The Future: six drivers of global change Part 9

After examining more than thirty studies of this issue, the International Inst.i.tute for Environment and Development concluded that many of the large-scale foreign investments have already failed because of miscalculations concerning difficulties in financing the projects or unrealistic business plans. Part of the underlying problem is a gross imbalance in political power, with elites in nondemocratic governments dealing with multinational corporations and foreign countries to make short-term profits at the expense of the sustainability of their nations' food production capability and often at the expense of poor farmers who are evicted from the land when ownership is transferred.

Several nations suffering from loss of topsoil, sharply declining crop yields, and shortages of freshwater have been forced to increase food imports. Saudi Arabia may have its last wheat harvest in 2013; it previously announced that it will rely entirely on wheat imports by 2016. In the 1970s, fearful that its central role in organizing the OPEC oil embargo might make it vulnerable to a counterembargo on the grain imports it relied upon heavily to feed its people, Saudi Arabia launched a crash program to subsidize (at almost $1,000 per ton) the growing of wheat irrigated with water from a deep nonrenewable aquifer underneath the Arabian Peninsula. However, years later, it belatedly realized that it was rapidly depleting the aquifer and announced cancellation of the program. "The decision to import is to preserve water," said Saudi deputy minister of agriculture for research and development Abdullah al-Obaid. Agriculture absorbs 85 to 90 percent of Saudi Arabia's water, and 80 to 85 percent of that water comes from underground aquifers. (Elsewhere in the region, Israel banned the irrigation of wheat in 2000.) THE OCEANS.

The need to meet increasing demand for freshwater and food, especially protein, has led many to look to the oceans for relief. Saudi Arabia is among many nations that have long dreamed that a logical solution to our water problems will eventually involve desalination of seawater. After all, 97.5 percent of all of the water on Earth is salt.w.a.ter, and most plans to deal with the current and projected shortages of freshwater involve the use and allocation of the other 2.5 percent of Earth's water resources-70 percent of which is locked up in the ice and snow of Antarctica and Greenland.

Unfortunately, even with the best currently available technology, the amount of energy required to remove the salt and other minerals from seawater is so great that even energy-rich Saudi Arabia cannot afford it. It is more beneficial, in their view, to sell the oil they would otherwise have to burn in desalination plants and use the money to purchase the use of water-rich land in Africa. There are, of course, many desalination plants in the world-including in Saudi Arabia. However, the quant.i.ties produced are still relatively small and the expense makes wider use of desalination for the world's growing water needs financially unsustainable.

Nevertheless, there are many scientists and engineers working to invent new, more cost-effective technologies for desalination. Some believe that this challenge is yet another reason why the world should embark on a ma.s.sive, large-scale global effort to accelerate the cost reductions now under way in solar energy. I have seen many intriguing business plans aimed at solving this problem, but none that yet appears to be close to financial feasibility.

As a measure of the desperation that water shortages can cause, one Saudi prince, Mohammed al-Faisal, provided funding to a French engineer, Georges Mougin, to develop a business plan for la.s.soing icebergs in the North Atlantic and then towing them to areas experiencing severe droughts. According to their calculations, a 30-million-ton iceberg could supply 500,000 people with freshwater for a year.

The production of food crops, of course, normally requires both freshwater and topsoil. Some techno-optimists, though, have touted the possibility of growing crops without topsoil in hydroponic facilities where the plants are suspended from racks and supplied with ample amounts of water, nutrients, and sunlight. Unfortunately, hydroponics is the food equivalent of desalination: it is prohibitively expensive, largely because it too is so energy-intensive.

Yet there is one source of high-quality protein that does not require topsoil-seafood. Today, more than 4.3 billion people rely on fish for approximately 15 percent of their animal protein consumption. Unfortunately, however, the demand for fish is far outstripping the supply. Consumption of fish has increased significantly because of two familiar trends: growth in population and growth in per capita consumption. Over the last half century, the average person's fish consumption globally increased from twenty-two pounds per person per year to almost thirty-eight pounds in 2012. As a result, the majority of the world's ocean fisheries have been overexploited and almost one third of fish stocks in the oceans, according to the United Nations, are in danger. Stocks of large fish-tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, and flounder, for example-have been reduced by 90 percent since the 1960s.

Although other factors play a role-including the destruction of coral reefs and changes in ocean temperature and acidity due to global warming pollution-the overexploitation of the ocean fisheries is the princ.i.p.al cause of the decline. The world reached "peak fish" twenty-five years ago. According to the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, "About 80 percent of the world marine fish stocks for which a.s.sessment information is available are fully exploited or overexploited.... The average maximum size of fish caught declined by 22% since 1959 globally for all a.s.sessed communities. There is also an increasing trend of stock collapses over time, with 14% of a.s.sessed stocks collapsed in 2007."

