NUMBER 108 / JANUARY 2001

Richard Heinberg

BIOTECHNOLOGY & THE FATE OF THE SOUL

(We encourage you to get books through your local bookstore or from your llibrary. If this is not practical, ordering through our links provides Museletter with a small commission. Book links are to Powell's or, if unavailable there, Amazon. These links are also useful to find out more about the book: price, content and reviews.)

According to the myths of the Coast Miwok - the original inhabitants of the area in Northern California near where I live - the first human being was created by a committee of animals, each desiring to shape a lump of clay in its own image. My own cultural forebears similarly believed that the first human was formed from earth, but held that this feat was accomplished by an otherworldly being named Yahweh. Comparative myth studies reveal that people have always been fascinated by origins and by the mysteries of life and death. Countless cultures have explained these mysteries by way of a singular metaphor - the divine breath, the spirit or soul by which humans (and, in some traditions, other creatures) were first animated.

Today we use scientific terms to describe the origins of living things. We speak of the evolution of organic molecules, and of traits and adaptations. The exact process by which the first self-replicating cell appeared may still be somewhat obscure, but the mechanics of heredity are becoming increasingly clear to researchers armed with DNA probes and PCR machines. Over the past century, molecular biology has revolutionized our ideas about what life is and how it functions. Our decoding of the molecular alphabet of DNA and our tracing of the relationships between discrete DNA sequences on one hand and specific traits in organisms on the other have led us toward a gene-centered view of all life, including human life. Indeed, it is now customary to relate nearly every human strength or weakness - from genius to helpfulness to criminality - at least partly to genes. For practical purposes, DNA has taken on most of the traditional functions of the Christian soul.

Our new knowledge has given us power. Already we can transfer adaptive traits between radically dissimilar species, engineer food plants to manufacture their own pesticides, and clone farm animals. We routinely solve crimes - or free wrongly convicted prisoners - on the basis of DNA samples, and probe patients' chromosomes for signs of disorders that may show up decades hence. But virtually everyone involved with the development of the new genetic tools agrees that we are still at the earliest stages of the biotech revolution.

If current trends continue, by the year 2020 virtually all food plants worldwide will be genetically engineered, and for a broad variety of purposes-superior nutrition, herbicide tolerance, pest resistance, longer shelf life, and even medicinal qualities ("Eat two of these turnips and call me in the morning . . ."). Nearly all remaining forests will consist of quick-growing, designer-gene trees.

With up to 25% of mammal, bird, and plant species likely to become extinct over the next twenty years, genetic science is poised to become a conservation tool. Biologists will collect DNA samples from endangered species and preserve them in gene banks, hoping for a future time when the creatures themselves can be revived, like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park ("And here, in this tube, we have the genome of the Siberian tiger, the last living specimen of which died in 2018 . . .").

However, most genetic alterations of animals will not be for the purpose of saving them from extinction, but for making them serve a variety of commercial and therapeutic purposes. Researchers have already found ways to "pharm" useful biochemicals in the milk of genetically altered sheep, goats, and cows. Soon pigs will be engineered and cloned so that their organs can be transplanted into sick or injured people. Fast-growing transgenic salmon will have replaced their wild counterparts, and farm animals will all have been fine-tuned for optimum meat, milk, and egg production.

Many human uses of the new gene tools will flow from genetic screening. Several companies are already hard at work on machines that will reveal an individual's DNA at lightning speed. These GenID devices, which could be commonplace by 2020, will tell us what ails us now and what is likely to in the future. They will also be useful in determining psychological and physical aptitudes ("Mrs. Jones, your infant daughter is a genetic concert pianist; Mrs. Smith, yours is a genetic lawyer. . . .")

The ultimate application of gene technologies to humans will consist of the redesign of the genome to exclude defects (including tendencies toward degenerative diseases and cancer) and to enhance capabilities (such as musical or mathematical aptitude). Eventually even behavioral charactieristics like cheerfulness, quickness to anger, perseverance, or thrill-seeking may be targeted for removal or augmentation. Meanwhile, the process of human genetic modification will inevitably entail procedures for embryo cloning, which might offer - as byproducts - transplantable stem cells for the treatment of a wide range of disorders.

Equipped, godlike, with the new genetic tools, we will remake nature and ourselves; we will become, in effect, our own creators.

