. The answer would seem to be to slow down and devise the best course in advance, but that notion is a mirage.
012—Watson’s simple question, “If we could make better humans . . . why shouldn’t we?” cuts to the heart of the controversy about human genetic enhancement. Worries about the procedure’s feasibility or safety miss the point. No serious scientists advocate manipulating human genetics until such interventions are safe and reliable.
Why all the fuss, then? Opinions may differ about what risks are acceptable, but virtually every physician agrees that any procedure needs to be safe, and that any potential benefit needs to be weighed against the risks. Moreover, few prospective parents would seek even a moderately risky genetic enhancement for their child unless it was extremely beneficial, relatively safe, and unobtainable in an easier way. Actually, some critics, like Leon Kass, a well-known bioethicist at the University of Chicago who has long opposed such potential interventions, aren’t worried that this technology will fail, but that it will succeed, and succeed gloriously.
013—The coming advances will challenge our fundamental notions about the rhythms and meaning of life. Today, the “natural” setting for the vast majority of humans, especially in the economically developed world, bears no resemblance to the stomping grounds of our primitive ancestors, and nothing suggests that we will be any more hesitant about “improving” our own biology than we were about “improving” our environment. The technological powers we have hitherto used so effectively to remake our world are now potent and precise enough for us to turn them on ourselves. Breakthroughs in the matrix-like arrays called DNA chips, which may soon read thirty thousand genes at a pop; in artificial chromosomes, which now divide as stably as their naturally occurring cousins; and in bioinformatics, the use of computer-driven methodologies to decipher our genomes — all are paving the way to human genetic engineering and the beginnings of human biological design.
014—Difficult ethical issues about our use of genetic and reproductive technologies have already begun to emerge. It is illegal in much of the world to test fetal gender for the purpose of sex selection, but the practice is commonplace. A study in Bombay reported that an astounding 7,997 out of 8,000 aborted fetuses were female, and in South Korea such abortions have become so widespread that some 65 percent of third-born children are boys, presumably because couples are unwilling to have yet a third girl. Nor is there any consensus among physicians about sex selection. In a recent poll, only 32 percent of doctors in the United States thought the practice should be illegal. Support for a ban ranged from 100 percent in Portugal to 22 percent in China. Although we may be uncomfortable with the idea of a woman aborting her fetus because of its gender, a culture that allows abortion at a woman’s sole discretion would require a major contortion to ban this sex selection.
Clearly, these technologies will be virtually impossible to control. As long as abortion and prenatal tests are available, parents who feel strongly about the sex of their child will use these tools. Such practices are nothing new. In nineteenth-century India, the British tried to stop female infanticide among high-caste Indians and failed. Modern technology, at least in India, may merely have substituted abortion for infanticide.
034—In light of the major differences we have created between poodles and Great Danes in a few thousand years, using the primitive tools of animal breeding, our own self-selection using DNA chips, artificial chromosomes, and IVF will probably change us even more, and soon.
038—…”An amazing thing is that the manipulations to do those kinds of experiments [gene repairs] are actually much simpler in germline than in somatic therapy. If I had to project, I think fifty years from now we will be doing everything through the germline rather than in somatic tissues.”
To understand why germline interventions seem easier, we must look at the fundamental challenge to all gene therapy: making a new gene active in the right place, at the right time, to the right extent. Somatic gene therapy’s success relies on placing a modified gene into the cells of some target tissue and ensuring that the gene is active only there. This is no simple matter for hard-to-reach internal organs like the liver, for dispersed tissue such as muscle, and for diseases in which therapy requires the repair of nearly all afflicted cells.
Early clinical research has focused on particularly accessible tissue such as the lining of the lung and white blood cells. With cystic fibrosis, for example, researchers can use inhalants containing viruses that can carry a gene into the mucosal cells in the lung’s lining. For patients with adenosine deaminase deficiency, an immune disease in which certain white blood cells are unable to function normally, doctors draw a patient’s blood, extract the white cells, alter them, and infuse them back into a vein. With these therapies, the cells are relatively easy to reach, so researchers concentrate on refining the viral vectors and other methods of getting a modified gene into the cells and keeping it active.
044—Unraveling the genetic differences among human populations sharing common ancestries may be difficult, but such differences also exist. Concern is so great about our ability to deal with the potential implications that investigators using data from the primary database on human genetic diversity at the NIH are required to sign a form stating they will not try to determine the ethnicity of the people who donated the samples. Although every one of the world’s top two hundred times in the hundred-meter dash is held by someone of West African ancestry, it is commonly asserted that black athletic dominance of specific sports has nothing to do with genetics. So heightened are our political sensitivities about racial matters that some say the possibility of a genetic link should not even be examined.
Sir Roger Bannister, who broke the four-minute-mile mark in 1954 and is a retired Oxford dean, was sharply criticized when, at the 1995 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he said, “As a scientist rather than a sociologist, I am prepared to risk political incorrectness by drawing attention to the seemingly obvious but under-stressed fact that black sprinters and black athletes in general all seem to have certain natural anatomical advantages.” Theresa Marteau, of the Psychology and Genetics Research Unit at Guy’s Hospital in London, responded, “It is potentially racist to look at the biological factors. I don’t need to know whether what Bannister said is correct. And I don’t think there needs to be research.”
Avoidance is no solution. Genetics is clearly a key ingredient in athletic performance, as it is in other areas, and genetic differences among populations long isolated reproductively may cause a shift in the average potential of individuals in those populations. But generalizations about “blacks” and “whites” oversimplify and distort matters by suggesting some underlying unity within these categories. The broad groupings defined by superficial attributes like skin color include many distinct populations, each with its own common ancestry, and many people with mixed lineages. The genetic differences among ten black Africans from different parts of that continent, for instance, are far greater than the differences among ten light-skinned individuals from scattered places around the world.
Such sensitive issues will not remain in limbo much longer. Research will show that the influence of our genes on some human attributes is unclear or too hard to decipher, but other influences may be straightforward. The answers will be just another byproduct of the Human Genome Project. How we respond to this new information will be one of the biggest social and intellectual challenges of coming decades, for we will learn a great deal about ourselves that many people would rather not face. To date, most discussions of genetic information have focused on such issues as genetic privacy and whether to allow genetic testing for untreatable diseases like Huntington’s. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Wait until the price of DNA diagnostic chips drops enough so that comprehensive testing becomes routine.
With the identification of every human gene, as well as the most common variants of each — the so-called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs — we will be able to probe our genetics as never before. The key will be the DNA chip. In 1997, the company Affymetrix released the first such device, a dense grid-like array of 50,000 short DNA sequence probes on a glass chip. By mid-2000, when the rough draft of the human genome was completed, 400,000 such probes on a single chip were available for a few thousand dollars, and by early 2002, Affymetrix was selling researchers even better chips for as little as 0 each.
Dozens of large and small companies are working on chips designed to analyze tens of thousands of genes at a time. The result will almost certainly be tests that are fast, comprehensive, cheap, and reliable enough to read DNA sequences from a smear of saliva or blood. With this coming generation of gene chips, today’s efforts to track changing levels of gene expression in tumors and other tissues will expand into broad population studies that bring new insights into our genetic makeup.
