Meeting notice: The 99.11.02 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: The Politics of NT ... hit them where they are weak... Destroy their crops, equipment, buildings, vehicles, ... everything is up for grabs. ...if corporations, governemnts and Universities have any relationship to biotechnology, they are targets... It's harvest time. - Johnna Appleseed of RECLAIM THE SEEDS, an anti-genetic engineering group. If the relatively mild and modest applications of self- replicating technologies to date, involving the transfer of naturally evolved and ecologically established genetic material, have stirred this kind of reaction, what, one wonders, will full-bodied NT do? From the point of view of such critics, NT looks like a proposal to invent entirely new organisms, even new ecologies. It is easy to imagine (especially since accidents will certainly happen, since they always do) such groups sponsoring serious unpleasantness; the media happily fanning the flames; politicians falling all over themselves to regulate and ban; and the field being driven underground, where it would fall into the hands of whomever it finds in residence there. Can this prospect be avoided, or, if not avoided, at least minimized? One place to begin is with the headscratching now going on over how the introduction of biotech might have been better managed. An example is a report by the Global Environmental Change Programme (http://www.gecko.ac.uk) In summary, the report recommends that: Government and industry should greatly expand their initial experiments with new ways of making decisions on issues like GM food - such as using consensus conferences, citizens juries, focus groups and deliberative polls - and be a more intelligent customer for the knowledge such experiments produce. This requires taking a more precautionary approach, legislating to back this up, a wider understanding of the nature of risk, greater openness, more rigorous scientific monitoring of effects and a willingness to adapt policy decisions on the basis of evidence from a wide range of sources. Only then is the crucial ingredient of trust likely to come back into the publics view of managing change. This is certainly one approach. However, it is worth noting that as a technological civilization we have a few centuries of experience with anti-technology movements and that history does not clearly support these suggestions. The campaign against fluoridation in the 50's was intense and well- organized and had a good story to tell (who among us is comfortable with the idea of state- sponsored involuntary medication?). Today opposition to fluoridation (for better or worse!) has been reduced to a handful of muttering cranks. How did we get from here to there? Did the dentists organize consensus conferences and focus groups? They did not: they demonized their critics as mentally unstable tools of the John Birch Society and ran right over them. Is there a lesson for the sector in *that*? For that matter, we still have more than a hundred operating nuclear power plants in this country. When was the last time there was an action against any of them? Where have those groups gone? (Into the anti-biotech movement, in some cases.) I have a vague sense that the anti- nuclear movement began to lose steam after Three Mile Island. That seems counter-intuitive, but perhaps catastrophes actually help people put a technology in perspective, both by actualizing their fears (which can shrink them) and by giving the society a chance to see itself dealing with a real problem. The historical pattern suggests that as our sense of a technology shifts from fantasy to experience, from what will be to what is and has been, the stakes (for better as well as worse) go down and our self-confidence about dealing with the negative consequences, whatever they might be, goes up. The details of how this happens, how a culture accommodates to and internalizes new technologies, are mysterious and to my knowledge have never been studied. Given the stakes and prospects, this is a subject that the Foresight Institute might well want to look into. Fred Hapgood <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> The New England Complex Systems Institute is introducing two new discussion forums: complex-science@necsi.org scholarly discussion of complex systems principles in science and application to physical, biological and social systems. complex-community@necsi.org personal discussion of topics related to the community of complex systems researchers and the societal context. To subscribe to the lists send e-mail to: complex-science-on@necsi.org complex-community-on@necsi.org <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Announcement Archive: http://world.std.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg-d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. 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