Reason Magazine - Topics > Biotechnology

Richard Cohen Regrets my Tattoos for Me

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:33:00 EDT

Richard Cohen wrote a ridiculous, no good, very bad column about tattoos for today's Washington Post. I've excerpted the most polemical parts of the piece to give you an idea of his thesis:

Tattoos are the emblems of our age....The tattoo is the battle flag of today in its war with tomorrow. It is carried by sure losers.
About 40 percent of younger Americans (26 to 40) have tattoos. About 100 percent of these have clothes they once loved but now hate. How can anyone who knows how fickle fashion is, how times change, how their own tastes have "improved," decorate their body in a way that's nearly permanent? I don't get it....
The permanence of the moment—the conviction that now is forever—explains what has happened to the American economy. We are, as a people, deeply in debt. We are, as a nation, deeply in debt. The average American household owes more than its yearly income. We save almost nothing (0.4 percent of disposable income) and spend almost everything (99.6 percent of disposable income) in the hope that tomorrow will be a lot like today....
[T]he tattoos of today are not minor affairs or miniatures placed on the body where only an intimate or an internist would see them. Today's are gargantuan, inevitably tacky, gauche and ugly. They bear little relationship to the skin that they're on. They don't represent an indelible experience or membership in some sort of group but an assertion that today's whim will be tomorrow's joy.

For those of you who lost count, here's a quick list of Cohen's claims: Old people tattoos are thoughtful, discreet, and better than young people tattoos, which are ugly, tacky, thoughtless and never tied to a group identity; one will feel roughly the same way towards one's tattoos several years after getting them as one does towards one's clothes several years after they have gone out of style; and the mentality that leads a young person to get a tattoo is the root of America's eminent economic demise.

Wow, Cohen sure knows an awful lot about tattoos for someone who doesn't have any. His knowledge of economics is far more impressive. I'll refrain from defending body modification culture, which is as diverse and fascinating as the people who comprise it, because Cohen's lazy stereotyping doesn't deserve an extended rebuttal. And while I'm tempted to deconstruct his tenuous parallel between Social Security, the illusion of permanence, and tramp stamps, I will instead respond with a sampling of the statistics that would have forced Cohen to abort his column in the conceptual stage, or at least find a different whipping boy for his economic frustrations, had he bothered to do his homework:

How do people without tattoos feel about those with them?

Many Americans who do not have tattoos said they think that people with tattoos are less attractive (42%), less sexy (36%) and less intelligent (31%). They also think that those with tattoos are more rebellious (57%). In contrast, only 29% of those with tattoos think they are more rebellious.
Do people regret getting tattoos?
A majority of Americans with tattoos (83%) do not regret getting them, while 17% do feel regret. The survey found that regret for getting a tattoo was highest among tattooed Republicans (24%) and among those living in the South (21%). And, the reason cited most often for feeling regret about getting tattoos was "because of the person's name in the tattoo" (16%).

Thank you, Mr. Cohen, for regretting my tattoos for me.

Will Humanity Survive the 21st Century?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Oxford, England—"The good news is that no existential catastrophe has happened," declared Nick Bostrom. "Not one. Yet." Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute opened what he thinks might be the first ever conference to comprehensively consider the gamut of Global Catastrophic Risks. By existential catastrophes Bostrom means that humanity has survived extinction so far. However, he quickly pointed out 99.9 percent of all species are extinct. Bostrom cited the Toba super-eruption 73,000 years ago which may have produced a global winter that reduced the population of human ancestors to fewer than 500 fertile women (though some disagree). Our Neanderthal relatives died out between 33,000 and 24,000 years ago. In Our Final Hour, Lord Martin Rees predicted that there was only a 50 percent chance that our civilization would survive to 2100.

Bostrom justified the broad topic of global catastrophic risks by pointing to common causal links, e.g., super-volcanoes, asteroid strikes, and nuclear wars all have the potential to produce disastrous global cooling. Catastrophic scenarios also present common methodological, analytical, and cultural challenges. And, argues Bostrom, a wider view of potential catastrophes is necessary for the adoption of proper policies and informed prioritization. To assist in this effort, the conference is launching the eponymous volume, Global Catastrophic Risks.

Bostrom did note that people today are safer from small to medium threats than ever before. As evidence he cites increased life expectancy from 18 years in the Bronze Age to 64 years today (the World Health Organizations thinks it's 66 years). And he urged the audience not to let future existential risks occlude our view of current disasters, such as 15 million people dying of infectious diseases every year, 3 million from HIV/AIDS, 18 million from cardiovascular diseases, and 8 million per year from cancer. Bostrom did note that, "All of the biggest risks, the existential risks are seen to be anthropogenic, that is, they originate from human beings." The biggest risks include nuclear war, biotech plagues, and nanotechnology arms races. The good news is that the biggest existential risks are probably decades away, which means we have time to analyze them and develop countermeasures.

A small, and rather dapper audience gathered in the Rhodes Trust Lecture theatre at the Said Business School in Oxford to listen to Bostrom and keynote speaker, Sir Crispin Tickell, expound on the end of the world. Tickell, it turns out, is mostly an old-fashioned Green catastrophist. The main problems he sees are overpopulation and dwindling resources, with climate change thrown in for good measure. As far as I could tell, Tickell thinks that everything started going downhill with the invention of farming, and forget about the horror of the Industrial Revolution! Doom lurks in six big issues for Tickell: overpopulation, land degradation, freshwater shortages, climate change, fossil fuel energy generation, and biodevastation of species. He later mentioned a seventh factor, the curse of dangerous new technologies.

I won't deal here with all of Tickell's challenges, but it is interesting that he did admit that fertility rates are falling around the world. In addition, he claimed that since we are "close to running out of freshwater," that water wars could dominate the 21st century. Thus Tickell propagated the stale water wars meme that most empirical evidence has shown to be false. Transboundary water cooperation rather than conflict is the norm. "The simple explanation is that water is simply too important to fight over," Aaron Wolf, the Oregon State University professor who heads up the Program in Water Conflict Management, told Reuters.

While a massive reduction in biodiversity would be a tragedy, at least some researchers don't believe that biodiversity losses pose an existential threat to humanity. For example, Martin Jenkins from the United Nations Environment Program argues that even if the dire projections of extinction rates being made by conservation advocates are correct, they "will not, in themselves, threaten the survival of humans as a species." He adds, "In truth, ecologists and conservationists have struggled to demonstrate the increased material benefits to humans of 'intact' wild systems over largely anthropogenic ones [like farms].... Where increased benefits of natural systems have been shown, they are usually marginal and local."

Tickell indulged in the conceit of looking back 100 years to see how the world got to its happy state in 2100. By then, he foresees a more globalized world linked by instantaneous communications networks, where human numbers in cities will be reduced, not least because human population will have fallen to 2.5 billion. Communities will be more dispersed, agriculture will be more local, energy and transport will be decentralized. Quite idyllic. Except for the communications networks, Tickell's world in 2100 sounds a lot like 1950 when world population was 2.5 billion and Sir Crispin was a green youth of twenty. Nostalgia?