There will be technical and computational obstacles to overcome in characterizing our individual genomes cheaply and comprehensively, but emerging technologies do not need to analyze our individual genomes completely. Subtle effects can wait. Tests for the several million already identified common variants of our genes will yield enough information to keep researchers, epidemiologists, and clinicians busy while analytic techniques improve.
The burgeoning computational field of bioinformatics will be critical to this effort. No single human scientist will ever examine more than a tiny portion of our genome directly; it contains too many bases. Without computers to sift through this vast mass of data to find useful correlations between our genes and key aspects of who we are, the Human Genome Project would offer us a book we could never fathom. These computer tools are also essential to sophisticated embryo screening or germline manipulation because without the knowledge emerging from the Human Genome Project, few genetic interventions could be considered.
048—The push toward therapies for adults cannot help but contribute to the development of germline technologies, but pharmaceutical development may prove even more important. While tens of millions of dollars each year go to gene-therapy research, billions will flow into pharmacogenetics — the effort to tailor pharmaceutical interventions to people’s individual genetic constitutions.
Pharmaceutical companies estimate that they spend an average of seven years and 0 million to go from the discovery of a promising compound to an approved drug. The cost is so high because about 80 percent of this expenditure is on drug candidates that never reach market. The 1997 approval of the diabetes drug Rezulin shows what can go wrong. Although the drug initially seemed a big success, when a scattering of patients began to suffer liver damage and some died, calls to withdraw it mounted and Rizulin was doomed. The deaths do not mean that the drug didn’t help anyone. Today, a drug is worthless if it benefits some patients and causes severe reactions in others. If these two groups could be distinguished in advance, however, the story would be different.
The hope of the pharmaceutical industry is that our genes will be the key to such predictions, and that as correlations are found between people’s genetic constitutions and their medical histories and drug reactions, their drugs can be personalized. This and other medical hopes are helping fuel efforts to collect massive amounts of genomic data.
Kari Stefansson, the founder and CEO of deCODE Genetics, in Reykjavik, Iceland, has moved aggressively to uncover what the genes of Icelanders can tell us about disease. Until in-depth genetic surveys become affordable, deCODE must lean heavily on family histories, which makes Iceland an ideal place for prospecting. It has detailed medical records that go back to 1915, century-old genealogical records, and a homogeneous population descended from small bands of tenth-century Norse and Celtic settlers. In December 1998, Stefansson reached an unprecedented agreement with the Icelandic government to link the country’s health-care records with genealogical information about the island’s 275,000 inhabitants, and license the information to deCODE. Three quarters of the population supported the initiative, and many Icelanders have given blood samples to provide detailed genetic information for the studies. The pharmaceutical company Hoffmann–La Roche was impressed enough to sign an agreement specifying research milestone payments totaling up to 0 million.
Such information helps find the genes implicated in various diseases, but if DNA chip technology moves quickly, large-scale genetic surveys that ignore genealogy will largely supersede Stefansson’s approach. Researchers will depend less on finding disease genes in well-studied families and more on comparing genetic test results from tens of thousands of people who have a particular disease. Collaborative Genomics and other companies are already collecting hundreds of thousands of patient histories and tissue to prepare for such efforts. The government of Estonia is preparing to assemble genomics data for research on its 1.4 million citizens; the island nation of Tonga has signed an agreement with an Australian genomics company to compile data on its 100,000 inhabitants; and a company called Lifetree Technologies is collecting genetic samples from funeral homes and cremation societies.
053—In vitro fertilization is now the choice of tens of thousands of couples who would not otherwise be able to have children, and in some clinics, the success rate for women under thirty-five is more than 70 percent per ovulatory cycle, much higher than for natural conception. In the United States in 1998, 28,000 babies were born this way, and doctors performed 80,000 cycles. The biggest complaint is not that IVF is immoral, but that it costs so much and often doesn’t work. An IVF cycle in the United States typically costs about ,000 and is not covered by health insurance.
No matter what methods eventually arise for shaping the genetics of human embryos, IVF procedures — the extraction of eggs, their in vitro fertilization, and the implantation of the resultant embryos — will underlie these methods. So present efforts to refine and enhance IVF procedures are also working toward germline interventions.
056—Three technologies will likely combine to convert IVF into a commonplace reproductive procedure that is suitable for germline interventions. The first will be the maturation of immature eggs retrieved by simple ovarian biopsy. This will raise the number of eggs a woman might use for reproduction and eliminate the need for heavy doses of hormones to stimulate her ovaries. The second will be the freezing and thawing of immature eggs without damaging them. This will allow a young woman to bank healthy eggs without having to decide then and there whose sperm will eventually fertilize them. She could thaw eggs from this external artificial ovary anytime, then mature and fertilize them to make large numbers of embryos. The third technology is comprehensive genetic testing of embryos. Such non-damaging testing would allow couples to make meaningful choices about the embryos they implant.
Genetic testing of embryos is nothing new. Physicians first performed preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in 1989 at London’s Hammersmith Hospital by teasing a single cell from each of several eight-cell embryos and testing the gender of the cells, so they could implant a female embryo and avoid a sex-linked disorder that occurred only in males. Two years later, the same physicians tested for a genetic mutation that causes cystic fibrosis and enabled a high-risk couple to implant an embryo free of the disease. Today, couples can use PGD to screen for a handful of genetic diseases, including hemophilia, Tay-Sachs, and fragile X syndrome, which can cause severe mental retardation in males. Because of high cost, limited availability, and the small number of conditions that can be tested, the procedure is still rare, but in a decade the landscape will differ. Scientists will have identified associations between constellations of genes and various physical and mental attributes, including the risks for common diseases. Couple this with the future use of PGD to look at many more genes in a single embryo, and we will probably be able to test an embryo and obtain solid information about the child it would become. Parents will then have a choice as to which potential child they’d like to bring into being.
The usefulness of such embryo testing will depend on the extent to which our genes shape us and on the complexity of their influences. Some important aspects of who we are will turn out to be largely independent of our genes; others will have strong genetic contributions. At present, our knowledge of this is only general. Lung cancer, for example, seems to depend mostly on environmental influences, while prostate cancer appears to be more influenced by genetic predisposition. In a decade or so, however, we should have solid, specific answers about many of these relationships.
We are the result of an intricate interplay of genes and environment, and the two are interdependent. Our genetic tendencies can shape our environment by steering our choices, and environmental influences can switch genes on or off. This means that as society ever more successfully eliminates extreme variations in environment — say, by providing basic nutrition and education to all — genes will become more, not less, important influences in shaping us. As we correlate our genetic constitutions with the details of our health, personality, and behavior, we will learn not what our genes determine in some absolute sense, but what possibilities they push us toward within the normal range of environments we encounter. Deciphering the workings of our biology and the influences of experience and environment will give us more control over our lives by offering us more effective ways of diminishing the vulnerabilities and adding to the potentials that our genes bring us.