 

* * *

 

Not surprisingly, these prospects raise some thorny ethical questions

What unexpected consequences might arise if we genetically engineer virtually the entire human food system over the course of a few brief years? Independent scientists and pure-food activists insist that we know very little about the long-term ecological and human health effects of genetically engineered foods. Some evidence (e.g., that of damage to monarch butterflies from Bt corn, and of the increased presence of cancer-causing chemicals in milk from cows routinely injected with recombinant bovine growth hormone) is worrisome. Activists worldwide are accusing agricultural biotech companies of pushing profit above safety, and regulatory agencies of placing corporate interests above the public good.

How will the easy availability of human genetic data affect personal privacy? Might insurance companies prefer to shun genetically "defective" customers? Wouldn't employers seek to exclude genetically undesirable applicants? Given our historical propensity to judge one another as superior or inferior, wouldn't easily accessed genetic data simply tend to give such judgments a quantifiable, "scientific" basis?

Could the genetic engineering of humans usher in a Brave New World of eugenic tyranny? Germline gene therapy raises the specter of the revival of the "social hygiene" programs of Nazi Germany, and of many U.S. states which enacted forced sterilization laws in the 1920s and '30s. Not only critics, but even wholehearted proponents of human genetic engineering agree that the deliberate redesign of the human germline will lead to a genetic stratification of society. Since medical science recognizes no exact definition of what constitutes a "disease" or "disorder," therapeutic "treatments" will inevitably shade into "improvements." Caring wealthy parents will feel delinquent if they withhold from their offspring interventions that would confer freedom from known genetic disorders like sickle-cell anemia or Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome; eventually they will feel equally obliged to provide genetic "cures" for shortness, male-pattern baldness, or myopia, and genetic boosts to advantageous characteristics like longevity, higher intelligence, athletic prowess, and good looks. Since these treatments will necessarily be expensive, poor people will be unable to afford them. Gradually we may see humanity bifurcate genetically into what Princeton biologist Lee Silver calls "GenRich" and "Natural" subspecies. By 2020, it is unlikely that we will have arrived at the point where humankind is divided into what might crudely be called a master race and a slave race, but we may be well along the path toward that dubious goal.

Won't the proliferation of gene-altering technologies open the way to genetic weapons of mass destruction-designer germs-that would be cheaper by far than atomic weapons, but potentially even more devastating? The reports of investigative journalists suggest that there are laboratories working even now to refine gene weapons that target specific ethnic groups.

In modifying the adaptive traits of living organisms with the new gene-transfer techniques, do we really understand what we are doing? Many animal DNA-splicing experiments have led to unexpected, bizarre deformities. Does the genome more closely resemble a computer program that we can rewrite at will, or a molecular ecosystem whose wild integrity we are corrupting in much the same way we have corrupted forest, ocean, and prairie ecosystems before we ever thought of cataloging their inhabitants' symbiotic interactions? In patenting novel gene-altered organisms, we fancy ourselves to be inventors of novel products. But, in actuality, might we merely be tinkerers with systems whose self-regulating complexity remains far beyond our ken?

* * *

A particularly subtle yet telling question centers on the problem of whether our implementation of gene technologies might constrain our future capacity for ethical choice. In reshaping our own bodies and behaviors at the molecular level, might we, in some sense, be endangering our own souls?

To be clear: I don't mean this in the crass, literal sense - as do uninformed biotech bashers and sci-fi novelists who imagine that human clones, if prepared in batches, wouldn't have souls. If we define "the soul" as the source of our personality and ethics, then any human clone would certainly have one, since identical twins are essentially clones of one another and I know of no one who contends that twins are uniquely soulless. What I'm suggesting is something more subtle: that our ethical sensibilities are changed by our exercise of power.

It is possible to speak of the collective moral character of a people. History offers examples of entire societies whose economies were based on war or whose religions revolved around human sacrifice, as well as societies that were mostly egalitarian and peaceful and whose members regarded wild plants and animals as honored relatives. What happens to its collective soul when a society embarks on the project of turning life itself into an artifact, a commodity, a designed object?

Many people already recoil from biotech with the gut response that "we shouldn't mess with mother nature." Of course, as defenders of gene technologies often point out, we humans have been messing with nature for millennia, patiently and purposefully altering the genetics of domesticated animals and food plants using ordinary selective breeding techniques. But the new technologies enable us to extend radically our control over the genome. Humans have been waging war for millennia, too, but as the practice has become technologically augmented-from fighting with clubs to lobbing nuclear missiles-new ethical issues have arisen. The same is surely true of genetic manipulation. In this case, some of the new issues pierce to the core of the human project.