During the question period, Tickell owned up to being something of a neo-Malthusian and was eagerly looking forward to reading Paul and Anne Ehrlich's new book, The Dominant Animal. Tickell reported that he had heard that Ehrlich writes in this new book that he got his timing wrong on when the "population bomb" would finally explode. Later over a glass of wine, I pointed out to Tickell that this is exactly what Ehrlich told me when I interviewed for him for an article in Forbes magazine back 1990. I'm sure that he was sincere when he said that he was sorry, but he had suddenly remembered that he had an urgent appointment elsewhere. About Ehrlich's new book, Crispin admitted, "I thought to myself, 'Ho, ho, the Neo-Malthusians rise again.'" Alas, they always do.

Tomorrow, the Oxford conference on Global Catastrophic Risks will have more edifying (and frightening?) presentations on proposals for recovering from social collapses occasioned by catastrophes; how to rationally consider the end of the world; how to avoid Millennialist cognitive biases; how to insure against catastrophes; how ecological diversity could affect human prospects; and the tragedy of the uncommons.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

TEOTWAWKI!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Oxford, England—People have long been fascinated by the end of the world. Some interpretations of Hindu scripture suggest that the world will end with the imminent conclusion of the current Kali Yuga cycle. Some New Agers believe that the world will undergo apocalyptic changes as the Maya Long Count calendar comes to an end on December 21, 2012. Some Christian End Timers believe that the period preceding the Day of Judgment described in the Book of Revelation is now upon us. Religious believers are not alone in their fascination with doomsday. Secular catastrophists predict environmental doom or worry about calamity raining down on us from outer space.

This week the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, headed by bioprogressive philosopher Nick Bostrom, is convening a conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. The Institute's work focuses on how radical technological developments such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and life-extension treatments will affect the human condition. One of the Institute's research programs is global catastrophic risks which mulls questions like: What are the biggest threats to global civilization and human well-being? Will the human species survive the 21st century?

The savants gathered here in Oxford will consider a wide variety of potentially apocalyptic risks. For example, Michelangelo Mangano from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will explore the possibility that certain scientific research—e.g., the Brookhaven Lab's high energy experiments that might produce a black hole—could inadvertently destroy the world. Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology will discuss how the advent of molecular manufacturing could lead to massive economic and social disruptions, including a new arms race, the spread of tyranny, and dangerous environmental degradation. At the cosmic level, the Technion Institute's Arnon Dar will look at the devastation that a nearby supernova could wreak, and astronomer and author William Napier will evaluate the chances that the earth might soon suffer an asteroid strike. Whether future advanced artificial intelligences will think of us as pets or pests will be pondered by Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In addition to the more exotic risks noted above, the conferees will also be discussing the prospects for nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. More reassuringly, Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security fellow Ali Nouri is apparently set to argue that trends in biotechnology are making it less likely that bad guys could unleash a man-made plague. On an even happier note, technoprogressive bioethicist James Hughes will discuss how to avoid cognitive biases toward over-pessimism and over-optimism. And Steve Rayner, director of Oxford's James Martin Institute (which is co-sponsoring the conference), will point out that much contemporary doomsaying shares cultural characteristics with earlier superstitious predictions of imminent catastrophe.

The whole cheery conference kicks off this evening with a talk by Sir Crispin Tickell entitled, "Humans: Past, Present and Future." Apparently Tickell buys into the whole litany of environmentalist doom. However, he thinks that doom can be avoided if we "radically change our thinking on global governance" and pursue some "interesting" technological options.

This is the first dispatch from the Oxford conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. Since the conference runs through the weekend, future dispatches will report various gloomy presentations chiefly as blog posts at reason online. I will finish up coverage of the conference with my science column next Tuesday.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

If It's OK for Navy SEALs, Why Not College Kids?

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:57:00 EDT

Slate's William Saletan sized up the Pentagon's Human Performance study and concluded that fears of genetically enhanced super humans are unfounded. Unless, of course, there's something scary about arming soldiers to the teeth and then keeping them awake for three days:

[The study]involved tests of the effects of caffeine on performance for a group of Navy SEALs, following 72 hours of intense training activity with almost total sleep deprivation. A variety of metrics were used, including computer-based tests of reaction speed and mental acuity, psychiatric self-assessment surveys, and marksmanship tests. The test was to determine the optimal caffeine dose to ameliorate the effects of fatigue and stress.

The authors of the report do their best to avoid openly condoning the use of amphetamines without a prescription, with disclaimers like this one:

The use of supplements, primarily to ameliorate sleep deprivation and to improve physical performance, is report[ed] to be common among US military personnel. This behavior is a cultural norm in the US and is recognized, but not endorsed, by the US military. For instance the PX at most military bases stock popular supplements.

But as Saletan points out, it's tricky to condemn amphetamine use when it works so well. This is one instance where the military is a little behind the curve. Attention deficit medications work much better than caffeine does when pulling an all-nighter, as reason contributor Juliet Samuel explained here.

Still unable to dismiss your fears of a military state maintained by superhuman mech warriors? Me too.

The Gay Science

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:14:00 EDT

The gay blogosphere is heralding the results of a new study from the Karolinska Institute that provides even more evidence that sexual orientation is biological, as "the most compelling evidence yet that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait."

According to the study, gay men's brains resemble those of straight women, and gay women's brains resemble those of straight men. But while victories like California warrant popping the cork on some champagne, this occasion is far more ambiguous.

Blogger Breaktheterror leads his post on the study by calling it something that the "Religious Right never, ever, ever wants you to see," but the truth is exactly the opposite. Opponents of gay rights have been steadily losing ground in the political fight to maintain a moralistic hetero-hegemony, and they're adapting their culture war strategies to the scientific frontier.

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has been pushing the anti-gay rights movement in this direction for over a year. In an essay published in March 2007, Mohler called for a revision of the Baptist Church's stance on interference in the genetic development of embryos, for one reason only:

"If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin."

The Karolinka Institute's study suggests that sexual orientation might result from too much or too little exposure to androgen in the womb, suggesting to some that it might be changeable using hormone therapy.

So, congrats to gays and lesbians. According to science, you're hardwired to prefer members of the same sex. I'm genuinely glad to hear it. But be mindful of the the ugly history of the use and abuse of science to justify persecution of gays, and tread warily.

Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey responded to Albert Mohler here last year.

Heather Has Two Mommies and a Daddy

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:05:00 EDT

A U.K. research team is making serious progress in the production of three-parent embryos. A few three-parented children already walk among us, the product of some work done in the late 1990s. But the process was banned by the Food and Drug Administration shortly thereafter. Research continues in the U.K.

The goal is to prevent children inheriting a rare group of serious diseases caused by faulty mitochondria, the powerhouses in our cells, [which are inherited from the mother only]. Mitochondrial diseases affect at least 1 in 8000 people, probably more, and there are no treatments.

Here's how it works:

The procedure would involve fertilising a woman's egg by in-vitro fertilisation outside the body and transplanting the fertilised nucleus to an egg from another woman which has had its nucleus removed.
Any child born following implantation of such an embryo would have cells containing a nucleus with genes from both parents, and mitochondria from a woman other than their mother.

So while a certain stripe of social conservatives are wringing their hands and fretting about the possibility that gay marriage might open the door for polyamory, scientists are on the verge of assembling babies with three biological parents. (Most of the genetic material will be from the two parents of the first fertilized egg, of course, mitochondria have only a smidge of genetic material. Still...)

