Meeting notice: The 99.10.19 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. 

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Suggested topic:   Dealing with the activists


One road to NT -- the "microbial engineering" road -- runs 
through three stages: leveraging natural genes, coding sequences 
directly, and reconstructing the cell to embrace more kinds, and 
longer and more complicated sequences, of reactions.  Once any 
development distance into the last phase, you start to have 
something that looks very like a general purpose, self- 
replicating, assembler.

The first phase is now an everyday fact, and perhaps the most 
interesting thing about it is the scale and effectiveness of the 
social resistance it has attracted.  This resistance rests on the 
threat of the technology to local mores, its association with 
large corporations, and the lack of a guarantee that local 
ecologies will not be disturbed, nor, in the case of food, the 
health of consumers affected. 

All these arguments seem likely to be reasserted with even 
greater emotional power against the products of the next two 
stages.  A technology as powerful as direct gene coding will 
almost certainly disrupt some local activity and give a serious 
first- mover advantage to whomever is the first to launch it. 

Perhaps more to the point, if people are upset about the 
consequences of perfectly natural genes being moved around, their 
reaction to seeing completely novel genes injected into the 
environment needn't be guessed at.   (It is of course not 
remotely possible to guarantee that such organisms will not 
escape, or have their distribution safeguards, if any, modified 
by biohackers, or end up disturbing the ecology in any other way.  
One would be on firmer ground guaranteeing that they will do or 
be subject to all those outcomes.)   Stage 3 seems likely to 
inflame these arguments even further.   

So, how will they react to NT, or on this scale, stage 4?  If the 
technology is a tenth as powerful as we think it is, they will 
totally freak.  It will be their worst nightmare.  (Think what 
Greenpeace will do with the archives of the discussion over grey 
goo.)  And by then the sceptics might have had three separate if 
overlapping anti-technology campaigns under their belt.  (Four, 
if you count the campaign against nuclear power, which is where 
many of the leaders of the anti-biotech movement evolved their 
tactics and rhetoric.)  They will be seasoned warriors with 
decades of experience in scaring off markets and investment, 
recruiting and organizing, manipulating the media, staging 
events, and agitating for the most onerous and expensive regime 
of regulation possible.   They may well be powerful enough to 
drive whole categories of NT research underground, which will 
probably end up poorly, even on their terms. 

So the question is:  what can be done, if anything, to give the 
society a stake in the technology as a whole (as apart from 
specific applications)?  Is there anything to be learned from the 
current travails of the biotech industry?

Fred Hapgood

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Stark Design is offering a free statistical mechanics simulator 
at www.starkdesign.com/sciam.  Very impressive and improbably 
fast. Contains modules that demo diffusion, osmotic pressure, 
etc.  Supports electrostatic interactions, which means you can 
model annealling.  To repeat: free.  For yet more information, 
check out http://earth.thesphere.com/SAS.

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Announcement Archive: 
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