Meeting notice: The 9/07 meeting will be held at 7:30 
p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block 
down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new 
and can't recognize us, ask the manager.  He'll probably 
know where we are. 

Suggested topic(s):  The growth dynamics of science-limited technologies


The scale of intensity of the campaign against biotech has grown 
most impressively over the last quarter.  All around the world 
national bureaucracies are announcing new regulations on testing 
and labelling; distributors up to and including US firms like 
Archer Daniels Midland are insisting on product segregation, and 
buyers are in full retreat from the market for genetically 
modified foods.  

The success of this campaign is of special interest since many of 
the arguments made against biotech -- the dilution of the 
national patrimony, the erosion of traditional mores, the 
displacement of local production modes, the acceleration of 
change, the stimulation of uncontrolled and inequitable wealth 
transfers, the exposure to unknown secondary effects, and the 
concoction and release of artificial entities -- can and probably 
will be made against nanotech as well.   If people are so upset 
about the transfer of purely natural genes across species lines, 
think how they will feel when people start writing DNA sequences
with no analogue in nature at all.  

The parallel the critics most often cite is with commercial 
nuclear power.  This analogy plays to their hopes and intentions, 
since many (i.e.,  the Union for Concerned Scientists) 
participated in that campaign directly and brought it to a 
generally successful conclusion (from their pov).  However, there 
are many differences between biotech and that sector.  Biotech is 
market-driven, characterized by access costs that are low and 
falling, organized in and over dozens of jurisdictions, and 
adaptable to a very wide range of markets. None of that was true 
of commercial nuclear power.

Another difference, perhaps the most important of all, is 
expressed by a chart on my desk: a plot of the number of permits 
and notifications issued by the US Dept. of Agriculture relative 
to biotech field releases:  30 in 1989; 160 in 1992; 707 in 95; 
1073 in 98.  There are 1200 biotech engineered drugs in patient 
trials today and possibly 10,000 ongoing plant biotech projects 
(most of which do not require field trials).  A reasonably 
knowledgeable person I know expects to see 20,000 plant biotech 
projects by the end of next year.  No matter where you look in 
this field (research, food, drugs, materials processing)  you see 
curves that are, if not classic 'J's, then clearly running under 
a real head of steam.

The reason might be this: Biotech's primary constraints, unlike 
many other productive processes, including commercial nuclear 
power, lie in information, in the state of the science.  Neither 
its inputs nor its processing equipment are expensive.  (Last 
year the Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American ran a 
series on how to build your own biotech lab bench.)  Such 
processes are inherently autocatalytic, since the more people 
work in them, the more is known; the more that is known, the 
lower the entry barriers (in that it becomes easier to imagine 
completing more kinds of projects for less investment); the lower 
the barriers, the more people enter the field; the more people 
enter the field, the more is known, etc., etc.  This effect is 
especially powerful in plant biotech, since most of the plants of 
interest (food plants) are pretty closely related, so that a 
genetic effect that works in potatoes is likely to be spread 
quickly through onions or apples.  (Furthermore, new features 
appearing in one plant variety can be spread via classical 
breeding techniques to all the varieties in that species.) 

So we are now watching two mutually antagonistic waves of 
cultural change, each growing rapidly, each bristling with 
political energy, mounting up and rolling toward each other.  In 
the long run it seems hard to see how the critics can prevail: 
biotech seems too cheap, flexible, and useful to be locked up for 
long.  However, at least for the moment, when the opposition is 
drawing strength from the very pace at which biotech is 
developing, the wrong incident at the wrong moment (the 
equivalent of a biotech Three Mile Island) would do a lot of 
damage and do it world wide.  

This interaction will attract the attention of anyone interested 
in the dance between technology and society, and especially those 
of us who think it might be just a warmup for an even bigger and 
scarier wrestling match ten or so years down the road.


Fred Hapgood

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David Swosy hosts a chat session on nanotech every Monday at 
7pm EST.  Tune your IP dial to www.nanorevolution.com

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Announcement Archive:
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