I can't help but feel that this whole thing is just an elaborate joke on the Leon Kasses and Stanley Kurtzes of the world.

The State of Libertarianism, 2058

pinkerto@ix.netcom.com (James P. Pinkerton) — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

As we consider the current condition of libertarianism, here in the middle of the 21st century, we might pause to reflect upon the bleak fate that befell the last flowering of personal freedom. That period of liberalism and liberation blossomed in the late 20th century, before coming to a disastrous end in the first decade of this new millennium. We can call that happy period the Rand Era, in honor of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a book still intensely and tragically relevant 101 years after its publication.

But let's look back before we look to the present—and to the future. The Randian libertarianism that emerged in the 1950s was a fierce critique of planning and centralization, manifested in its minor (New Deal), major (Swedish), and malignant (Soviet) forms. The school of anti-statist criticism, reinforced by émigré economists, was further strengthened by the obvious failures of American "Big Government" in the 1960s, from the war in Vietnam to the "War on Poverty." Interestingly, during that same decade of the '60s, libertarianism received a major boost from the so-called New Left. These leftists were ostensibly socialist, or even communist, but, in fact, they were more typically, in practice, anarchists and libertarians. Indeed, by the decade of the 1970s, it became clear that radicals and counter-culturalists were mostly interested in "doing their own thing," an attitude leading them toward an insistence on personal freedom-or, as they put it, not being hassled in their "personal space." Thus the New Left helped spawn the New Age, producing a generation of intensely capitalist music producers, natural food entrepreneurs, and then, most portentously, computer geeks and software developers. But of course, in their private moments, these folks retained their youthful predilections for drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

By the 1980s, these libertarian Boomers were in alliance, conscious and unconscious, with President Ronald Reagan. That is, even if yuppies looked down their nose at Reagan over matters of partisan style, they remained in tune with the pro-business substance of the Gipper's "supply side" ideology. The result was a robust consensus for lower taxes and freer trade, in both political parties. And of course, at the end of the '80s came the end of Communism, inspiring some to proclaim that a full-scale "end of history" was dawning—the permanent and decisive victory of liberal capitalist democracy.

Moreover, in the 1990s, the Internet seemed to bring with it the promise of libertarian nirvana, connecting everyone all across the cyber-flattened "borderless world" in a win-win capitalist nexus. Finally, in that same decade, the failed effort by right-wingers to impeach President Bill Clinton—a libertarian Boomer if there ever was one—was seen by many as the high-water mark of censorious "social" conservatism.

Click above to watch Jim Pinkerton discuss the state of libertarianism in the year 2058.

But then came the Big Shift, from the Rand Era to the Surveillance Era. We can point to five events in particular that heralded this repressive shift:

First, the 9/11 attacks brought a new sense of terrible danger to the world. After that Tuesday morning, normal travel and normal life took on a new menace, to be alleviated, seemingly, only by monitors, security guards, and checkpoints. "The twilight of sovereignty" didn't seem like such a slam-dunk good idea anymore, as nations instead redoubled their surveillance of borders, airports, and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Iraq and Afghan wars had a paradoxical effect on American politics. On the one hand, those disappointing conflicts demonstrated the incompetence of civilian planners and would-be nation-builders and democratizers. But on the other hand, the two wars rekindled patriotic ardor in many, engendering a sense of social solidarity and government generosity. An old phrase from the end of the First World War, "a nation fit for heroes," was heard again. As defined by politicians with the power of the purse, such a nation proved, of course, massively expensive.

Second, the long stock market slump at the turn of the century shook people's faith in "shareholder capitalism." The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and some notorious corporate bankruptcies led to the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in 2002—a bill producing unforeseen legal consequences that echo down to this day. But even before the passage of "Sarbox" white-collar prosecutions spiked; ambitious DAs knew that juries had little sympathy for millionaire and billionaire defendants. So when the subprime mortgage market started melting down in 2007, the legal and political climate was ripe for a long siege of regulation and enforcement. A string of spectacular trials and spectacularly long prison sentences for well-heeled defendants permanently changed the business climate on Wall Street. And there was no escape; from the City of London to the Caribbean to Cyprus to Moscow, prosecution (some called it persecution) ratcheted upward. Yet at the same time, the federal government took on new responsibility on behalf of the property-owning middle class; Uncle Sam would, in effect, guarantee both high stock prices and high home prices. A falling dollar, and rising inflation, be damned.

Third, the disgrace of Democratic New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2008 underscored the expansion of state power into areas thought to be mostly private and thus off-limits to government snoops. Spitzer's fall was ironic, because, as the Empire State's attorney general, he had been a zealous proponent of white-collar prosecutions. And so the business class had no sympathy for Spitzer when he was snared on a prostitution rap. But what was little discussed at the time was the ease with which the federal government had nailed this particular defendant. Spitzer was caught on the basis of cash transactions totaling just $80,000—that is, an $80,000 minnow inside the ocean of the then-$14 trillion economy. That the government could be so effective at threshing out Spitzer's activity should have been a red flag to libertarians, but in the scandalous heat of the moment, few bothered to reflect coolly upon what state power had been able to enforce. (And even fewer paused to think about what it meant for the future of personal freedom if all Americans—indeed, all humans—were on the same easily-searchable Google grid. Only too late did "organizing all the world's information" come to seem like more of a threat than a promise.)

Fourth, the 2008 Beijing Olympics taught a bitter lesson: Capitalism and personal freedom do not march forward together. To be sure, China in 2008 was infinitely freer than China of the Maoist era, but the government's tough tactics against Tibetan protestors was proof that the PRC was not moving in a democratic direction, but rather reverting back to Confucianism, albeit with capitalist-mercantilist characteristics. And speaking of mercantilism, the emergence of a whole new work force in tariff heavy and immigrant-proofed Japan—a huge class of mostly subservient robot-helots—did nothing to advance the idea of personal freedom.

Fifth, and finally in our sad saga, that same year, 2008, saw the election of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as the 44th President, spelling the final end of the Rand Era. In retrospect, we can see that the political triumph of a military leader, carrying his stern message of national service and sacrifice, was made inevitable by the continuation of the Iraq and Afghan wars; in times of severe crisis, democratic electorates naturally turn to the Strong Man. A few lonely figures, notably Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), argued that McCain-style policies were not the solution to America's problems, but rather the cause of the problems. But despite big fundraising totals, Paul's argument was little regarded during the 2008 Republican primary. And in the general election, McCain swept to victory against the Democrats, who, interestingly enough, seemed actually to be more libertarian than McCain. And as president, as we all know, McCain was supremely eager to stride manfully in the Progressive footsteps of his activist-interventionist idol, Theodore Roosevelt.

But America's strenuous efforts in the Middle East proved unsustainable. Even substantial tax increases, as well as the enactment of a "voluntary draft," were not sufficient to maintain the tempo of operations as the fighting dragged across decades. And so most Americans breathed a sigh of relief when Saudi Arabia, engorged with profits from Euro-denominated oil, engineered what was effectively a buyout of U.S. Central Command.

And by then, of course, America faced many other national security challenges closer to home. After Venezuela, and then Mexico, exploded their atomic bombs in the 2020s, Americans concluded, once and for all, that border security needed to be a top priority.