058—Germline selection and manipulation lie beyond medicine’s present boundaries, but these boundaries may shift rapidly in response to public interest as real opportunities emerge. In a 1993 international poll, Daryl Macer, the director of the Eubios Ethics Institute in Japan, found that a substantial segment of the population of every country polled said they would use genetic engineering both to prevent disease and to improve the physical and mental capacities inherited by their children. The numbers ranged from 22 percent in Israel and 43 percent in the United States to 63 percent in India and 83 percent in Thailand.
Speaking to a pollster about abstract choices is one thing; making concrete decisions about our children’s genes is another. But widespread use of coming reproductive technologies is not hard to imagine. Large numbers of young women would likely bank eggs if they could do so easily. If nothing else, that would calm the angst about their biological clocks running out. Many such women, of course, would never use their banked eggs; they would conceive their children through sex. But other women would choose embryo implantation, seeing it as a trivial procedure too good to pass up. Some couples would find the option of timing the conception and birth of their child compelling. Others would want to screen for worrisome genetic diseases or eliminate the spontaneous abortions caused by genetic abnormalities. Still others would want to select some attribute of their future baby: gender, adult height, hair color, or temperament. The motivations behind such choices would be as personal and varied as the lifestyles and values of the couples.
Women who have banked eggs would not be the only ones to avail themselves of these options. Millions of couples have infertility problems. The numbers of people who use IVF would swell when the procedure became less expensive and onerous, and they too would find such choices enticing. Also, as IVF became easier, many women who never bothered to freeze eggs might decide to use the technology simply for the choices it offered them.
The procedure would be straightforward. Typically, a woman would enter an IVF clinic as she does today, but instead of facing an exhaustive ordeal, she would have an ovarian biopsy to obtain fresh eggs or would just send for her previously frozen eggs. Her partner would deposit sperm as he does today or send for previously frozen sperm. In light of the recently identified risks in conceptions by men over forty, such sperm banking could well become increasingly common. Conception would occur in the laboratory, and the woman would later return to have the growing embryo implanted.
For “natural” conception, the woman would implant one of the embryos at random. For disease screening, she would implant one that had passed a genetic test for chromosomal abnormalities and disease mutations. For embryo selection, she would implant the one whose PGD results best matched the genetic predispositions she and her partner had chosen. For germline intervention, she would also implant a selected embryo, but one whose genes had been modified.
065—Widespread modifications of human genetics will require reliable generalized methods for germline intervention. The human artificial chromosome, pioneered by John Harrington and Huntington Willard in 1997 at Case Western Reserve University, has that potential. This technological descendant of the bacterial artificial chromosome and the yeast artificial chromosome, which have been in use for many years, contains all the essential elements for chromosome functioning. In 2001, two companies were at the vanguard in developing this technology.
Back in 1998, one reported that its synthetic chromosomes had passed stably through more than a hundred cell generations in human tissue culture. And in 1999, the other announced that its artificial chromosomes had been retained by successive generations of mice reproducing normally. The implications of the mouse result for human germline interventions were so clear that the inventors felt compelled to state that they planned to use the technology only for animal transgenic work and human somatic therapy, and would not license the chromosomes for human germline therapy. It is doubtful that this will have any more long-term impact on the use of the technology than statements from the Roslin Institute opposing human cloning.
Adding a new chromosome pair (numbers 47 and 48) to our genome would open up new possibilities for human genetic manipulation. The advantages of putting a new genetic module on a well-characterized artificial chromosome instead of trying to modify the genes on one of our present 46 chromosomes are immense. Not only could geneticists add much larger amounts of genetic material, which would mean far better gene regulation, they could more easily test to ensure that the genes were placed properly and functioning correctly.
Because an artificial chromosome provides a reproducible platform for adding genetic material to cells, it promises to transform gene therapy from the hit-and-miss methods of today into the predictable, reliable procedure that human germline manipulation will demand.
Ideally, an unloaded auxiliary human chromosome would have no functional genes of its own. It would be an inert scaffolding dotted with independent insertion sites where modules of genes and their control sequences could be placed using the various enzymes that splice and clip DNA. With adequately separated sites, the eventual payloads of genetic modules would not interact with one another and could be expressed independently. The auxiliary chromosome would be a universal delivery vehicle for gene modules fashioned by medical geneticists throughout the world. At first, only a few safe and effective modules would exist, primarily those specific constellations of gene variants known to confer clear advantages because they occur naturally and have obvious benefits. Eventually, geneticists might develop hundreds of such modules, each with its own particular benefits and risks.
Delivering gene modules using synthetic chromosomes would be the safest and least intrusive way to substantially modify our genetics. By not altering a single one of the 3 billion bases on our existing chromosomes, geneticists would minimize the chance of inadvertently stepping on the many yet unappreciated interactions within our genome. Given the limits of our knowledge, however, we would be wise to design any insertion sites to include a mechanism for selectively switching off the expression (that is, the activity) of the genetic module placed there. An injection could provide the chemical signal that would trigger the shutoff.
073—To understand how such targeting would work, we first need to look a little more closely at how genes are regulated. The promoter, a stretch of DNA immediately upstream from a gene’s coding region, is one of the best understood of a gene’s regulatory elements. Promoters serve as attachment sites for special protein factors that enable a promoter’s associated gene to be expressed. Our genome codes for thousands of such factors, and the particular ones a cell makes determine which genes and groups of genes are active in that cell.
088—A successful germline intervention that significantly extended mouse longevity would ignite a huge effort not toward germline interventions in human embryos, but toward clinical interventions in adults. As Aubrey de Grey, the tall, full-bearded, rather eccentric British theorist on aging, who organized the roundtable on reversing age-related decline, said to me, “Germline manipulations on future generations don’t interest me. I already have aging.” So do we all. Researchers are using germline techniques as a tool for understanding aging and figuring out how to combat it directly in adults, not as a prelude to human germline manipulation, though this may prove easier.
Any drug that retards key aspects of aging would have sales that dwarf today’s disease-specific blockbusters. Virtually every adult might take anti-aging medications for life — and a dollar a day from everyone older than forty-five is billion a year in the United States alone. Given such incentives, biomedical science is likely to come up with adult therapies for at least some facets of aging, but ultimately, germline technology may prove a more potent tool for so intrinsic a part of our biology.
095—Whatever our attitudes about biological enhancement, I suspect that most of us would rather be among the first to live an extended lifespan than among the last to live a “natural” one. Yet the idea of striving to extend our lives is somehow discomforting. We celebrate the nobility of self-sacrifice and the heroism of risking death for the common good. We do not applaud those reaching for longevity. Their self-serving actions evoke images of cowards on the deck of the Titanic, pushing aside women and children to clamber into lifeboats, or hypochondriacs counting their every vitamin and avoiding anyone with a cough, or, yes, even vampires sucking the blood of others to buy immortality. It is easy to recoil from those who practice caloric restriction and starve themselves in the pursuit of added years. The travails of their quest are reminiscent of religious ascetics, but their goal seems unworthy and narcissistic.
We should look more closely at the source of our repugnance, however. Today those grasping for longer life seem to be relinquishing life’s richness and focusing solely on themselves and their survival. Small wonder at the disdain they sometimes provoke. But real breakthroughs in the biology of aging would change this. We might not be willing to starve ourselves to buy a few years, but surely we would take a pill. This would be neither selfish nor self-absorbed; it would be common sense.