The good news is that ocean fisheries that are carefully managed can and do recover. The United States has led the way in such protections, and many of the U.S. fisheries are now improving in their health and abundance. President George W. Bush enacted an excellent system of protection for a large marine area in the Pacific Ocean northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. However, most fishing countries have not yet followed the example of the U.S. restrictions on overfishing, and global fish consumption is continuing to increase steadily.

Most of the continuing increase in fish consumption is now being supplied by farmed fish. However, there are growing concerns about the rapid expansion of aquaculture-61 percent of which will occur in China over the next seven years. Farmed fish do not have the same healthy qualities as wild fish, and often-particularly if they are imported from China or other jurisdictions that lack adequate environmental enforcement-can be tainted by pollution, antibiotics, and antifungals. In addition, most farmed fish are fed large amounts of smaller wild fish processed for formulated fishmeal. Salmon, for example, are fed at a ratio of five pounds of wild fish for each pound of farmed salmon produced. Consequently, the netting of enormous volumes of small fish in the oceans is now causing further disruption to the ocean food chain.

During an expedition to Antarctica in 2012, I talked with scientists who are deeply concerned about the overexploitation of the krill population in the Antarctic Ocean, largely for fishmeal and pet food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has noted that the overexploitation of so-called industrial species that are used for fishmeal instead of direct human consumption will begin to impose limits on the production of fishmeal and fish oil for aquaculture in 2013. Over half of the fish food in agriculture is now made from plant protein, and some operators are trying to increase that percentage, but it is still difficult to provide essential nutrients economically without fishmeal.

In addition, any major expansion of plant protein dedicated to aquaculture would represent yet another diversion of arable land from the production of food that can be directly consumed by people.

The overexploitation of the oceans, like the reckless depletion of the world's resources of freshwater and topsoil, has increased the amount of attention being paid to the genetic engineering of plants and animals-to give them traits that will enable them to thrive in the new conditions we are creating in the world. Although more than 10 percent of all cropland is now planted with genetically engineered crops, the issues raised are complex, as we shall now see.

* At least, it's noncommunicable by means of pathogens transferred from one person to another; research shows that it is communicable socially in families, communities, and nations in which the people one normally comes into contact with include many who are obese and overweight.

Obesity is also a major risk factor for osteoarthritis and other musculoskeletal disorders, some cancers-particularly colon, breast, and endometrial-and kidney failure. Health experts estimate that the cost of treating these obesity-related diseases consumes roughly 10 to 20 percent of U.S. health care spending each year. Globally, approximately 6.4 percent of the world's adult population now has diabetes, and according to the World Health Organization that number is expected to grow to 7.8 percent in the next seventeen years, to a total of 438 million-more than 70 percent of them in low- and middle-income countries.

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5.

THE REINVENTION OF LIFE AND DEATH.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY, THE DIGITIZATION OF PEOPLE IS CREATING a new capability to change the being in human being. The convergence of the Digital Revolution and the Life Sciences Revolution is altering not only what we know and how we communicate, not just what we do and how we do it-it is beginning to change who we are.

Already, the outsourcing and robosourcing of the genetic, biochemical, and structural building blocks of life itself are leading to the emergence of new forms of microbes, plants, animals, and humans. We are crossing ancient boundaries: the boundary that separates one species from another, the divide between people and animals, and the distinction between living things and man-made machinery.

In mythology, the lines dividing powers reserved for the G.o.ds from those allowed to people were marked by warnings; transgressions were severely punished. Yet no Zeus has forbidden us to introduce human genes into other animals; or to create hybrid creatures by mixing the genes of spiders and goats; or to surgically imbed silicon computer chips into the gray matter of human brains; or to provide a genetic menu of selectable traits for parents who wish to design their own children.

The use of science and technology in an effort to enhance human beings is taking us beyond the outer edges of the moral, ethical, and religious maps bequeathed to us by previous generations. We are now in terra incognita, where the ancient maps sometimes noted, "There Be Monsters." But those with enough courage to sail into the unknown were often richly rewarded, and in this case, the scientific community tells us with great confidence that in health care and other fields great advances await us, even though great wisdom will be needed in deciding how to proceed.

When humankind takes possession of a new and previously unimaginable power, the experience often creates a mixture of exhilaration and trepidation. In the teachings of the Abrahamic religions, the first man and the first woman were condemned to a life of toil when they seized knowledge that had been forbidden them. When Prometheus stole fire from the G.o.ds, he was condemned to eternal suffering. Every day, eagles tore into his flesh and consumed his liver, but every night his liver was regenerated so he could endure the same fate the next morning.