But the biggest shock came in East Asia. The Chinese takeover of Taiwan was a masterpiece of patient and subtle Go-like positioning, followed by a sudden cyber-strike that left Taiwanese and American defense planners blinded and befuddled—until, of course, it was too late to thwart the People's Liberation Army. Only then did it become clear that America's policy toward China had to change.

For a painful and perilous decade, America feverishly worked to rebuild its military computer systems, all of which had to be completely replaced and redesigned, since the turn-of-the-century equipment had been so honeycombed by Chinese viruses and spyware. During that period of American rebuilding, only America's nuclear arsenal kept the homeland safe; in the meantime, China was able to consolidate its hegemony in Asia, regaining its historic position as The Central Kingdom.

But of course, the rising threat from China provoked a strong response here in the U.S., as policymakers massively rethought their assumptions about economic policy and national strategy. The old consensus, in which both parties had agreed that propping up the stock market and real estate values was the top priority, became no longer viable. As we all remember, the second crash of '29 was worse than the first. In the difficult decade that followed, the federal government spearheaded the "New New Deal," which, a century after the original New Deal, once again witnessed the fitfully effective economic and military restructuring of the United States.

Meanwhile, around the world, capitalist prosperity waxed and waned, in response to booms and busts of secular liberalization, followed inevitably by sacred radicalization. From Dubai to Mumbai to Shanghai, unparalleled frenzies of conspicuous consumption were followed by equally conspicuous bonfires of the vanities. The reluctant conclusion: Over time, culture trumps economics, and piety stomps freedom. But fortunately for freedom, new libertarian thinkers have blossomed in recent decades, seeking to liberate humanity from the not-at-all-dead hand of state power. These new thinkers, re-reading Rand, Hayek, Friedman, and others, are determined to learn the sad lessons of history and apply the new hope of technology. And they have reached a few conclusions that we must study closely:

First, true freedom—camouflaged from all-seeing eyes in the sky, hidden even from the all-penetrating Google Grid—can flourish only in a few small and isolated places around the globe, where self-selected populations can gather together as ex-pats and exiles, to live free or die. These places have been mostly small islands, protected by nuclear booby traps, although a few have existed on the poles, or under the sea, or deep underground. Poignantly, one such place was called "Galt's Gulch," named after the place where the capitalist strikers hid out in Rand's Atlas Shrugged. But this time, the strikers were real enough—until, of course, they met their tragic end at the hands of bounty-hunting looters.

So the second lesson: No permanent victories for freedom can be found in this finite physical earth. Hobbes was right: The nation-state—sometimes, the imperial state—is the most effective monopolizer of force, thus the inevitable master of territory.

The third lesson: The true frontier of freedom will have to be elsewhere, not in this physical world as we commonly think of it. Many freedom-seekers have experimented with virtual reality as an escape hatch, or various kinds of nanotechnology. We wish those dematerialized libertarian voyagers well—but, frankly, we don't know what has happened to them.

The fourth lesson is the keeper: A free world is a new world, the farther away, the better. The next significant victory for freedom—a return to Randianism—will be best realized via transportation to somewhere else, off this earth. Flight beats fight, especially when the freedom-fighter is guaranteed to lose to the statists in the end. The Europeans who came to America found liberty in the empty spaces of the New World; the same was true in Australia. It's no accident that North America and Australia have traditionally been among the freest countries in the world. And if they are now less free, in the middle of this grim 21st century, that's because they are increasingly filled up. They have regressed to the regimented condition of the rest of the planet.

As free-market economists said in the last libertarian era, the only true freedom that one has is the power of an alternative—that is, the power to go somewhere else, to go where a man or a woman can breathe free air, even if that air is artificial. And that means outer space—to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Of course the moon has long been settled by various countries. And Mars and other asteroids have been touched by humans, too, mostly those wearing uniforms and working for various governments and mining collectives. Does that mean that the state has permanently extended its grip there, too? Is freedom finished off-earth, as well as on-earth?

Maybe. But it's easier to stage a freedom revolution in the far pavilions. Just as the mountains of West Virginia were free when the lowlands of Virginia were enslaved, so the periphery is always freer than the core.

Just as the American colonies rebelled from the mother country in 1776, so, too, could the space colonies rebel from this earth. Will it work? Could a space-revolt succeed? There is only one way to find out.

In the meantime, as we hatch our plan for the big breakaway, we might turn to another great libertarian writer from the Rand Era, Robert A. Heinlein. His 1966 novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, remains the best handbook for an off-world revolution, leading, in this instance, to a libertarian Luna.

Yes, the moon is a harsh mistress, but the earth is even harsher.

James P. Pinkerton served in the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is a Fox News contributor and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

The Genetics of Ensoulment

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Until about a decade ago, there was only one way to make an embryo—the old-fashioned technique of combining an egg with a sperm. Then came Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996. Scottish scientists created her by injecting the nucleus of a breast cell from one sheep into the enucleated egg of another sheep. Dolly was essentially genetically identical to the donor of the breast cell nucleus.

Since then researchers have used reproductive cloning to produce mice, cats, dogs, horses, cows, goats, pigs, and other mammals. As valuable as reproductive cloning is for producing livestock and research animals, most researchers were excited by the prospect of using cloning to create human embryonic stem cells. These stem cells produced by therapeutic cloning might be used to grow perfect transplants to replace and repair damaged tissues and organs.

Therapeutic cloning to produce transplants fell directly into the heated abortion debate. From the pro-life point of view, cloned human embryos, like all other embryos, have the same moral status as adult human beings. The moral status of five-day embryos is still contested. Hoping to avoid controversy, researchers searched for sources of cells that would have the valuable properties of embryonic stem cells (self-renewing and transformable into any type of cell), but would be acceptable to pro-lifers.

One proposal is to create human stem cells using altered nuclear transfer (ANT). Championed by Stanford University bioethicist William Hurlbut, the technique is essentially the same as regular cloning except that it uses RNA interference to disable a single crucial gene so that the cloned entity cannot implant into a womb and thus cannot grow into a fully developed embryo. In ANT all of the genes involved would be human, even the one that has been deliberately broken.

A number of prominent Roman Catholic thinkers recently endorsed ANT as a morally acceptable way to produce human embryonic stem cells. So whether or not an entity can house a human soul evidently depends on the timing of the operation of a single gene. Other theologians question this, asking why such a cloned entity should not be considered a defective human embryo deserving of same the moral solicitude owed to disabled adult human beings.

The search for a morally unproblematic source of stem cells continued. Last fall, Shinya Yamanaka and his colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan and another team at the University of Wisconsin announced the good news that they had been able to transform adult human skin cells into cells that act very much like embryonic stem cells. Yamanaka took skin cells and inserted four genes—Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and Myc—that are expressed in embryonic stem cells, causing the skin cells to revert to the embryonic state. These induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are generating a huge amount of excitement among stem researchers and were even hailed as the end of the stem cell wars.

Well, not quite. The Kyoto and Wisconsin researchers used skin cells originally derived from human fetuses in their research. Still, such cells are not necessary to generate new iPS cells; they were just convenient. But let's approach the moral issue from another direction.

It turns out that, at least in mice, injecting iPS cells into mouse blastocysts creates chimeric mice. The iPS cells are incorporated into the developing mouse embryo and form part of the tissues and organs of new mouse pups. Researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts have gone even further. They created a mouse comprised entirely of iPS cells. The iPS cells form an embryo after they are embedded into tetraploid embryonic cells that grow into a placenta. There is no apparent reason why this technique wouldn't work in humans.