100—Researchers have run hundreds of studies in numerous countries and examined various traits in various types of twins. The results have been remarkably consistent. Genetic factors generally account for between 35 and 75 percent of the variation among people in traits we think of as significant. Environmental influences and random factors that are unique to each individual account for most of the rest, whereas environmental influences shared by an entire family matter little, at least within the range of environments encountered by a typical child growing up in the developed world.
I have been speaking of genes and environment as though they are independent, but this is not the case. Genes not only affect our minds and bodies directly by shaping our biology, they also do so indirectly, by influencing the environment we experience. A child who excels at sports is more likely to gravitate toward athletic activities, just as one who loves to read philosophy might choose more intellectual pursuits. Both children would be selecting their environments. This happens in less overt ways as well. A reclusive, rigid child almost certainly elicits different treatment from those around him or her than one who is gregarious and easygoing. Thus, self-reinforcing feedback comes into play: our biological predispositions shape our environment, which in turn reinforces our predispositions. Some of the spread that exists in estimates of the heritability of IQ, for instance, may arise because of the dissimilar ages of the subjects in different studies. By late adolescence, twins tend to be closer in IQ than they were in childhood, which may be because of their growing power to align their activities with their underlying predispositions. Similar results show up with qualities such as antisocial behavior.
IQ provides a good example of the difficulties we face in teasing apart the relative contributions of environmental and genetic factors. Many studies have looked at the heritability of intelligence, and although some of them have been challenged as flawed or even fraudulent, the work typically shows that IQ is anywhere from 45 to 75 percent heritable. Moreover, some studies conclude that adopted children living together show no more correlation in their IQs than other unrelated individuals. The households covered in these studies do not include extremes of poverty and environmental disadvantage, but absent this, the influence of living in one home rather than another is small.
Not surprisingly, studies of the biology of intelligence are highly controversial. While almost no one claims that IQ accurately gauges all the dimensions of human talent, people who score higher on these tests clearly tend to apprehend, scan, retrieve, and respond to stimuli more quickly than those with lower scores. Moreover, IQ is one of the most useful predictors of school performance, years of education, job performance, and income. Such correlations are statistical, of course, and cannot tell us what will happen to a particular individual. Some geniuses are too dysfunctional even to hold down a job. But these correlations with IQ are real, they are significant, and they may grow stronger as our society becomes more complex and technology intensive. Deciphering, reading, and manipulating the genes involved in human intelligence are going to be thorny political issues, to say the least.
Long before the genomics revolution, stories of uncanny similarities between identical twins were contributing to the idea that our genes determine much about our personalities. The most publicized such twins were probably the so-called Jim twins, James Springer and James Lewis, whose story broke in 1979 in the Minneapolis Tribune and inspired Thomas Bouchard to launch his famous twin study.
110—I refer to this whole realm, which extends all the way from rudimentary embryo diagnostics to germline enhancement, as germinal choice technology, or GCT. “Germinal” emphasizes that GCT manipulates one or a very few of our germinal cells rather than a fetus and is directed toward creating (or germinating) life rather than terminating it. “Choice” acknowledges that our personal preferences will help determine our children’s genes. “Technology” recognizes the entry of laboratory machinery into human reproduction to externalize the process of conception.
Choosing Genes
Some parents insist that their children study hard and earn good grades. Some push their kids toward sports. Some want outgoing and popular offspring. Whether we guide our children with a heavy hand or are subtle and indirect, the paths we try to choose for them often tell more about us than about them or who they will become.
126—Some nations may hold off the technology for a while, but the longterm impact of such bans will be no greater than previous such efforts. Germany, haunted by its Nazi past, opposed genetic technology for many years and in 1991 enacted an Embryo Protection Law that was the most restrictive in the world. By 1993, however, the realization had sunk in that biotechnology would pass the country by, and Germany moderated its tight restrictions on great swaths of genetic research. In 2000, the nation went further and began to debate the watering down of the 1991 law. Switzerland, home to many pharmaceutical companies, seemed especially unlikely to lead a charge against genetic medicine, but in 1997 it almost did. The Swiss nearly passed a plebiscite to ban such research. They blinked only when the economic costs of driving drug companies abroad became clear, and in 2000, another plebiscite there, this time to ban IVF, lost by a margin of more than 30 percent.
These economic forces operate throughout the developed world. That we will halt the global scientific effort to elucidate human genetics is inconceivable. And we will have no trouble figuring out how to justify using more potent germinal choice technologies as they emerge. Bans in this or that country surely won’t keep them from spreading. When large numbers of people want something that regulators cannot monitor and that small laboratories in any country can provide, people obtain it.
Though the prospect of genetic manipulation disturbs William Gardner, a bioethicist at the University of Pittsburgh, he argues convincingly that no ban can stop it: “Both nations and parents have strong incentives to defect from a ban on human genetic enhancement, because enhancements would help them in competitions with other parents and nations. The ban on enhancement, moreover, is vulnerable to even small defections because the disadvantages of defecting late will increase the incentives for non-defectors to follow suit, causing defections to cascade.”
Couple Gardner’s argument with the global diversity of attitudes about germline selection and enhancement, and the writing is on the wall. The inevitability of these technologies, however, doesn’t mean that no one will try to block them or that no reasons exist for concern about their possible risks. Although many people believe that the potential benefits of these technologies outweigh their dangers, many do not share this belief. Some assert that we don’t have the wisdom to shape our children in this way, others feel that we are wrong to play God. Some fear that the technology might lead to genetic discrimination, be abused by tyrants, or enable the wealthy to give their children superior talent and leave the rest of us behind. Still others worry that it might corrupt the relationship between parent and child, transform children into mere objects, or burden them with unrealizable parental expectations. In short, many people are uncomfortable with the idea that we might take control of our own evolution, and many of them would like to stop this technology.
130—Most of us would shake our heads in disbelief at anyone who argued that a child had an inherent right to an unaltered biological constitution and should undergo no surgical procedures before adulthood. When we hear the same argument against genetic manipulation, however, we take it seriously, though it is just as out of line with our values. After all, when fetal testing reveals cystic fibrosis, some 90 percent of couples in the United States choose to abort, and even more would probably avoid implanting a seriously afflicted embryo.
The most difficult type of germinal choice technology for people to accept is germline enhancement — the direct manipulation of an embryo’s genome to improve it in some way. Although as embryo screening becomes more sophisticated it will be able to match many of the immediate possibilities of direct enhancement, more complicated enhancements no doubt will require direct interventions, so in this discussion I will focus mainly on these when speaking about germline enhancement. As the ultimate example of GCT, it will no doubt figure in any serious reworking of human biology, and except for cloning, it has been the most criticized future reproductive technology.
Arguments against human germline enhancement rest largely on assertions that it is morally wrong, that it is too dangerous, that it will be badly abused, or that it could bring dire indirect consequences in personal, political, social, environmental, or spiritual ways. Let’s look at each of these.
The most common form of the first assertion, that germline enhancement is morally wrong, is: we should not play God. But there are many secular variations. Along with our “right to unaltered genes” are the ideas that children should not be manufactured, that our gene pool is the common property of all humanity, and that genetic manipulation would assault human dignity.