What is the proper role of humans within the biosphere-is it colonist and conqueror, steward, or responsible citizen within a community of beings? Just how far should we go on the path of domination and control over living things? We might have asked these questions at any point during the past ten millennia (indeed, many astute philosophers from Lao Tzu to Thoreau have done so), but now they demand our attention as never before, since wild nature may effectively cease to exist before the end of the current century.

Some say that biotechnologies-like all technologies-are morally neutral tools. But this simplistic attitude overlooks a substantial body of historical and cross-cultural research on the social impacts of technologies. Our tools embody our purposes and expand our powers. What purposes shall we pursue? How much power should any person or group of persons wield? These are ethical matters, and to imagine that we can rewrite nature's genetic code without revisiting these questions might well constitute a form of willful moral blindness.

There are those who say that technological change is inevitable, that as soon as we gathered around the first deliberately-set campfire millions of years ago we started on a road that would necessarily take us to Dolly the cloned sheep and the Human Genome Project. But technologies are political, in that they alter the balance of power within and among societies. Technological change is a social process shaped by material circumstance and cultural adaptation; it confers advantages and exacts costs. To say that we have no choice about technological change is equivalent to saying that we have no political will. Who should decide how and when new technologies are implemented and how benefits and costs are apportioned?

The essence of the dilemma may reside in the very terms biotechnology and genetic engineering. Each represents a union of two realms: that of life (bio-, genetic) - of eating, reproducing, and feeling; and that of machines (-technology, engineering) - of designing, manufacturing, and marketing. If we uncritically accept biotechnology, the inevitable result appears to be that, to a markedly greater degree, life will become a means to an end, a utility, or a commodity. How far down that path do we wish to go?

None of these questions can be brushed aside lightly. And of course, all must be balanced against the moral problem, If science offers us a tool that might save lives or improve quality of life, are we not ethically obliged to use it? The process of weighing this last question against ones previously mentioned is sure to be horrendously difficult.

As we begin to grapple with the arguments, however, we might recall the many myths that warn about uninformed human interference in the business of the gods - Icarus, Pandora, Prometheus, the sorcerer's apprentice. . . .

* * *

Of course, current trends might not continue. Forecasts are always conditional. Any of a number of economic, political, or ecological events could unexpectedly derail the plans of the gene industry. The most likely is that economic turmoil, triggered by mounting energy costs, will derail technological "progress" in most fields. But it is also possible that the trajectory of the implementation of gene technologies could deliberately be altered by citizen action, if the general public engages in a debate about those technologies' ethical impact.

What might prompt such a public debate? Widespread outrage over a horrific biotech accident might do so. However, it is just as likely that, as people become aware of the increasing intrusion of genetic technologies into their lives, the ethical and moral issues will simply become unavoidable.

The scientific intricacies of representational difference analysis or mutant selection are beyond the understanding of many citizens. Still, most people who are aware that up to 60% of processed foods in supermarkets contain unlabeled genetically engineered ingredients, or that gene-tailored farm animals will soon become commercially available, sense that we as a society have arrived at a moral crossroads. And so an ethical discussion is beginning to take place, despite all difficulties.

So far, polls suggest that, with regard to biotech food, the general public is concerned and skeptical. Consumers want gene-altered foods to be labeled as such, and many people will go out of their way to avoid them. In Europe, widespread concern has led to policies requiring mandatory labeling, and to temporary moratoriums on the growing or sale of new biotech food products. There has been no similar public outcry here or abroad over the human DNA technologies (though Germany, with its horrific eugenic past, has instituted a ban on human cloning); however, that may simply be due to the fact that few of these tools or procedures have yet become commonplace. But as human genetic screening and gene therapy become everyday realities, people may begin more openly to express qualms.

Clearly, we face a choice-either to permit the continued unchecked development and deployment of the new gene tools, or to deliberately restrain their use, at least until we better understand the potential consequences. For individual humans, self-restraint regarding sexuality, food, alcohol, and the management of the household budget is usually considered a sign of maturity and mental stability. Might something similar be true for us collectively with regard to our technological power over life?