Ironically, scientists at Wake Forest University are now genetically engineering replacement livers in their laboratory bioreactors-and no one doubts that their groundbreaking work is anything but good. The prospects for advances in virtually all forms of health care are creating exhilaration in many fields of medical research-though it is obvious that the culture and practice of medicine, along with all of the health care professions and inst.i.tutions, will soon be as disruptively reorganized as the typewriter and long-playing record businesses before it.

"PRECISION HEALTH CARE"

With exciting and nearly miraculous potential new cures for deadly diseases and debilitating conditions on the research horizon, many health care experts believe that it is inevitable that the practice of medicine will soon be radically transformed. "Personalized medicine," or, as some now refer to it, "precision medicine," is based on digital and molecular models of an individual's genes, proteins, microbial communities, and other sources of medically relevant information. Most experts believe it will almost certainly become the model for medical care.

The ability to monitor and continuously update individuals' health functions and trends will make preventive care much more effective. The new economics of health care driven by this revolution may soon make the traditional insurance model based on large risk pools obsolete because of the huge volume of fine-grained information about every individual that can now be gathered. The role of insurance companies is already being reinvented as these firms begin to adopt digital health models and mine the "big data" being created.

Pharmaceuticals, which are now aimed at large groups of individuals manifesting similar symptoms, will soon be targeted toward genetic and molecular signatures of individual patients. This revolution is already taking place in cancer treatment and in the treatment of "orphan diseases" (those that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S.; the definition varies from country to country). This trend is expected to broaden as our knowledge of diseases improves.

The use of artificial intelligence-like IBM's Watson system-to a.s.sist doctors in making diagnoses and prescribing treatment options promises to reduce medical errors and enhance the skills of physicians. Just as artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the work of lawyers, it will profoundly change the work of doctors. Dr. Eric Topol, in his book The Creative Destruction of Medicine, writes, "This is much bigger than a change; this is the essence of creative destruction as conceptualized by [Austrian economist Joseph] Schumpeter. Not a single aspect of health and medicine today will ultimately be spared or unaffected in some way. Doctors, hospitals, the life science industry, government and its regulatory bodies: all are subject to radical transformation."

Individuals will play a different role in their own health care as well. Numerous medical teams are working with software engineers to develop more sophisticated self-tracking programs that empower individuals to be more successful in modifying unhealthy behaviors in order to manage chronic diseases. Some of these programs facilitate more regular communication between doctors and patients to discuss and interpret the continuous data flows from digital monitors that are on-and inside-the patient's body. This is part of a broader trend known as the "quantified self" movement.

Other programs and apps create social networks of individuals attempting to deal with the same health challenges-partly to take advantage of what scientists refer to as the Hawthorne effect: the simple knowledge that one's progress is being watched by others leads to an improvement in the amount of progress made. For example, some people (I do not include myself in this group) are fond of the new scales that automatically tweet their weight so that everyone who follows them will see their progress or lack thereof. There are new companies being developed based on the translation of landmark clinical trials (such as the Diabetes Prevention Program) from resource-intensive studies into social and digital media programs. Some experts believe that global access to large-scale digital programs aimed at changing destructive behaviors may soon make it possible to significantly reduce the incidence of chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity.

THE NEW ABILITIES scientists have gained to see, study, map, modify, and manipulate cells in living systems are also being applied to the human brain. These techniques have already been used to give amputees the ability to control advanced prosthetic arms and legs with their brains, as if they were using their own natural limbs-by connecting the artificial limbs to neural implants. Doctors have also empowered paralyzed monkeys to operate their arms and hands by implanting a device in the brain that is wired to the appropriate muscles. In addition, these breakthroughs offer the possibility of curing some brain diseases.

Just as the discovery of DNA led to the mapping of the human genome, the discovery of how neurons in the brain connect to and communicate with one another is leading inexorably toward the complete mapping of what brain scientists call the "connectome."* Although the data processing required is an estimated ten times greater than that required for mapping the genome, and even though several of the key technologies necessary to complete the map are still in development, brain scientists are highly confident that they will be able to complete the first "larger-scale maps of neural wiring" within the next few years.

The significance of a complete wiring diagram for the human brain can hardly be overstated. More than sixty years ago, Teilhard de Chardin predicted that "Thought might artificially perfect the thinking instrument itself."

Some doctors are using neural implants to serve as pacemakers for the brains of people who have Parkinson's disease-and provide deep brain stimulation to alleviate their symptoms. Others have used a similar technique to alert people with epilepsy to the first signs of a seizure and stimulate the brain to minimize its impact. Others have long used cochlear implants connected to an external microphone to deliver sound into the brain and the auditory nerve. Interestingly, these devices must be activated in stages to give the brain a chance to adjust to them. In Boston, scientists at the Ma.s.sachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary connected a lens to a blind man's optic nerve, enabling him to perceive color and even to read large print.