In April, this insight caused The Independent to hyperventilate, "Now we have the technology that can make a cloned child." The Independent quotes stem cell researchers Robert Lanza: "It raises the same issues as reproductive cloning and although the technology for reproductive cloning in humans doesn't exist, with this breakthrough we now have a working technology whereby anyone, young or old, fertile or infertile, straight or gay can pass on their genes to a child by using just a few skin cells." Maybe so, but iPS cell research raises an even more intriguing question.

Back in 1999, during a hearing of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, then-Director of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus made the intriguing observation that "It may eventually become possible to take a cell from any one of our organs and to expose it to the right set of environmental stimuli and to encourage that cell to return to a more primitive stage in the hierarchy of stem cells. Under those conditions, one might in fact generate the cell with as great a potential as a pluripotent cell from a very mature cell." Nine years later Yamanaka proved that Varmus was prophetic.

Varmus continued, "One might even in fact imagine generating a cell that is totipotent [able to develop into a complete organism] in that manner." In other words, researchers may one day take human cells all the way back to the embryonic stage, at which point they could be implanted into a womb, where they could eventually develop into complete human beings. This is the direction in which iPS cell research is heading. So instead of switching off one gene to make sure that an entity is not worthy of their moral concern, pro-lifers may soon have to worry about the opposite, pushing an adult cell so far back in its developmental stage that switching on a single gene will turn it into an embryo.

Advances in stem cell research may be provoking a kind of "God of the Gaps" retreat on the moral status of embryos. People who subscribe to God of the Gaps thinking believe that the hand of God can be seen in those things which science cannot explain. In this case, the closing gaps in the details of molecular biology are forcing pro-lifers into an uncomfortable corner where they have to decide whether or not a cell can be imbued with a soul by turning a single gene on or off.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

What the Hell Is Human Dignity Anyway?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:32:00 EDT

Friend of reason Steven Pinker plows into the mushy category of "human dignity"—routinely invoked to argue against advances in science and medicine that will enliven and lengthen our lives—like nobody's business here:

Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.
Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it.

Whole thing in The New Republic, via Arts & Letters Daily, here.

Read Pinker's reason interview here.

'Technology Is at the Center'

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Running Babies Through a Scanner Darkly

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:26:00 EDT

From today's Congress Daily:

Former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly is scheduled to make a pitch on Capitol Hill today for legislation on the House floor requiring all states to screen newborns for the full complement of disorders that can be detected in early childhood.
Kelly, whose 8-year-old son died in 2005 of a nervous system disorder called Krabbe disease, planned to join Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Children and Families Subcommittee, to urge the House to pass Dodd's newborn-screening bill. A vote on the legislation is scheduled for today.
Not all states screen infants for all disorders such as Krabbe, and Dodd's bill would require such testing to be uniform across the country.

While it's easy to imagine (and to celebrate) a world where genetic testing is so cheap and easy that most people get their kids tested as a matter of course, mandating testing at this stage doesn't make sense and may even slow progress and artificially inflate prices.

The same reasoning applies here as in the case of mandating florescent light bulbs: A mandate will reduce incentives to keep pushing prices down and testing technology at the bleeding edge of science. Plus, picking a list of disorders to be tested for, and setting it down in the fast-drying concrete of legislation will breed a less flexible, less adaptable field.

How's this for a case of nanny state--literal and figurative?

The Biggest Green Mistake

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In the last year, the price of wheat has tripled, corn doubled, and rice almost doubled. As prices soared, food riots have broken out in about 20 poor countries including Yemen, Haiti, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Mexico. In response some countries, such as India, Pakistan Egypt and Vietnam, are banning the export of grains and imposing food price controls.

Are rising food prices the result of the economic dynamism of China and India, in which newly prosperous consumers are demanding more food—especially more meat? Perennial doomsters such as the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown predicted more than a decade ago that China's growing food demand would destabilize global markets and signal a permanent increase in grain prices. But that thesis has so far not been borne out by the facts. China is a net grain exporter. India is also largely self-sufficient in grains. At some time in the future, these countries may become net grain importers, but they are not now and so cannot be blamed to for today's higher food prices.

If surging demand is not the problem, what is? In three words: stupid energy policies. Although they are not perfect substitutes, oil and natural gas prices tend to move in tandem. So as oil prices rose above $100 per barrel, the price of gas also went up. Natural gas is the main feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer. As gas prices soared, so did fertilizer prices which rose by 200 percent.

As a report from the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (ICSFAD) notes, applying the fertilizer derived from 1000 cubic feet of natural gas yields around 480 pounds of grain. That amount of grain would supply enough calories to feed a person for one year. Rising oil prices also contribute to higher food prices because farmers need transport fuel to run their tractors and to get food to urban markets.

Even worse is the bioethanol craze. Politicians in both the United States and the European Union are mandating that vast quantities of food be turned into fuel as they chase the chimera of "energy independence." For example, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed misbegotten legislation requiring fuel producers to use at least 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022-which equals about 27 percent of the gasoline Americans currently use each year and is about five times the amount being produced now. And the European Union set a goal that 10 percent of transport fuels come from biofuels by 2020.

The result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel, drawing down global grain stocks to their lowest levels in decades. Keep in mind that 100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year.

As Dennis Avery from the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues points out, the higher corn prices that result from biofuels mandates mean that farmers are shifting from producing wheat and soybeans to producing corn. Less wheat and soybeans means higher prices for those grains. In the face of higher prices for wheat, corn and soybeans consumers try to shift to rice which in turns raises that grain's price. In addition, higher grain prices encourage farmers in developing countries to chop down and plow up forests. It also hasn't helped that some traditionally strong grain exporters such as Australia have experienced extreme weather.

So what to do? In the short run, there is some good news. High prices are encouraging farmers to shift back toward wheat and soybeans which should relieve some of the pressure on grain prices. Second, the biofuels mandates must go. If biofuels are such a good idea, entrepreneurs, inventors and investors will make them into a viable energy source without any government subsidies. Thirdly, both high and low technologies are addressing high fertilizer prices. On the high tech front, Arcadia Biosciences has created biotech rice and corn varieties that need much less nitrogen fertilizer that conventional varieties require. In Bangladesh and other poor countries, farmers are embedding low tech fertilizer-infused briquettes in the soil to deliver nitrogen to rice. This boosts crop production 25 percent while cutting fertilizer use by 50 percent.

Expanding acreage to grow biofuels is bad for biodiversity and may even boost the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to man-made global warming. Avery notes that food production needs to double because there will be more people who will want to eat better by 2050, at which point world population begins to slide back downwards. Turning food into fuel makes that goal much harder to achieve. Avery is right when he argues, "Biofuels are purely and simply the biggest Green mistake we've ever made and we're still making it."

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Humanizing Animals

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Combining animal and human genes provokes unease among some philosophers, theologians, and ordinary citizens. Currently, scientists want to inject the nuclei of human cells into animal eggs-generally from cows and rabbits--that have been stripped of their nuclei to create cell hybrids, or cybrids. Human eggs are hard to come by and expensive whereas animal eggs are plentiful and cheap. The aim is to produce embryonic stem cells for research.