What would it mean in practical effect if we were to take the route of self-limitation regarding biotechnology? The following are a few proposals that have already been offered by scientists and ethicists familiar with the issues:

• A complete global ban on life patents; or, at a minimum, a ban on any patents of human cell lines, tissues, or genes;
• A complete global ban on human cloning (including embryo cloning), and on germline gene therapy;
• A complete moratorium on the release of genetically modified organisms into the environment, lasting at least until we have established full, transparent means of risk assessment for each release, monitored by organizations with no financial stake in the outcome;
• Strict labeling of gene-altered foods; and
• Full civil and criminal liability for harm caused by the release of any genetically modified organism.

* * *

The biotech industry will no doubt resist every one of these proposals. But the public is likely to insist on many of them. We may therefore be witnesses to the beginning of what could eventually become known as the Gene Wars. It is unlikely that, by 2020, either side will have claimed total victory. If anything, the controversy will by then probably have broadened and intensified. Today's children will likely be tomorrow's partisans in one of history's greatest moral conflicts.

* * *

Perhaps future creation myths will say that nature made us by accident, but that at a certain point we became smart enough to remake nature and to re-create ourselves, seizing conscious control over our own evolution. On the other hand, future myths may say that we humans once passed through a centuries-long adolescent phase of dominating and controlling nature, until we remembered that we are a part of nature, whereupon we began to learn to respect wild natural systems and to live in harmony with them once again. These two mythopoeic views of the choices we are now facing denote nothing less than two radically different futures for both humankind and the rest of the natural world.

It may not be hyperbole to suggest that the human soul hangs in the balance. If we were to lose our souls, it would not be because we mistakenly strained them out of our DNA during some Frankensteinian gene-splicing experiment. But it might be because our fascination with improvement, control, profit, and power overwhelmed our deeper senses of respect, awe, compassion, and proportion.

Our souls will not and probably cannot be taken from us. But they just might be prone to atrophy from disuse. q

---

CRISIS / OPPORTUNITY FOR CALIFORNIA AND THE WORLD

"The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants."

-George W. Bush, quoted in The New York Times, January 14, 2001

During the past few months, California's main power utility companies (Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison-PG&E and SCE) have been issuing power alerts-letting cutomers know that rolling blackouts may be necessary in order to avert complete system breakdown. The companies claim to be near bankruptcy, and Wall Street has downgraded their credit ratings to junk-bond status.

From a short-term perspective, these problems can be seen as issuing from deregulation: in the mid-1990s, PG&E and SCE lobbied for deregulation and virtually wrote the laws that would require them to sell off power plants and buy power on the wholesale market. The idea was for the two companies to become distributors and retailers only; investors would reap a profit while consumers would supposedly save up to 20% on their utility bills. Clearly, things haven't worked out that way. According to Brian J. Fleay, an Australian energy expert (in his January 10 essay, USA's Tripple Whammy in Electic Power, Natural Gas, and Oil, distributed by e-mail),

Before 1990 there was a 25% installed generator capacity margin over peak summer demand in the USA, necessary for supply security-electricity cannot be stored. The uncertainty introduced by deregulation led to a cut back in investment in power stations and transmission lines so that by 1998 the capacity margin was below 10%-and worse in states like California where utilities import about 25% of their peak summer power load from other states.

Overall, U.S. electricity demand has been increasing at about 3% per year since the mid-1980s, with a 5.4% increase in 1998. In California the picture is more extreme: the state's population is growing, and the new high-tech companies of Silicon Valley soak up energy prodigiously. Deregulation has made a bad situation much worse. Consumers are paying much more, and are threatened with blackouts on nearly a daily basis. Computer companies are saying they will expand no further in California because of power constraints.

Where will additional generating capacity come from? Since all our rivers are already dammed, little more can come from hydroelectric turbines. Nuclear power plants have proven to be costly and unreliable, and there is as yet no solution for the problem of waste disposal. Wind and solar are costly. Oil and coal plants are polluting. Currently the utility companies favor natural gas-powered generators. But the price of natural gas has doubled and tripled in the past few months. Fleay again:

US installed generating capacity was some 743,000 megawatts in 1998 with a peak load of 680,000 MW. About 90% of new capacity to 2010 is planned to be natural gas-fired with 22,000 MW added in 2000 and as much as 30,000 MW expected in 2001. . . . The capacity of gas turbine manufacturers and installers is being pushed to the limit. Consumption of natural gas for power generation is growing at over 10% pa, the major contributor to a 2.6% growth in natural gas consumption.