Yet for all of the joy and exhilaration that accompany such miraculous advances in health care, there is also an undercurrent of apprehension for some, because the scope, magnitude, and speed of the multiple revolutions in biotechnology and the life sciences will soon require us to make almost G.o.dlike distinctions between what is likely to be good or bad for the entire future of the human species, particularly where permanently modifying the gene pool is concerned. Are we ready to make such decisions? The available evidence would suggest that the answer is not really, but we are going to make them anyway.

A COMPLEX ETHICAL CALCULUS.

We know intuitively that we desperately need more wisdom than we currently have in order to responsibly wield some of these new powers. To be sure, many of the choices are easy because the obvious benefits of most new genetically based interventions make it immoral not to use them. The prospect of eliminating cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, and other deadly and fearsome diseases ensures these new capabilities will proceed at an ever accelerating rate.

Other choices may not be as straightforward. The prospective ability to pick traits like hair and eye color, height, strength, and intelligence to create "designer babies" may be highly appealing to some parents. After all, consider what compet.i.tive parenting has already done for the test preparation industry. If some parents are seen to be giving their children a decisive advantage through the insertion of beneficial genetic traits, other parents may feel that they have to do the same.

Yet some genetic alterations will be pa.s.sed on to future generations and may trigger collateral genetic changes that are not yet fully understood. Are we ready to seize control of heredity and take responsibility for actively directing the future course of evolution? As Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Inst.i.tute of Medicine, put it in 2011, "We will have converted old-style evolution into neo-evolution." Are we ready to make these choices? Again, the answer seems to be no, yet we are going to make them anyway.

But who is the "we" who will make these choices? These incredibly powerful changes are overwhelming the present capacity of humankind for deliberative collective decision making. The atrophy of American democracy and the consequent absence of leadership in the global community have created a power vacuum at the very time when human civilization should be shaping the imperatives of this revolution in ways that protect human values. Instead of seizing the opportunity to drive down health costs and improve outcomes, the United States is decreasing its investment in biomedical research. The budget for the National Inst.i.tutes of Health has declined over the past ten years, and the U.S. education system is waning in science, math, and engineering.

One of the early pioneers of in vitro fertilization, Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, who runs the Los Angeles Fertility Inst.i.tutes, said that the beginning of the age of active trait selection is now upon us. "It's time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand," says Steinberg. One of his colleagues at the center, Marcy Darnovsky, said that the discovery in 2012 of a noninvasive process to sequence a complete fetal genome is already raising "some scenarios that are extremely troubling," adding that among the questions that may emerge from wider use of such tests is "who deserves to be born?"

Richard Hayes, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, expressed his concern that the debate on the ethical questions involved with fetal genomic screening and trait selection thus far has primarily involved a small expert community and that, "Average people feel overwhelmed with the technical detail. They feel disempowered." He also expressed concern that the widespread use of trait selection could lead to "an objectification of children as commodities.... We support the use of [preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD)] to allow couples at risk to have healthy children. But for non-medical, cosmetic purposes, we believe this would undermine humanity and create a techno-eugenic rat race."

Nations are compet.i.tive too. China's Beijing Genomic Inst.i.tute (BGI) has installed 167 of the world's most powerful genomic sequencing machines in their Hong Kong and Shenzhen facilities that experts say will soon exceed the sequencing capacity of the entire United States.

Its initial focus is finding genes a.s.sociated with higher intelligence and matching individual students with professions or occupations that make the best use of their capabilities.

According to some estimates, the Chinese government has spent well over $100 billion on life sciences research over just the last three years, and has persuaded 80,000 Chinese Ph.D.'s trained in Western countries to return to China. One Boston-based expert research team, the Monitor Group, reported in 2010 that China is "poised to become the global leader in life science discovery and innovation within the next decade." China's State Council has declared that its genetic research industry will be one of the pillars of its twenty-first-century industrial ambitions. Some researchers have reported preliminary discussions of plans to eventually sequence the genomes of almost every child in China.

Multinational corporations are also playing a powerful role, quickly exploiting the many advances in the laboratory that have profitable commercial applications. Having invaded the democracy sphere, the market sphere is now also bidding for dominance in the biosphere. Just as Earth Inc. emerged from the interconnection of billions of computers and intelligent devices able to communicate easily with one another across all national boundaries, Life Inc. is emerging from the ability of scientists and engineers to connect flows of genetic information among living cells across all species boundaries.