As for playing God, by the measure of earlier ages, we do just that every time we give our children penicillin, use birth control, fly in an airplane, or telephone a friend. We embrace technologies that tame and harness nature because we think they improve our lives, and we will accept or reject human genetic manipulation on the same grounds.
But perhaps the scale of primitive humans is no longer appropriate, and playing God is a rather hyperbolic way of speaking about any of our tinkering with the natural world. At a 2001 conference on cloning, Rabbi Moses Tendler, a professor of Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University, spoke against reproductive cloning, but not because he considered it playing God:
“God gave us molecules. God gave us atoms. We put them together differently. We are not playing God by doing that. We can’t get along without Him . . . God is the source of all science and God is the source of religion, and God is not schizophrenic. He doesn’t fight with Himself. If there is seemingly conflict between the two, it’s based upon one of three possibilities. We don’t understand what God said, we don’t understand the science, or, the usual explanation, we don’t understand either.”
Metaphors about “human manufacturing” are another way of articulating that germline manipulation would somehow violate the natural order. The infusion of conscious human choice into the process of conceiving a child blurs the line between the biological and the technological in the same way that artificial intelligence does, but genetic engineering is not about to turn our children into manufactured products. A freely chosen nine-month pregnancy is nothing like the controlled and optimized assembly-line manufacturing evoked by this metaphor. Moreover, children, whatever their genetic makeup, are far too influenced by the vagaries of individual experience to be anything but unique and highly individual.
Communal ownership of the human gene pool is an even stranger concept. The gene pool is a conceptual abstraction that is simply the sum total of all the genes of the reproducing population. We affect the gene pool every time we save a diabetic who would otherwise die before reproducing, every time we bring a child into the world, every time we inoculate a child, protecting him or her from fatal infectious diseases. Do those who argue for collective control of our gene pool imagine that humanity as a whole should oversee these choices as well? Such invocations of the sanctity of our gene pool are not scientific but religious arguments. John Fletcher, who was the first chief of the bioethics program at the National Institutes of Health and is now professor emeritus of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, commented in 1998:
“The idea of natural law is one that I think is not a viable concept when it comes to the gene pool . . . Suppose we really knew how to treat cystic fibrosis or some other very burdensome disease and didn’t do it because of the belief that people had a right to an untampered genetic patrimony. Then, you met a person twenty-five years later and did the Golden Rule thing and said, ‘Well, you know, we could have treated you for this, but we wanted to respect your right to your untampered genetic patrimony. Sorry.’ It doesn’t take a high-falutin ethicist to realize that’s just plain wrong. You violate one of the basic principles of morality, namely that you want to treat a person as you would want to be treated.”
The moral and religious arguments against genetic manipulation are unconvincing to me, but they have significant sway. Beliefs about right and wrong are deep-seated, and I would be astonished if the coming extension of human control into the intimate realm in which life passes from one generation to the next did not provoke strong reactions.
James Watson was instrumental in bringing the Human Genome Project into being. When I asked for his reaction to the idea of the “sanctity” of our genome, he couldn’t have been more blunt. “I just can’t indicate how silly I think it is,” he said. “I mean, sure, we have great respect for the human species. We like each other. We’d like to be better, and we take great pleasure in great achievements by other people. But evolution can be just damn cruel, and to say that we’ve got a perfect genome and there’s some sanctity to it . . . I’d just like to know where that idea comes from. It’s utter silliness.”
156—Almost no one, however, is pushing for these technologies; they are too threatening. I once spoke about these issues with a group of libertarians, who rail about taxes and wholeheartedly embrace global free markets. Even they voiced concerns about unregulated manipulation of human embryos. Clearly, human biological enhancement puts philosophies of individual autonomy and laissez-faire ideology to the test.
Read more about contemporary eugenics and conscious evolution at Matt Nuenke’s NeoEugenics website.
General Scientific Issues
(genes, mapping, genetic manipulation, genetic engineering)
Anderson, W. French, “Gene Therapy.” Scientific American (September 1995), 124-128.
Bowman, James E. and Robert F. Murray Jr., Genetic Variation and Disorders in Peoples of African Origin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Davis, J., Mapping the Code: The Human Genome Project and the Choices of Modern Science (New York: John Wiley, 1990).
Gosden, Roger, Designing Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology (W.H. Freeman and Co., New York, 1999).
Hai, Yan, Kenneth W. Kinzler, Bert Vogelstein. “Genetic Testing– Present and Future”. Science 289: 1890-1892 (2000)
Holtzman, N.A. and M.S. Watson, eds., Promoting Safe and Effective Genetic Testing in the United States. Final Report of the Task Force on Genetic Testing. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
McFadden, Johnjoe, “Our Genes are doomed,” The Guardian, February 5, 2001. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4130720,00.html
Plomin, Robert, Michael J. Owen, and Peter McGuffin. “The Genetic Basis of Complex Behaviors.”, Science 264: 1736 (1994).
Time Magazine Special Issue, “The Future of Medicine”, January 11, 1999, Vol. 153, No. 1 (cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/toc/0,3392,1101990111,00.html)
Zallen, Doris T., “Chapter 2: Basics of Genetics and Genetic Testing” in Does It Run in the Family? A Consumer’s Guide to DNA Testing for Genetic Disorders (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
Cold Spring Harbor (NY) on-line DNA Learning Center at http://vector.cshl.org/
Ethical, Social and Religious Issues
American Society of Human Genetics/American College of Medical Genetics Report, “Points to Consider: Ethical, Legal, and Psychological Implications of Genetic Testing in Children and Adolescents”, American Journal of Human Genetics 57: 1233-1241 (1995).
Appleyard, Bryan. Brave New Worlds: Staying Human in the Genetic Future (Viking Press, 1998.)
Billings, Paul R., Jonathan Beckwith, and Joseph Alper, “The Genetic Analysis of Human Behavior: A New Era?, Social Science and Medicine 35: 227-238 (1992).
Buchanan, Allen, Norman Daniels, Dan Brock, and Daniel Wikler. From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Cranor, Carl F., ed., Are Genes Us? The Social Consequences of the New Genetics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
Deenen, Sally, “Designer People: Are We Changing the Nature of Nature?” E-Magazine, Jan-Feb 2001. Available at: http://www.emagazine.com/january-february_2001/0101feat1.html
Gardner, William, “Can Human Genetic Enhancement be Prohibited?”, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 20: 65-84 (1995).
Glover, Jonathan. What Sort of People Should There Be? (New York: Penguin Books, 1992).
Hubbard, Ruth and Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
Juengst, Eric T. and LeRoy Walters. “Gene Therapy: II. Ethical and Social Issues,” in Warren T. Reich, ed., Encyclopedia of Bioethics (revised ed.; 5 vols.; New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), II, 914-922.
Kevles, Daniel J. and Leroy Hood, eds., The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Kimbrell, Andrew, The Human Body Shop: The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life (Regnery Publishing, Inc, 1998).
