By: Jim Taylor

The question that science never asks itself


The news item almost sneaked by on an inside page of my newspaper. Associated Press reported that scientists expect to create artificial life within three to ten years.

        This is not just genetic manipulation of existing DNA, to create some new variant of a fruit fly or a tomato. It’s synthetic life, starting from scratch.

        It means inviting the raw materials of DNA to form totally new genetic combinations. Scientists will create a cell membrane to contain this DNA, enabling it to mutate and reproduce, and giving it a metabolism that can extract nourishment from its environment.

        If Darwin was right, evolution could begin all over again.

        Of course, they won’t know what kind of life might eventually develop until it happens.

        It could be benign, even beneficial. Perhaps the alien cells will fight our diseases, or absorb greenhouse gases, or gobble toxic wastes.

        On the other hand, it could be catastrophic. The new cells could launch a pandemic. They could prove parasitic, making us their foodstuff.

        As Jared Diamond noted, in his book Collapse, every new technology creates about five times as many problems as it solves.

        The only guarantee is that once created, synthetic life forms cannot be stuffed back into the bottle again.



The genie and the bottle

Should they be created at all? That’s a question science refuses to answer.

        Science never asks whether something should be done. It only asks whether it can be done.

        Science presupposes that knowledge is always good. That is its fundamental conviction, a dogma as unquestioned as any religious belief.

        In recent years, several prominent scientists have attacked religion. Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking restrained themselves to vigorous scepticism; Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris have attacked religion more directly.

        Personally, I think they’ve done religion a favour. They’ve applied the rigour of scientific debate to concepts that many religious people take for granted.

        But they fail, in my view, to apply the same rigour to their own doctrines—even if they wouldn’t use that term. They don’t challenge science’s presumption that if we can find out about something, we should.

        From cloning to nuclear fission, from probing the brain to sending humans to Mars, the scientific enterprise is utterly predictable—if we can imagine it, we will attempt it.

        Science assumes that knowledge is its own justification. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe,” exulted Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of the corporations in the race to create synthetic life.

        “We’re talking about technology that could change our world,” Bedau bubbled, “in ways that are impossible to predict.”



Problems of containment

Bedau admits that there are concerns about creating life that could “run amok,” but insists it can be safely contained.

        Perhaps he should try telling that to the British farmers whose cattle got infected with a rare form of hoof-and-mouth disease supposedly confined to a nearby research laboratory.

        Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant canola has contaminated seeds on neighbouring fields on the prairies.

        In theory, corn should be one of the easiest food plants to control. By selective breeding, humans eliminated varieties of corn that scattered their own kernels. Now corn depends totally on humans for reseeding.

        But the genes of StarLink Maize, originally approved only for animal feed, is now found in corn for human consumption throughout the United States and Canada, and in Egypt, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Japan, and South Korea.

        “You cannot design a system that is 100 per cent foolproof,” says Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher, a molecular geneticist who co-founded London’s Eco-Nexus organization.



Fear of “frankenforests”

If genetic alterations are hard to control in domesticated agriculture, they will be even harder to control in forests.

        Trees are, by their very nature, wild—forests do not exist inside greenhouses or laboratories. Trees also live longer than tomato plants. They grow taller. Therefore winds and birds can carry their seeds farther.

Duke University has found that pollen from pine trees can spread more than a thousand miles.

        To combat deforestation, China planted more than a million poplar trees, genetically engineered to grow faster and bigger.

        The U.S. has more than 150 test plots for genetically modified trees. At least 15 other countries—generally, the nations of the developed world, including Canada—have similar programs going.

        “The technology is moving very quickly, outpacing regulations,” said Anne Petermann, a founder of the Global Justice Ecology Project. “There are no controls in place to properly address or assess the risks.”

        Proponents of genetic manipulation argue that they can render the new trees safely sterile. Even in the relatively controlled environment of agriculture, the track record doesn’t inspire confidence; in the wild, success seems even less likely.

        Besides, a sterile forest would produce no seeds, no flowers, no fruit. It would be a wasteland, a silent green desert, without the resources that thousands of species of birds, insects, reptiles, and mammals depend on.

        “Frankenforests” would be useless for anything but manufacturing.



Pursuit of profit

But the forest industry seems willing to risk even non-sterile trees in its eternal pursuit of profit. In July, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved an application by ArboGen to let a field of genetically modified eucalyptus trees flower and produce seeds.

ArboGen is a $60 million joint venture of International Paper, described as the world’s largest forest and paper company, and another forest products giant, Westvaco.

        Eucalyptus is a fast growing, high yield hardwood. In the short term, that’s good for the forest industry.

        In a longer term, though, eucalyptus is notorious for colonizing native ecosystems. It kills indigenous ground cover and depletes ground water resources, exacerbating droughts. In forest fires, it’s almost explosive. California classes it as plant pest.

        Given this kind of history, it’s unlikely that any new form of life can be contained within a laboratory, forever and ever, amen.

        Maybe science needs to start asking itself ethical questions.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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