The merger between Earth Inc. and Life Inc. is well under way. Since the first patent on a gene was allowed by a Supreme Court decision in the U.S. in 1980, more than 40,000 gene patents have been issued, covering 2,000 human genes. So have tissues, including some tissues taken from patients and used for commercial purposes without their permission. (Technically, in order to receive a patent, the owner must transform, isolate, or purify the gene or tissue in some way. In practice, however, the gene or tissue itself becomes commercially controlled by the patent owner.) There are obvious advantages to the use of the power of the profit motive and of the private sector in exploiting the new revolution in the life sciences. In 2012, the European Commission approved the first Western gene therapy drug, known as Glybera, in a treatment of a rare genetic disorder that prevents the breakdown of fat in blood. In August 2011, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a drug known as Crizotinib for the targeted treatment of a rare type of lung cancer driven by a gene mutation.

However, the same imbalance of power that has produced dangerous levels of inequality in income is also manifested in the unequal access to the full range of innovations important to humanity flowing out of the Life Sciences Revolution. For example, one biotechnology company-Monsanto-now controls patents on the vast majority of all seeds planted in the world. A U.S. seed expert, Neil Harl of Iowa State University, said in 2010, "We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of [seed genetics]."

The race to patent genes and tissues is in stark contrast to the att.i.tude expressed by the discoverer of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, when he was asked by Edward R. Murrow, "This vaccine is going to be in great demand. Everyone's going to want it. It's potentially very lucrative. Who holds the patent?" In response, Salk said, "The American people, I guess. Could you patent the sun?"

THE DIGITIZATION OF LIFE.

In Salk's day, the idea of patenting life science discoveries intended for the greater good seemed odd. A few decades later, one of Salk's most distinguished peers, Norman Borlaug, implemented his Green Revolution with traditional crossbreeding and hybridization techniques at a time when the frenzy of research into the genome was still in its early stages. Toward the end of his career, Borlaug referred to the race in the U.S. to lock down ownership of patents on genetically modified plants, saying, "G.o.d help us if that were to happen, we would all starve." He opposed the dominance of the market sphere in plant genetics and told an audience in India, "We battled against patenting ... and always stood for free exchange of germplasm." The U.S. and the European Union both recognize patents on isolated or purified genes. Recent cases in the U.S. appellate courts continue to uphold the patentability of genes.

On one level, the digitization of life is merely a twenty-first-century continuation of the story of humankind's mastery over the world. Alone among life-forms, we have the ability to make complex informational models of reality. Then, by learning from and manipulating the models, we gain the ability to understand and manipulate the reality. Just as the information flowing through the Global Mind is expressed in ones and zeros-the binary building blocks of the Digital Revolution-the language of DNA spoken by all living things is expressed in four letters: A, T, C, and G.

Even leaving aside its other miraculous properties, DNA's information storage capacity is incredible. In 2012, a research team at Harvard led by George Church encoded a book with more than 50,000 words into strands of DNA and then read it back with no errors. Church, a molecular biologist, said a billion copies of the book could be stored in a test tube and be retrieved for centuries, and that "a device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole internet."

At a deeper level, however, the discovery of how to manipulate the designs of life itself marks the beginning of an entirely new story. In the decade following the end of World War II, the double helix structure of DNA was discovered by James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin. (Franklin was, historians of science now know, unfairly deprived of recognition for her seminal contributions to the scientific paper announcing the discovery in 1953. She died before the n.o.bel Prize in Medicine was later awarded to Watson and Crick.) In 2003, exactly fifty years later, the human genome was sequenced.

Even as the scientific community is wrestling with the challenges of all the data involved in DNA sequencing, they are beginning to sequence RNA (ribonucleic acid), which scientists are finding plays a far more sophisticated role than simply serving as a messenger system to convey the information that is translated into proteins. The proteins themselves-which among other things actually build and control the cells that make up all forms of life-are being a.n.a.lyzed in the Human Proteome Project, which must deal with a further large increase in the amount of data involved. Proteins take many different forms and are "folded" in patterns that affect their function and role. After they are "translated," proteins can also be chemically modified in multiple ways that extend their range of functions and control their behavior. The complexity of this a.n.a.lytical challenge is far beyond that involved in sequencing the genome.

"Epigenetics" involves the study of inheritable changes that do not involve a change in the underlying DNA. The Human Epigenome Project has made major advances in the understanding of these changes. Several pharmaceutical products based on epigenetic breakthroughs are already helping cancer patients, and other therapeutics are being tested in human clinical trials. The decoding of the underpinnings of life, health, and disease is leading to many exciting diagnostic and therapeutic breakthroughs.

In the same way that the digital code used by computers contains both informational content and operating instructions, the intricate universal codes of biology now being deciphered and catalogued make it possible not only to understand the blueprints of life-forms, but also to change their designs and functions. By transferring genes from one species to another and by creating novel DNA strands of their own design, scientists can insert them into life-forms to transform and commandeer them to do what they want them to do. Like viruses, these DNA strands are not technically "alive" because they cannot replicate themselves. But also like viruses, they can take control of living cells and program behaviors, including the production of custom chemicals that have value in the marketplace. They can also program the replication of the DNA strands that were inserted into the life-form.