Kohlenberg, Leah. “Designer Babies?” Salon. Oct. 5, 2000. http://archive.salon.com/health/feature/2000/10/05/bone_marrow/index.html
Lantos, John, “Ethical Issues in Growth Hormone Therapy”, Journal of the American Medical Association 261: 1020-1024 (1989).
Lomax, Elizabeth M.R., Jerome Kagan, and Barbara G. Rosenkrantz, Science and Patterns of Child Care (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1978)
McGee, Glenn, The Perfect Baby (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997).
Murray, Thomas H., The Worth of a Child (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
Murray, Thomas H., Mark A. Rothstein, and Robert F. Murray Jr., eds., The Human Genome Project and the Future of Health Care (Medical Ethics Series). (Indiana University Press, 1996).
Nelson, J. Robert. On the New Frontiers of Genetics and Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994).
Parens, Erik, ed., Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998)
Parens, Erik, “Is Better Always Good? The Enhancement Project” (A Special Supplement to the Hastings Center Report, 28: S1-S18, January-February 1998)
Rifkin, Jeremy. The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (J.P. Archer: May 1998).
Sears, R.R., “Your Ancients Revisited: A History of Child Development”, in E. M. Hetherington, ed., Review of Child Development Research, volume 5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975)
Singer, Peter and Deane Wells, “Genetic Engineering”, in Erwin Edward, Sideny Gendin, and Lowell Kleiman, eds., Ethical Issues in Scientific Research: An Anthology (New York: Garland Publishing Co, 1994).
Stock, Gregory. Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future ( Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002).
Walters, LeRoy and Julie Gage Palmer, The Ethics of Human Gene Therapy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Weiss, Michael J. Improving Nature? The Science and Ethics of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge Univ Press, 1996).
Wivel, Nelson A. and LeRoy Walters. “Germ-Line Gene Modification and Disease Prevention: Some Medical and Ethical Perspectives.” Science 262: 533-538 (1993).
History: The Nature/Nurture Debate and the Eugenics Movement
Baumrind, D. “The average expectable environment is not good enough.” Child Development, 1993, 64, 1299-1317.
Duster, Troy, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Gallagher, Winifred. Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual (Random House, 1997)
Lewontin, R.C., Stephen Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
Paul, Diane B. Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Prometheus Books, 1995).
Paul, Diane. The Politics of Heredity : Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (SUNY Series, Philosophy and Biology) (State Univ of New York Press, 1998)
Rothman, Barbara Katz. Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We Are (New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998).
Rutter, M. et al.. “Integrating nature and nurture: Implications of person-environment correlations and interactions for developmental psychopathology.”
Development and Psychopathology, 1997, 9 (2), 225-364.
Skodak, M. & Skeels, H. “A final follow-up study of 100 adopted children.” Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1949, 75, 85-125.
Steen, R. Grant. DNA and Destiny : Nature and Nurture in Human Behavior (Plenum Press, 1996).
Sternberg, Robert J., and Elena Grigorenko. Intelligence, Heredity, and Environment (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Thomas, A. & Chess, S. Temperament and Development. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1977
Public Policy Issues
Ad Hoc Committee on Genetic Testing/Insurance Issues, “Background Statement: Genetic Testing and Insurance.” American Journal of Human Genetics 56: 327-331 (1995).
Aldhous, P. “Who Needs a Genome Ethics Treaty?” Nature 351: 507 (1991).
Andrews, Lori B., Jane E. Fullarton, Neil A. Holtzman, and Arno G. Motulsky, eds. Assessing Genetic Risks: Implications for Health and Social Policy (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994).
Annas, George J. and Sherman Elias, eds., Gene Mapping: Using Law and Ethics as Guides (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Buchanan, Allen, Norman Daniels, Dan Brock, and Daniel Wikler. From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Cohen, Sherrill and Nadine Taub, eds. Reproductive Laws for the 1990s (Clifton, NJ: Human Press, 1989).
Gardner, William, “Can Human Genetic Enhancement Be Prohibited? Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 20: 65-84 (1995)
Nowlan, William. “A Rational View of Insurance and Genetic Discrimination”. Science 297: 195-106 (2002). http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/297/5579/195
Silvers, Anita, David Wasserman, and Mary Briody Mahowald. Disability, Difference, Discrimination : Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy (Point/ Counterpoint) (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
Stock, Gregory. Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future ( Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002).
Walters, LeRoy. “Human Gene Therapy: Ethics and Public Policy,” Human Gene Therapy 2: 115-122.(1991).
Weiss, R. “Predisposition and Prejudice: As Scientists Crack the Code of Inherited Imbalances, Policy Makers Confront the Specter of Genetic Discrimination”, Science News 135: 40-42 (1989)
The Policy News and Information Service website at url:
http://www.policy.com/issuewk/1998/1130_45/detail150.html
Genetic Explorations in Science Fiction, Theatre, and Films
Aldiss, Brian W., Trillion Year Spree (Avon, 1988)
Bear, Greg, Blood Music (Paperback reprinted: Ace Books, 1996)
Cherryh, C.J., Cyteen (Warner Books, 1995)
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Del Rey, 1996)
“Gattaca – There is no Gene for the Human Spirit” (Movie from 1997)
Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (Harper Perennial Library, 1998)
Shelley, Mary W., Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (W.W. Norton & Company, 1996)
Sterling, Bruce, Holy Fire (Bantam Spectra, 1996)
Wells, H.G., The Island of Dr. Moreau (Bantam Books, 1994)
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30 Years Beyond the Limits – an interview with Jørgen Randers
April 7, 2007|
Jørgen Randers (60) represent the forefront of Norwegian future studies. His work with scenario planning and system dynamics from the early 70’s has given these exotic fields attention from more than military planners and the literati. His articles and books promote views of a truly concerned scientist, many would say radical environmentalist. The controversy surrounding the now legendary book “Limits to Growth” resounds in the current environmental debate. The fact that energy demands are slowly reaching the limits of supply cause concerns even for big business. Randers is currently professor of policy analysis at the Norwegian School of Management (BI) and work with environmental strategy for companies like Tomra, The Dow Chemical Company and British Telecom. |
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Book review: “The World Upside Down”
April 7, 2007|
Future studies is about attaining the most revealing perspective on complex issues. The ability to find the perspective that gives as much information about a given situation as possible is the essence of future studies. Marcoeconomics, demographics, geopolitical strategies and resource analysis are among the disciplines that give a futurologist a feeling of a bird’s eye view on complex global questions. Given this, what would be a more all-encompassing perspective than that given from outer space? |
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“The memory of the cataclysms was erased, not because of lack of written traditions, but because of some characteristic process that later caused entire nations, together with their literate men, to read into these traditions allegories or metaphors where actually cosmic disturbances were clearly described.” A perspective that has been underestimated by the established futures thinking community is exactly that of cosmology and astrophysics. What secrets dwell in the vast space that surrounds our spaceship Earth and what can the cosmos tell mankind about its future? Carefully avoiding the New Age bandwagon this is the core topic of the thrilling new book “The World Upside Down” by Kris and Jo Van den Driessche. The quest that the Van den Driessche brothers set out to explore in this book is not an easy one. Explaining astrophysical phenomena like black holes, the evolution of stars and other celestial bodies and tracing the history of Earth is an enormous undertaking. What forces in the universe are the most important factors governing Earth? It becomes clear from early on that the established scientific worldview are not sufficent to explain the evolution and future of our beloved Earth. The first part of the book goes into great detail explaining the fundamental laws of the universe that subsequently governs Earth. Although many of the key concepts explained, like gravitational forces and different energy and matter particles, are in line with orthodox astrophyics some ideas are