Natural gas is the principal fuel for winter heating in North America. . . . Natural gas consumption has exceeded US production since the mid-1980s and Canadian imports now supply 15% of US consumption. However, US production has declined since 1997 with the increasing number of new wells unable to offset a [decline in production] since the mid-1980s. A similar pattern has emerged in Canada: running faster and faster in order to stand still-or even go backwards! There is no way US production and imports from Canada can grow at 2.6% per annum to fuel gas turbines to meet electric power growth through the next 5-10 years.

What, then, are the supply options? According to Fleay, there are three: "Import liquid natural gas (LNG), develop gas resources in northern Alaska and along the adjacent Canadian Arctic Ocean coast, or develop gas resources at greater depth in the lower 48 states and in presently embargoed areas offshore on the east and west coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida." Each of these strategies would require huge investments, at least two would have dire ecological consequences, and none would result in significant supply increases before about 2005.

The electiricy and natural gas crises happen to coincide with an emerging world oil supply shortage, as production of cheap oil outside the Persian Gulf countries peaks. Fleay's conclusions deserve to be quoted at length:

Since the mid-1980s, the world has been expanding its consumption of natural gas and oil. Over half the oil supply growth in that time has come from Persian Gulf countries turning on wells shut down in the early 1980s. The remaining growth has come from developing expensive sources in ever smaller fields outside the Persian Gulf, e.g., the North Sea and deep water in the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, low oil prices have decimated industry profit margins and forced a downsizing of the exploration and development industry, especially in the USA. As well as consuming a non-renewable resource, the upstream petroleum industry has also been consuming its capital, both fixed and human. In late 2000 the last of the effective spare oil production capacity from the 1980s was turned on-only Saudi Arabia has limited spare capacity left.

Suddenly the upstream petroleum industry has to run more than twice as hard to keep pace with growing demand for oil and natural gas-especially in the US, where circumstances have also conspired to produce a major electric power crisis. A triple whammy!

The only immediate solution for the US is to systematically reduce consumption of electric power, natural gas, and oil, since it takes time and dollars to overcome physical constraints. Any attempt to massively expand energy production must divert energy from the general economy to achieve this task, just as existing hydrocarbon supplies are declining. There are severe limits to the rate at which the energy industry can expand under these circumstances. In the jargon of economics there is an "opportunity cost" of no small proportions.

So President-[s]elect George 's greatest energy crisis in its history on his agenda. He will of necessity have to preside over a contraction of oil and gas consumption in the USA, shortly after the US refused to do so at The Hague Greenhouse Conference last year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions!

The present thrust of economic development in the USA has hit an energy supply ceiling, and economic growth in the old way is no longer possible.

Here in California, Governor Gray Davis is trying to solve the electricity crisis through a process that leaves consumers out of the discussion. The state will buy power at a discount and sell it to PG&E and SCE, fixing rates that consumers pay at a level higher than before the crisis, but lower than would be the case if the utility companies were forced to buy wholesale power on the open market. In the end, consumers will bail out the utility companies. This is, sadly, a short-term fix that obscures a real opportunity.

It's important to note that areas of the state with publicly owned utilities (such as Los Angeles and Redding) have not experienced the same supply shortfalls and skyrocketing prices as elsewhere. Thus the glaringly obvious best approach to the woes wrought by deregulation is for the state of California to allow PG&E and SCE to go bankrupt, buy up the grid and the power plants, and form a state public utility agency.

As long as utilities are profit-driven enterprises, investors and consumers will always have conflicts of interest. Even if the utilities are re-regulated (as now seems certain), investor interests will work constantly to corrupt the regulators.

But there is a deeper and even more compelling reason why the utilities should be publicly owned (and this goes for oil, coal, and natural gas companies, too). As long as any energy provider is profit-driven, conservation will be given only lip service at best. Profits come from sales, not conservation. Ultimately, in a global regime of shrinking energy supplies, the only alternative to conservation is brutal competition for dwindling resources. Transitions to alternative sources (solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, etc.) are necessary and should be undertaken immediately, but these sources - because of their inherent nature - cannot make up for impending energy shortfalls resulting from petroleum and natural gas depletion. Our nations and communities are faced with a pivotal choice: conserve and cooperate now, or fight to the death later. California's current crisis presents that global choice in microcosm.

 

If you wish to republish any of these essays or post them on a web site, please contact us for permission.