The introduction of synthetic DNA strands into living organisms has already produced beneficial advances. More than thirty years ago, one of the first breakthroughs was the synthesis of human insulin to replace less effective insulin produced from pigs and other animals. In the near future, scientists antic.i.p.ate significant improvements in artificial skin and synthetic human blood. Others hope to engineer changes in cyan.o.bacteria to produce products as diverse as fuel for vehicles and protein for human consumption.

But the spread of the technology raises questions that are troubling to bioethicists. As the head of one think tank studying this science put it, "Synthetic biology poses what may be the most profound challenge to government oversight of technology in human history, carrying with it significant economic, legal, security and ethical implications that extend far beyond the safety and capabilities of the technologies themselves. Yet by dint of economic imperative, as well as the sheer volume of scientific and commercial activity underway around the world, it is already functionally unstoppable ... a juggernaut already beyond the reach of governance."

Because the digitization of life coincides with the emergence of the Global Mind, whenever a new piece of the larger puzzle being solved is put in place, research teams the world over instantly begin connecting it to the puzzle pieces they have been dealing with. The more genes that are sequenced, the easier and faster it is for scientists to map the network of connections between those genes and others that are known to appear in predictable patterns.

As Jun w.a.n.g, executive director of the Beijing Genomics Inst.i.tute, put it, there is a "strong network effect ... the health profile and personal genetic information of one individual will, to a certain extent, provide clues to better understand others' genomes and their medical implications. In this sense, a personal genome is not only for one, but also for all humanity."

An unprecedented collaboration in 2012 among more than 500 scientists at thirty-two different laboratories around the world resulted in a major breakthrough in the understanding of DNA bits that had been previously dismissed as having no meaningful role. They discovered that this so-called junk DNA actually contains millions of "on-off switches" arrayed in extremely complex networks that play crucial roles in controlling the function and interaction of genes. While this landmark achievement resulted in the identification of the function of 80 percent of DNA, it also humbled scientists with the realization that they are a very long way from fully understanding how genetic regulation of life really works. Job Dekker, a molecular biophysicist at the University of Ma.s.sachusetts Medical School, said after the discovery that every gene is surrounded by "an ocean of regulatory elements" in a "very complicated three-dimensional structure," only one percent of which has yet been described.

The Global Mind has also facilitated the emergence of an Internet-based global marketplace in so-called biobricks-DNA strands with known properties and reliable uses-that are easily and inexpensively available to teams of synthetic biologists. Scientists at MIT, including the founder of the BioBricks Foundation, Ron Weiss, have catalyzed the creation of the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, which is serving as a global repository, or universal library, for thousands of DNA segments-segments that can be used as genetic building blocks of code free of charge. In the same way that the Internet has catalyzed the dispersal of manufacturing to hundreds of thousands of locations, it is also dispersing the basic tools and raw materials of genetic engineering to laboratories on every continent.

THE GENOME EFFECT.

The convergence of the Digital Revolution and the Life Sciences Revolution is accelerating these developments at a pace that far outstrips even the speed with which computers are advancing. To ill.u.s.trate how quickly this radical change is unfolding, the cost of sequencing the first human genome ten years ago was approximately $3 billion. But in 2013 detailed digital genomes of individuals are expected to be available at a cost of only $1,000 per person.

At that price, according to experts, genomes will become routinely used in medical diagnoses, in the tailoring of pharmaceuticals to an individual's genetic design, and for many other purposes. In the process, according to one genomic expert, "It will raise a host of public policy issues (privacy, security, disclosure, reimburs.e.m.e.nt, interpretation, counseling, etc.), all important topics for future discussions." In the meantime, a British company announced in 2012 that it will imminently begin selling a small disposable gene-sequencing machine for less than $900.

For the first few years, the cost reduction curve for the sequencing of individual human genomes roughly followed the 50 percent drop every eighteen to twenty-four months that has long been measured by Moore's Law. But at the end of 2007, the cost for sequencing began to drop at a significantly faster pace-in part because of the network effect, but mainly because multiple advances in the technologies involved in sequencing allowed significant increases in the length of DNA strands that can be quickly a.n.a.lyzed. Experts believe that these extraordinary cost reductions will continue at breakneck speed for the foreseeable future. As a result, some companies, including Life Technologies, are producing synthetic genomes on the a.s.sumption that the pace of discovery in genomics will continue to accelerate.

By contrast, the distillation of wisdom is a process that normally takes considerable time, and the molding of wisdom into accepted rules by which we can guide our choices takes more time still. For almost 4,000 years, since the introduction by Hammurabi of the first written set of laws, we have developed legal codes by building on precedents that we have come to believe embody the distilled wisdom of past judgments made well. Yet the great convergence in science being driven by the digitization of life-with overlapping and still accelerating revolutions in genetics, epigenetics, genomics, proteomics, microbiomics, optogenetics, regenerative medicine, neuroscience, nanotechnology, materials science, cybernetics, supercomputing, bioinformatics, and other fields-is presenting us with new capabilities faster than we can discern the deeper meaning and full implications of the choices they invite us to make.