of a more controversial nature. According to the book the moon has gradually departed from Earth and left the huge area between Australia and Antarctica wide open. This also explains why India crashed into Eurasia during the dispersal of the continents some 65 millions years ago. Reading about how Pangea, the original supercontinent, broke apart is exciting and tells a lot about how Earth has ended up looking like it does. The most central thesis of the book is about the magnetic alignment of the Earth to the Sun and the Moon, the so-called precession movement. In addition to these forces our solar system moves from the sphere of influence of the Orion Arm into the sphere of influence of the Sagittarius Arm and vice verse during its ecliptic orbit. This movement results in a 12.888 year cycle of realignments of the axis of Earth which eventually could turn the Earth upside down. The book describes how previous civilizations have viewed this cycle, from Hindu and Mayan artifacts to Egyptian myths and later Greek cosmology. The authors show incredible detailed knowledge of ancient cultures and their cosmology. E.g. Seneca wrote in his work Thyestes: “Have we, people, deserved this, that the sky should want to destroy us by reversing its poles?” The many references and descriptions add depth and clarity to what many would consider a rather specualtive narrative about a coming cataclysm. See selections from Immanuel Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision” (1950) for more historical references. So how do we prepeare for a global catastrophe of immense proportions? Even the underground bunkers of the military wouldn’t stand a chance against moving tectonic plates, rising and sinking mountains and a global tsunami. Migrating to space will also prove to be hard due to the enormous winds that will sweep the Earth and the atmosphere and what will there be to return to? Where are you going to land? What are you going to eat and drink? One of the obvious solutions is described by finding the axis point of the rotation which according to the book will be Kenya. I’m not convinced that axis realignment is a real and potential threat to mankind. The timespan for these events are to great to be used as a basis for a prediction as precise as that given in the book, namely 23. December 2012. For those who believe in this prediction you better plan the 2012 Christmas vacation in Kenya. Even though the book is a fascinating read I haven’t booked any reservations for Kenya… yet. “The World Upside Down” by Johan Van den Driessche & Kris Van den Driessche Visit their webpage at: VDDAnalysis |
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Book review: “Psychedelic Horizons”
April 7, 2007|
As a visitor to this webpage you might ask yourself – what in the multiverse does a review of a book about altered states of consciousness have to do with future studies and long term change? The human mind has become the ultimate playground for radical interventions and the future of mind altering drugs has never been more exciting. With the introduction of psycho-pharmaceuticals; cognitive enhancers (modafinil, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, ritalin), performance enhancers (beta blockers), memory enhancers (ampakines) and mood controllers (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) the need for a roadmap for healthy and therapeutic use of drugs becomes imperative. |
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In addition to curing illness, many people are looking at ways to be more than healthy, more than intelligent and eventually more than human. There seems to be a drug for every conceivable situation in life. To answer this development “Psychedelic Horizons” raises important questions about altered states of consciousness, how to explore the mind, tweaking intelligence and what intelligence is really all about. Do you feel happy, creative and empathic? Do you understand the true nature and the fullest education of the human mind? Do you feel a sense of direction? Do you know how to augment your mental capabilities or tune your mind to be more productive and creative? These are some of the many questions raised in this highly intellectually stimulating book. This is not only a book about psychedelic drugs. It’s a book about psychotechnologies; different methodes and techniques for attaining profound altered states of consciousness and their potential benefits for the human mind. Such psychotechnologies include hypnosis, dreaming, lucid dreaming, meditation, biofeedback, contemplative prayer and of course psychedelics among many other methods. Since time immemorial religious experiences and psychoactive, psychedelic or hallucinogenic drugs has been closely related. Because of these close bonds a new term was coined in the late seventies to cover these aspects of psychedelic drugs; entheogens (“realizing the divine within”). The common denominator for psychedelic drugs is that they all, under controlled and desirable circumstances, may induce a transpersonal experience. The term “transpersonal psychology” was coined by Stanislav Grof, the founder of the discipline. Transpersonal psychology deals with experiences involving an expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the usual ego boundries and beyond the usual limits of time and/or space. Ego, time and space are the three limits which are surpassed by transpersonal experiences. Many call this a temporary state of ego-death, a complete disassociation or dissolution of the ego. Part one, “Snow White: Grofian Psychocriticism”, traces Roberts’ history as an explorer of the mind and later his work as a university professor. The book is written with a very distinct personal presence and with the language of someone who enjoys his expertise in a way you seldom find in academic books. This makes the reader engage with his ideas and concepts as a fellow adventurer. I even found myself smiling and laughing at some of his personal anecdotes. As a professor of educational psychology at the Northern Illinois University we follow his students at the Foundations of Psychedelic Studies and their first classes dealing with Disney’s animation-classic “Snow White”. Roberts and his fellow students analyze the content of “Snow White” and find the many psychological and psychedelic elements running through the story. The intention of this exercise is to train the students in identifying psychological significant symbols in media, litterature and personal experiences. The excercise help the students in “thinking about thinking” and master the art of self-reflection. Part two of the book, “The Emxis Speculation”, deals with the possibility of strengthening the immune system through entheogen induced mystical experiences. Although the chapters at times becomes a timid historical treatise of the challenges of making the psychedelics movement academically acceptable, the personal anecdotes makes the story worthwhile. The story about the annual Bicycle Day (in memory of Alfred Hoffman) and Roberts’ friend contemplating the feeling of being healthy when high on marijuana opens up the topic. The challenge confronting Roberts is to find ways to scientifically meassure the effects of a transpersonal experience on the immune system. After scanning through hundreds of papers dealing with parameters that weaken or strengthen the immune system Roberts settles down with the Immunoglobulin A (IgA) as a meassurement for the health status of the immune system. Much of the research uncovered deals with the correlations between general mood and stress levels with IgA levels. It’s a fact that when you’re in a good mood your IgA levels are high compared to low when under stress. Roberts goes on to posit the theory that the peak experience reached during a psychdelic session or in an altered state of consciousness increase IgA levels and consequently have positive health effects. Does this peak experience boost the immune system? Is humor and having a good time still the best medicine? Without coming to any positive conclusion Roberts gives lots of interesting details about research on correlates between psychedelics and the immune system. The problem is the lack of updated research on this specific area, an area which Roberts consider to be a worthwhile endeveour. “If positive day-to-day experiences strengthen the immune system somewhat, might powerfully positive experiences – mystical states, states of unitive consciousness, or ego-transcendent states – strengthen the immune system a great deal?”, asks Roberts. Although much research supports this hypothesis Roberts calls for more research into the healthy effects of psychedelics and similar ego-transcended states. These chapters represent a treasure trove of references to interesting books, journals, and organizations working in the field of pscyhedelics. Although much research was done in these areas in the sixties and seventies Roberts admits that little progress has been made since the hay-days of psychedelia. Unfortunately the so-called “war on drugs” has forced much of the research on psychedelic drugs underground. This is one of the developments Roberts sets out to reverse. In part three, “Multistate Mind”, the book goes from being interesting