No one knows if such cybrid embryos might grow into human babies if implanted in an appropriate womb. Would such cybrid babies suffer some physical or mental problems as a result of their animal genetic heritage? That heritage would basically be the energy producing mitochondria derived from the cytoplasm of the animal cells into which the human nuclei were inserted. Since cows and rabbits live much shorter lives than do humans it might be that any cybrid humans with cow or rabbit mitochondria would not live as long as normal humans. In addition, the operation of animal mitochondria in cybrids might mimic some mutational mitochondrial diseases that already afflict people. These real risks of creating physically and mentally diminished human beings mean that it would be immoral to grow human-animal cybrids into full-term babies.

But let's flip the question-instead of diminishing humans, what about uplifting animals by boosting their intelligence and physical dexterity? Uplifting animals to human-like sapience has been explored by many speculative writers. For example, in H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), humanized animals are commanded to follow Moreau's law: "Not to go on all-fours; Not to suck up Drink; Not to eat Fish or Flesh; Not to claw the Bark of Trees; Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?" But they are not Men and they eventually revert to their beast natures and destroy their hubristic creator. Even worse is Pierre Boulle's novel, The Planet of the Apes (1963), in which uplifted apes are now the masters of animal-like degenerate humans. On the other hand, in Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975), the underpeople, humanlike beings created from animals, struggle for their rights and are morally superior in many respects to their human masters.

The most popular novels of the genre are David Brin's The Uplift Saga and The Uplift Trilogy. In Brin's universe, one sapient species after another throughout the galaxies uses genetic engineering to uplift non-sapient species to self-aware intelligence. In Brin's books, humanity uplifts dolphins and chimps and we three earthly species go cheerfully caroming around the universe together.

Some technoprogressive thinkers such as editor-in-chief of Betterhumans.com George Dvorsky argue that we have a moral obligation to uplift other species to sapiency. "It would be negligent of us to leave animals behind to fend for themselves in the state of nature," declared Dvorsky. He foresees mostly great good coming out of any such project. On the other hand, the prospect of uplift inspires dread in bioconservatives like Francis Fukuyama who worries that biotechnologists will create slave chimpanzees with the intelligence of a ten-year old boy.

Setting aside the fact that no one has any idea of how to actually uplift, that is, to dramatically boost the intelligence of animals, would it be moral to do it? How would a dumb animal give its consent to being uplifted? Since no human being gives his or her consent to being born with whatever level of intelligence or health he or she has, why should prior consent be required for uplifting animals? Dvorsky actually thinks that it is more moral to uplift already born animals so that we can ask them before-and-after questions. Perhaps they would recall their pre-sapient state and tell us if it were preferable to the anxieties of self-awareness. But what if uplifted chimps and dolphins told us that self-aware intelligent language using is not all that it's cracked up to be and that they'd rather go back to their state of natural innocence?

Also, would uplifted animals retain something of their essential chimpanzee or dolphin natures? This could be problematic. For example, male chimpanzees share the human male proclivity for violence. And dolphins indulge in gang rape and kill for fun. It is possible that some intellectually-enhanced chimps and dolphins could be psychopathic murderers. In other words, uplifted animals might not be morally any better, and maybe even worse, than human beings. Would-be uplifters might suffer the fate of Dr. Moreau.

Fukuyama's concerns about subhuman slaves cannot be dismissed. Uplift advocate Dvorsky agrees: "Animals may also be engineered to have specialized physical or cognitive characteristics while lacking certain neurological faculties. Theoretically, such creatures could be designed for specific tasks, such as manual labour, dangerous work, or as sex trade workers--and at the same time be oblivious to the demeaning or hazardous nature of their work. For all intents and purposes these would be happy slaves."

So would it be wrong to uplift animals and make them happy slaves? One could imagine uplifted animals designed to receive an addictive jolt of pleasure inducing dopamine every time they successfully carry out a human command. Something like that already happens when a dog gets patted on its head by its owner for fetching a ball. Dvorsky denounces the prospect of uplifted happy slaves as "a repugnant possibility and an affront to humanitarian values."

Now imagine human beings who have been genetically engineered with a dopamine obedience circuit. It's pretty clear that we would consider such engineered people as "diminished" because their capacity for self-government would have been deliberately limited. We generally regard people as acting freely when they act on their own intentions and for their own reasons without coercion. In this case, the biotechnically juiced-up dopamine circuit functions as a kind of gentle coercion. But wait, aren't we all already in thrall to our un-tampered with dopamine reward circuits?

Creating happy uplifted animal slaves faces two chief moral objections. First, I would not want to be a happy slave. If I wouldn't want to be one then I assume no one else, including uplifted animals, would want to be. Second, a society dependent on happy slaves would be morally corrosive.

So why wouldn't I want to be a happy slave-after all I would be, by definition, happy. I reject happy servitude because I don't want limitations placed on my capacities and my aspirations. But of course, my genes and environment have already limited my intellectual and physical capacities and aspirations. However, living as a human discontented with my shortcomings, I know that it is "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n." When sufficient progress has been made later this century, I hope to have the power of choosing how to use new technologies to enhance my capacities and even at the risk of overwhelming and destroying my own identity.

On the point of moral corrosion, consider the plot of The Planet of the Apes. What has happened is that the humans uplifted the apes and became so dependent upon their simian servants that their intellects decayed. There are, of course, lots of confounding factors, but history features no economically and technologically robust slave-holding civilizations. In any case, I suspect humanity will become deeply integrated with our increasingly powerful computational technologies so that happy animal slaves will be basically useless anyway.

Some have argued that self-aware intelligence is an ecological niche that can only be inhabited by one species. If two proto-intelligent species arise at the same time, one eventually out-competes and causes the extinction of the other. This may have happened to our Neanderthal cousins. Would uplifting animals spark a dangerous evolutionary competition for the occupation of the intelligence niche?

A rich speculative literature makes it clear that there a plenty of ways in which uplift technologies could be misused or go awry, but there is no bright moral line forbidding the uplift of animals to human-level intelligence. Successfully uplifted animals would have to be treated with the same moral respect that we owe to human persons.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Neither Gods Nor Goo

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

By the middle of the century, the inventor Ray Kurzweil suggests in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, human beings will live in perpetual clouds of nanobots, molecule-sized robots that spend each moment altering our micro-environments to our precise preferences. Over the longer term, he imagines that nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at the molecular level—will let us change our shape and appearance, become immortal, and transfer our minds with ease between far-flung planets.

By contrast, the thriller writer Michael Crichton describes nanobots running amok in his 2002 novel Prey. With his signature mix of tech savvy and paranoia, Crichton imagines the tiny automatons forming “nanoswarms,” clouds that visually mimic human beings in order to infiltrate and destroy us—sort of microscopic, sentient super-kudzu.

Both our hopes and fears regarding nanotechnology have been extreme from the beginning, if we take as the beginning K. Eric Drexler’s 1986 book Engines of Creation. Drexler, an engineer, described nanotech as the ultimate fulfillment of humanity’s dynamic, self-transforming tendencies: the ability to create whatever we want, whenever we want it, combined with an imperative to take this godlike new power to the stars and turn the universe into our playground. Drexler also described the dark twin of this vision: the “gray goo” scenario. Self-replicating nanobots, which proliferate by turning surrounding matter into copies of themselves, would go out of control, turning the entire Earth into themselves—the most homogeneous imaginable version of the apocalypse. In the words of a technophilic but precaution-prone acquaintance of mine, a computer programmer who has his wristwatch set to alert him if a tsunami approaches Manhattan: “The gray goo scenario should at least give one pause.”