For example, the impending creation of completely new forms of artificial life capable of self-replication should, arguably, be the occasion for a full discussion and debate about not only the risks, benefits, and appropriate safeguards, but also an exploration of the deeper implications of crossing such an epochal threshold. In the prophetic words of Teilhard de Chardin in the mid-twentieth century, "We may well one day be capable of producing what the Earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce: a new wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life."

The scientists who are working hard to achieve this breakthrough are understandably excited and enthusiastic, and the incredibly promising benefits expected to flow from their hoped-for accomplishment seem reason enough to proceed full speed ahead. As a result, it certainly seems timorous to even raise the sardonic question "What could go wrong?"

MORE THAN A little, it seems-or at least it seems totally reasonable to explore the question. Craig Venter, who had already made history by sequencing his own genome, made history again in 2010 by creating the first live bacteria made completely from synthetic DNA. Although some scientists minimized the accomplishment by pointing out that Venter had merely copied the blueprint of a known bacterium, and had used the empty sh.e.l.l of another as the container for his new life-form, others marked it as an important turning point.

In July 2012, Venter and his colleagues, along with a scientific team at Stanford, announced the completion of a software model containing all of the genes (525 of them-the smallest number known), cells, RNA, proteins, and metabolites (small molecules generated in cells) of an organism-a free-living microbe known as Mycoplasma genitalium. Venter is now working to create a unique artificial life-form in a project that is intended to discover the minimum amount of DNA information necessary for self-replication. "We are trying to understand the fundamental principles for the design of life, so that we can redesign it-in the way an intelligent designer would have done in the first place, if there had been one," Venter said. His reference to an "intelligent designer" seems intended as implicit dismissal of creationism and reflects a newly combative att.i.tude that many scientists have understandably come to feel is appropriate in response to the aggressive attacks on evolution by many fundamentalists.

One need not believe in a deity, however, in order to entertain the possibility that the web of life has an emergent holistic integrity featuring linkages we do not yet fully understand and which we might not risk disrupting if we did. Even though our understanding of hubris originated in ancient stories about the downfall of men who took for themselves powers reserved for the G.o.ds, its deeper meaning-and the risk it often carries-is rooted in human arrogance and pride, whether or not it involves an offense against the deity. As Shakespeare wrote, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." For all of us, hubris is inherent in human nature. Its essence includes prideful overconfidence in the completeness of one's own understanding of the consequences of exercising power in a realm that may well have complexities that still extend beyond the understanding of any human.

Nor is the posture of fundamentalism unique to the religious. Reductionism-the belief that scientific understanding is usually best pursued by breaking down phenomena into their component parts and subparts-has sometimes led to a form of selective attention that can cause observers to overlook emergent phenomena that arise in complex systems, and in their interaction with other complex systems.

One of the world's most distinguished evolutionary biologists, E. O. Wilson, has been bitterly attacked by many of his peers for his proposal that Darwinian selection operates not only at the level of individual members of a species, but also at the level of "superorganisms"-by which he means that adaptations serving the interests of a species as a whole may be selected even if they do not enhance the prospects for survival of the individual creatures manifesting those adaptations. Wilson, who was but is no longer a Christian, is not proposing "intelligent design" of the sort believed in by creationists. He is, rather, a.s.serting that there is another layer to the complexity of evolution that operates on an "emergent" level.

Francis Collins, a devout Christian who headed the U.S. government's Human Genome Project (which announced its results at the same time that Craig Venter announced his), has bemoaned the "increasing polarization between the scientific and spiritual worldviews, much of it, I think, driven by those who are threatened by the alternatives and who are unwilling to consider the possibility that there might be harmony here.... We have to recognize that our understanding of nature is something that grows decade by decade, century by century."

Venter, for his part, is fully confident that enough is already known to justify a large-scale project to reinvent life according to a human design. "Life evolved in a messy fashion through random changes over three billion years," he says. "We are designing it so that there are modules for different functions, such as chromosome replication and cell division, and then we can decide what metabolism we want it to have."

ARTIFICIAL LIFE.

As with many of the startling new advances in the life sciences, the design and creation of artificial life-forms offers the credible promise of breakthroughs in health care, energy production, environmental remediation, and many other fields. One of the new products Venter and other scientists hope to create is synthetic viruses engineered to destroy or weaken antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These synthetic viruses-or bacteriophages-can be programmed to attack only the targeted bacteria, leaving other cells alone. These viruses utilize sophisticated strategies to not only kill the bacteria but also use the bacteria before it dies to replicate the synthetic virus so that it can go on killing other targeted bacteria until the infection subsides.