to mind boggling. Roberts believe that the current paradigm in psychology and other scientific disciplines are riddled with the “singlestate fallacy”. The singlestate fallacy implies a belief that the only way of rationally comprehending reality is through our default sensory mode, the home base of our consciousness. Roberts argues that the human mind is like a computer that can run different types of programs. The different mindbody states (programs) that exist in the human mind give different perspectives and different modus operandi for the brain to work in. Exploring these different states of consciousness expands regular intelligence and results in, what Roberts calls, multistate intelligence or metaintelligence. Many great inventions have been conceived in these altered states. Marquis de Condorcet thought and wrote with greater fluency in his dreams than in his waking life. Kekule litteraly dreamed up the benzene ring. According to journalist Alun Rees working for the London newspaper Mail on Sunday, Francis Crick percieved the double-helix structure of the DNA under the influence of LSD. The examples of great art and music produced under the influence of psychedelics is to numerous to mention here. Summa sumarum there are serious indications as to increased mental and cognitive abilities when operating in different states of consciousness. Psychdelics can be compared to the microscope or the telescope. Like a microscope to the mind, we can experience and observe its content with greater detail. We can think of psychedelics as “psychomagnifiers”. The challenge for explorers of the mind is to use these newfound perspectives in the home base state of consciousness. Experiences gained during psychedelic session must be brought back to the ordinary state of mind and focused on scientific or personal obstacles. This is the topic of part four of the book, “Enlarging Education”. Throughout this part of the book Roberts compares traditional psychological paradigms with the paradigms invoked by pscyhotechnologies. He compares the different perspectives of singlestate assumptions with multistate assumptions concerning everything from the essence of human nature and reality to cognition and intelligence. In the chapters dealing with education he takes these comparisons one step further and question how education differ from singlestate to multistate psychologies. In conclusion everything we know about pedagogics would have to change fundamentally since the basic assumptions are different. The concept of the well-educated person has to be reconsidered too. Every scientific discipline would need to incorporate the different perspectives that different states of consciousness gives access to. Roberts encourage the establishment of a Center for Multistate Studies to research the many topics of mind altering techniques. The well-educated person should be able to select from a large number of mindbody states, enter them, and use the residential abilities. The last chapters of the book explore many of the previous themes even further. The more we learn about mind altering techniques the more opportunities arise to design new states of consciousness. Is is possible to combine several techniques to gain access to even more advanced states of consciousness? Is it possible to cross-breed different typs of psychdelics to design especially interesting states of consciousness? Will it be possible in the future to engineer the human brain to integrate certain states of consciousness? Will neuroarchitects create designer minds? Being an academic book there is one thing I miss. I would like to know more about the chemistry involved in the different mindbody states. What receptors are involved? How do the chemicals in pscyhedelics work in the brain? What parts of the brain are involved and how are they manipulated to cause the euphoric and psychdelic experience? I would like a separate chapter on neurochemistry and its relevance for different mindbody states. I’m sure Roberts could fill us in on this topic. The book raises lots of very interesting questions for people generally interested in psychology, different states of consciousness and the future of mind exploration. I believe this book will wake up many people to the hidden powers of the human mind. We are much more intelligent that we think we are. If we knew how to tap into the vast potential of the incredibly intricate layers of human consciousness new possibilites would emerge. This book is a well-informed guide to the furthest reaches of what it means to be human. If we don’t explore and map the human mind in all its magnificent states we risk becoming prisoners of our own minds. Aldous Huxley recognized this threat all too well. “And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” – Aldous Huxley. “Psychedelic Horizons” by Thomas B. Roberts.
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Book review: “Makten bak Makten”
April 7, 2007|
Norwegians read more newspapers than any other nation in the world. Over 500 copies are sold pr. thousand inhabitants, each Norwegian reads at least two newspapers pr. day. Being a citizen of this rather innocent small town (4.6 mill.) in the global village there are few public voices that represent my weltanschuung. In the media landscape of hundres of newspapers and publishers very few speak about the most important global questions confronting us today. |
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This has all changed with the publication of “Makten bak Makten” (The Power Behind the Power) by Per-Aslak Ertresvåg (born 1931). I consider this book to be one of the most important dissident books having come out of the Norwegian printing press since Jens Bjørneboe. Bjørneboe dealt with the mechanisation of society; the growing sickness of the cultural soul and the problem of evil. This book deals with the sickness of the planet, the sickness of the ruling elite and the historical trajectories and political developments of what has come to be known as the “New World Order”. This book will either be percieved as unsubstantiated nonsense or as a collection of historical facts about the stronghold a few global organisations have on the world. The existence and background of the Bilderbergers, The Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission is no big secret. Scholars have examined the history and political roles of the Freemasons and the Jesuits in great detail. Much is know about the intricacy of international power structures, so are there anything more to add? In recent years several new developments has appeared with the fingerprints of the New World Order on them. Chemtrails, in contrast to condensation trails left by planes, contain numerous biological and chemical compounds that are harmful to humans. HAARP (Highfrequency Active Auroral Research Program) are officially meant to study the ionosphere, but has dual military applications for weather manipulation and even mind control. These topics have seldom or never been brought up in Norwegian media. The obvious comments on the book in Norwegian media goes along the lines of “in times of complexity it’s easy to reach for simple explanations” and claims of anti-semitism. Pointing out the historical fact that the Rothchilds, the Rockefellers and other monetary dynasties has played a significant role in the development of international banking has nothing to do with anti-semitism. Neither does explaining the formation of the world biggest privat banking cartel called The Federal Reserve. Per-Aslak Ertresvåg shows that the newspapers, business journals and TV-stations don’t represent the actual state of the world. They are actually the “whores of the oil-soaked, spy-riddled monopoly press” that fellow conspiracy researcher Sherman Skolnick so precisely describe them. Exposing the threat of an international psuedo-aristocratic mafia (The Black Nobility) hell-bent on world domination is not easy in Norway, or anywhere else in the world, without being tagged a “conspiracy theorist”. I believe the author know this very well having spent more than 50 years in journalism. With this professional background and a foreword by a military officer the book is given a certain academic credibility. The scope of the book is ambitious and bold, with topics ranging from the Illuminati and secret societies to corrupt international organisations and population control. Well-informed students of revisionist history will find the book somehow superfluous due to the very intensive use of sources like Carrol Quigley, Antony Sutton and John Coleman. Even oddities like Fritz Springmeier and William Cooper are mentioned. What makes this book more than a notch better than your average conspiracy theory is that it connects many of the major threads in conspiracy literature to real world research of the author. In addition to this the distinct academic prose and the Norwegian perspective make this book unique. If you read Norwegian I recommend you to get this book immediately. Hopefully it will be taken seriously and wake the oil-drunk Norwegian populace up to the reality of the international occult power structure. “Makten bak makten” av Per-Aslak Ertresvåg. References: |
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