Such disaster fears are already fueling calls for regulation, even with the technology barely out of the cradle. Nanotech-related products will soon account for $2.6 trillion in sales each year, according to a London School of Business/Rice University study. The current applications are concentrated in products that benefit from highly efficient filtering or surface-application processes, such as microchips, car wax, and sunscreen. But down the road, the likely applications include molecule-perfect wound-healing, flawless cleaning processes, quantum computing, far easier bioengineering, much more efficient photon and electrical transfer, and much more. In a June 2007 press release, Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, noted that nanotechnology “promises to be the most important innovation since electricity and the internal combustion engine.” At the same time, it called for more testing and oversight, warning that some nanotech applications “might pose substantial risks to human health and the environment.”

Although Consumers Union concedes that “no confirmed cases of harm to humans from manufactured nanoparticles have been reported,” it adds that “there is cause for concern based on several worrisome findings from the limited laboratory and animal research so far.” It worries that particles that are nontoxic at normal sizes may become toxic when nanosized; that these nanoparticles, which are already present in cosmetics and food, can more easily “enter the body and its vital organs, including the brain,” than normal particles; and that nanomaterials will linger longer in the environment. All of this really comes down to pointing out that some particles are smaller than others. Size is not a reliable indicator of potential harm to human beings, and nature itself is filled with nanoparticles. But the default assumption of danger from the new is palpable.

Anti-nanotech sentiment has not been restricted to Consumers Union’s relatively short list of concerns. In France, groups of hundreds of protesters have rallied against even such benign manifestations of the technology as the carbon nanotubules that allow Parkinson’s sufferers to stop tremors by directing medicine to their own brains. In England members of a group called THRONG (The Heavenly Righteous Opposed to Nanotech Greed) have disrupted nanotech business conferences dressed as angels. In 2005 naked protesters appeared in front of an Eddie Bauer store in Chicago to condemn one of the more visible uses of nanotech: stain-resistant pants.

These nanopants employ billions of tiny whiskers to create a layer of air above the rest of the fabric, causing liquids to roll off easily. It’s not quite what Kurzweil and Crichton had in mind, nor is it “little robots in your pants,” as CNN put it. But nanotechnology arguably embraces any item that incorporates engineering at the molecular level, including mundane products like this one.

Just as the nano label can be broadly applied to products for branding and attention-grabbing purposes, so too can critics use the label to condemn barely related developments by linking them to the (still hypothetical) problems of nanopollution and gray goo. But there’s a danger in thinking of nanotech only in god-or-goo terms. People at both extremes of the controversy fail to appreciate the humble, incremental, yet encouraging progress that nanotech researchers are making. And focusing on dramatic visions of nanotech heaven or hell may foster restrictions that delay or block innovations that can extend and improve our lives.

In a Small Country
To get a look at some of the real nanotech re-search, neither divine nor gooey, I went on a junket to one nanotech hotspot, visiting researchers in Glasgow, Dundee, and Edinburgh. (Scottish Enterprise, a public-private economic development agency that promotes international awareness of such researchers and other Scottish ventures, paid for the trip.) I also made a quick visit to the Edinburgh grave of Adam Smith, a reminder that the Scots are proudly, even pugnaciously, entrepreneurial and inventive—“punching above our weight,” as many people in that nation of only 5 million like to put it before rattling off a list of the famous inventors who have come from Scotland.

One of those famous Scots was the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Today, thanks to nanotech, one of his countrymen may be on the verge of creating a workable version of a system that Maxwell first imagined. “It’s a little bit frustrating when people talk about nanobots and gray goo, because it’s not as exciting as what we’re really going to be able to do,” says Edinburgh University chemist David A. Leigh. Leigh believes nanotech might allow us to create a system physicists call Maxwell’s Demon. With virtually no expenditure of energy, it could sort all the warmer particles of gas in a chamber to one side and all the cold particles to the other. It would be almost like getting heat from thin air, an immense source of energy at virtually no cost. Maxwell recognized that such a process would border on violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states, in essence, that entropy wins in the end, that things tend not to assume a more complex, orderly form unless energy is added to them. Since filtering—a far cry from robotically conquering the world—is what nanoparticles currently do best, Maxwell’s Demon is not such a far-fetched application.

In the meantime, Leigh contents himself with miracles like making water droplets run uphill, thanks to tiny, twisting “motors” created by simple chemical reactions between a few atoms. Similarly, the Livingston-based company Memsstar is creating more efficient surfaces for industrial coatings and wafers by, for instance, finding ways to keep them dry with microscopic gyroscopes. Leigh recognizes that this is “complete sci-fi stuff,” but he suggests it’s a wonder we haven’t made more use of such processes before. “Nature uses molecular machines to do everything…every single biological process,” he says. “We used controlled molecular motion for nothing. Nature isn’t using it for nothing. When mankind learns to make molecular machines, it’s going to change everything.” He expects that revolution within a decade.

Being able to design surfaces at the molecular level increasingly means being able to alter them on cue at the molecular level. “You can make surfaces that change their properties, so you can drag objects toward you just using light,” says Leigh. “One day, you might walk into your house to find that the kids have made some big mess, and you just turn on some lasers that put everything back in place.” After years of using nanotech for micro-level processes such as more efficiently sorting chemicals, Leigh says, his water droplet stunt “showed that you could use microscopic machines to do things in the real world, the big world.”

The staff of Leigh’s Edinburgh lab, perhaps as a reminder to remain humble, has put up a poster of actor/singer David Hasselhoff that reads, “ ‘I tried to save the world and I forgot to save myself.’ —The Hoff.” Leigh is mindful that for all our fantasies of transforming the outside world, our own bodies are an important locus of nanotech potential. “Nature carries cargo throughout the cells using molecular machines,” he says, and that opens up all sorts of possibilities for manipulating the system.

Pumping Ion
Medical uses offer some of the most immediate benefits of improved molecular manipulation. Adam Curtiss, a professor of cell biology at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Cell Engineering, has shown that by restructuring molecules on the surface of stem cells—just altering the roughness of the surface, without making chemical or biological changes—scientists can determine what sort of tissue the cells will grow into. Scott Wilson, a senior project manager with Scottish Enterprise, enthuses that nanotech may soon allow the easy transfer of signals between wires and nerves. That could be useful in many cybernetic and medical devices, such as more versatile prostheses. A step farther removed from the human body, ArrayJet, a company based in the Midlothian town of Dalkeith, is quietly improving the quality of scientists’ microscope slides by using inkjet-like technology to place samples on them with unprecedented accuracy. Meanwhile, the Intermediary Technology Institutes in Glasgow, taking a page from the comic book character Wolverine with his adamantium-plated skeleton, are studying potential reinforcement coatings for osteoporosis-ravaged bones.