The use of new synthetic organisms for the acceleration of vaccine development is also generating great hope. These synthetic vaccines are being designed as part of the world's effort to prepare for potential new pandemics like the bird flu (H5N1) of 2007 and the so-called swine flu (H1N1) of 2009. Scientists have been particularly concerned that the H5N1 bird flu is now only a few mutations away from developing an ability to pa.s.s from one human to another through airborne transmission.

The traditional process by which vaccines are developed requires a lengthy development, production, and testing cycle of months, not days, which makes it nearly impossible for doctors to obtain adequate supplies of the vaccine after a new mutant of the virus begins spreading. Scientists are using the tools of synthetic biology to accelerate the evolution of existing flu strains in the laboratory and they hope to be able to predict which new strains are most likely to emerge. Then, by studying their blueprints, scientists hope to preemptively synthesize vaccines that will be able to stop whatever mutant of the virus subsequently appears in the real world and stockpile supplies in antic.i.p.ation of the new virus's emergence. Disposable biofactories are being set up around the world to decrease the cost and time of manufacturing of vaccines. It is now possible to set up a biofactory in a remote rural village where the vaccine is needed quickly to stop the spread of a newly discovered strain of virus or bacteria.

Some experts have also predicted that synthetic biology may supplant 15 to 20 percent of the global chemical industry within the next few years, producing many chemical products more cheaply than they can be extracted from natural sources, producing pharmaceutical products, bioplastics, and other new materials. Some predict that this new approach to chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing will-by using the 3D printing technique described in Chapter 1-revolutionize the production process by utilizing a "widely dispersed" strategy. Since most of the value lies in the information, which can easily be transmitted to unlimited locations, the actual production process by which the information is translated into production of Synthetic Biology products can be located almost anywhere.

These and other exciting prospects expected to accompany the advances in synthetic biology and the creation of artificial life-forms have led many to impatiently dismiss any concerns about unwanted consequences. This impatience is not of recent vintage. Ninety years ago, English biochemist J. B. S. Haldane wrote an influential essay that provoked a series of futurist speculations about human beings taking active control of the future course of evolution. In an effort to place in context-and essentially dismiss-the widespread uneasiness about the subject, he wrote: The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some G.o.d. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.

By contrast, Leon Ka.s.s, who chaired the U.S. Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, has argued that the intuition or feeling that something is somehow repugnant should not be automatically dismissed as antiscientific: "In some crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power completely to articulate it.... We intuit and we feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear."

In Chapter 2, the word "creepy" was used by several observers of trends unfolding in the digital world, such as the ubiquitous tracking of voluminous amounts of information about most people who use the Internet. As others have noted, "creepy" is an imprecise word because it describes a feeling that itself lacks precision-not fear, but a vague uneasiness about something whose nature and implications are so unfamiliar that we feel the need to be alert to the possibility that something fearful or harmful might emerge. There is a comparably indeterminate "pre-fear" that many feel when contemplating some of the onrushing advances in the world of genetic engineering.

An example: a method for producing spider silk has been developed by genetic engineers who insert genes from orb-making spiders into goats which then secrete the spider silk-along with milk-from their udders. Spider silk is incredibly useful because it is both elastic and five times stronger than steel by weight. The spiders themselves cannot be farmed because of their antisocial, cannibalistic nature. But the insertion of their silk-producing genes in the goats allows not only a larger volume of spider silk to be produced, but also allows the farming of the goats.

In any case, there is no doubt that the widespread use of synthetic biology-and particularly the use of self-replicating artificial life-forms-could potentially generate radical changes in the world, including some potential changes that arguably should be carefully monitored. There are, after all, too many examples of plants and animals purposely introduced into a new, nonnative environment that then quickly spread out of control and disrupted the ecosystem into which they were introduced.

Kudzu, a j.a.panese plant that was introduced into my native Southern United States as a means of combating soil erosion, spread wildly and became a threat to native trees and plants. It became known as "the vine that ate the South." Do we have to worry about "microbial kudzu" if a synthetic life-form capable of self-replication is introduced into the biosphere for specific useful purposes, but then spreads rapidly in ways that have not been predicted or even contemplated?

Often in the past, urgent questions raised about powerful new breakthroughs in science and technology have focused on potentially catastrophic disaster scenarios that turned out to be based more on fear than reason-when the questions that should have been pursued were about other more diffuse impacts. For example, on the eve of the Bikini Atoll test of the world's first hydrogen bomb in 1954, a few scientists raised the concern that the explosion could theoretically trigger a chain reaction in the ocean and create an unimaginable ecological Armageddon.