In the past people were content simply to imagine such things, says Brendan Casey, chief executive of the Glasgow-based company Kelvin Nanotechnologies, but now “people expect delivery.” Delivery, in the case of Casey’s company, means fabricating materials in an ultramodern, stray-particle-free “clean room” in an old Victorian building at the University of Glasgow (where, Casey says, you become very adept at recognizing people in their jumpsuits and hoods). Sometimes clients know precisely what materials they need, he says, while other times they’ll say, “I’m not even sure if this is possible, but can you do this for me?”

Kelvin Nanotechnologies has been involved in research on so-called “labs on a pill” and “labs on a chip,” tiny chemical diagnostic and medicine-delivery devices within the body that eliminate such macroscopic clumsiness as time-release capsules, lengthy probes, and the need for many medicines to travel through the entire bloodstream. They employ precise fits between target cells and injected substances that Casey describes as “molecular Lego.” The ability to sort substances at the molecular level has applications from water flow in nine-inch pipes to fiber-optic cables. It also will likely mean the ability to regrow injured tendons along grooves created by nanomaterial within the body that melt away after use.

At the University of St. Andrews, the scientists of the Biophotonics Programme, aided by the fact that sufficiently small particles can be manipulated by light, are working with lasers as optical tweezers—the “ultimate sterile instrument,” one researcher calls them. Such instruments could decrease the odds of hospital infections by moving cells and microscopic dollops of medicine without the need for contact between flesh and solid instruments. Sufficiently fine-tuned tweezing, of a sort impossible with larger tools made from metal, may make it possible to deactivate tumors by identifying and destroying their stem cells. St. Andrews physicist Kishan Dholakia has high hopes for using molecular sorting and lasers to make more diagnoses at the chemical level rather than through patient observation.

Rather than looking at macroscopic phenomena, doctors of the future may be able to tag, track, and observe the cellular-level damage that is causing problems, whether it’s a perforated spleen or a misfiring nerve in the lower back. If that sounds too distant and speculative, St. Andrews researchers are already working with light-activated creams that speed wound healing and are less likely to leave scars than conventional bandages and stitches.

Defense of Mechanisms
Wonderful as all this is, it is gradual and piecemeal—not as frightening, terrible, or transformative as either the sci-fi optimists or the doomsaying activists would have it. And that makes it all the more ridiculous that such valuable work might be impeded by regulations or protests motivated by mostly imaginary or far-off scenarios. One reason the Scots are so optimistic about their potential to be big players in nanotech is their belief that wariness about cloning and stem cell research in the U.S. and a general aversion to biotechnology in continental Europe do not bode well for nanotech research in those places.

Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, along with various European green groups, have called for a moratorium on nanotech until it can be proven safe. At their urging, the European Commission last year began to consider whether nanotech fits under existing E.U. safety regulations or must be subjected to special reviews and controls. This sort of legal limbo tends to inhibit investment.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regards nanotech as a “combination product” that bridges the divide between pharmaceuticals, biological agents, and medical devices. That means nanotech must be proven safe and effective before approval and may risk being shuttled between different offices, but is not as yet presumed especially dangerous. The FDA concedes it has no regulatory authority over nondrug, nonfood products such as nanotech-incorporating cosmetics, a frequent target of unscientific health scares. It would not be surprising if the FDA eventually invites discussion of whether to expand its regulatory authority to cover nanotech uses currently outside its bailiwick or cedes such regulatory responsibility to other agencies. In 2006 the Berkeley City Council, often in the vanguard of green regulations, became the first U.S. locality to explicitly require tracking of production processes involving nanoparticles.

While nanotech has not yet attracted as much ire as biotech, nanotech researchers are worried by the negative tone of much of the press coverage biotech receives. Shortly before my visit to Scotland, the Roslin Research Institute—a source of Midlothian pride 11 years ago when it unveiled the cloned sheep Dolly—declined to participate in a BBC special about biotech because it was clear the show would take a “Frankenstein unleashed” approach, according to Harry Griffin, the institute’s former science director and CEO. I saw an ad for the broadcast, an episode of the BBC series Animal Farm, while I was in Scotland. In the sort of overt appeal to ignorance that has become the norm in media coverage of biotechnology, it suggested that what viewers don’t know about high-tech animal husbandry should be cause for alarm.

Among those making a conscious effort to stave off similar paranoia about nanotech are Richard Moore and Ottilia Saxl of the Institute of Nanotechnology in Stirling. Moore laments green activists’ “tendency to consider any of the risks and not the benefits.” He likens the recklessness of being overcautious about nanotechnology to regulators’ longtime resistance to portable defibrillators, once feared because of their potential misuse in inexpert hands but now so valued in the U.K. that they are routinely carried on garbage trucks and kept in other widespread places to make their rapid deployment possible. “There’s no medical device that’s free of risk,” he notes.

Suppose “you’ve got a disseminated brain tumor, and you’re offered nanoparticles or you’ve got three weeks to live,” says Saxl. “If you can actually minutely target these nanoparticles at the tumor, what a wonderful thing.” She has helped organize awareness-raising conferences on “bioinspired nanotechnologies” and nanotech’s environmental benefits (such as radically more efficient oil spill cleanups) because the sense that nanotech is “unnatural” could make it the next target of green or Luddite revulsion. “Lipids and other natural substances can be called nanoparticles,” she notes, “but companies didn’t want to call their work nanotechnology.”

Moore adds that people tend to assume that “natural” things are safe and that the products of industry are automatically a cause for concern. “We’re talking about manmade nanoparticles,” he says, “but we’ve had natural nanoparticles for centuries”—from volcanoes and other natural sources, spewed far and wide—with little concern except among those directly in the blast zone.

No Pants, No Implants
In the U.S., despite our flirtation with paranoia about biotech and our routine panics over pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, our resilient gee-whiz attitude toward machines may yet make our country a haven for unbounded nanotech. But we will have to be watchful of those who seek to smother it as a potential monster long before it has had a chance to yield anything remotely resembling the dreams of the optimists or the nightmares of the detractors.

Given people’s instinctive unease about strange things entering their bodies, we may be better off if the American public becomes enamored of relatively trivial nanotech applications, such as the now-omnipresent stain-resistant pants, before taking much notice of the far more beneficial medical uses. Biotech endures in the U.S. largely because people are accustomed to seeing it used in corn, soybeans, wheat, and other staples of the food supply before opponents had really spread their message. Similarly, we may find that a nation long accustomed to unnaturally clean pants is more receptive to nano-based treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s.

Today’s researchers can only dream of someday possessing the technology to make self-construction by nanobots more efficient than a macroscopic process for making nanobots. Only then could they begin to dream of making the self-construction process propagate itself so rapidly that it constituted a widening menace. Worrying at this stage about the theoretical potential for nanotech to destroy the world—or to transform us into shape-shifting gods—is a bit like worrying that if we engage in laser research we might someday create a laser weapon so powerful that it could destroy the entire planet. There’s a long way between here and there, and those distant prospects should not cause us to hobble people taking tiny steps in far more benign directions.

Todd Seavey edits HealthFactsAndFears.com for the American Council on Science and Health and blogs at ToddSeavey.com.

Decrying the "Pursuit of Unnecessary Things"

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin has written a provocative column, "The Endless Pursuit of Unnecessary Things," on his always interesting Dot Earth blog. The title is from a line attributed to Adam Smith: "An investment is by all right-minded people to be commended, because it brings comforts and necessities to the citizenry. But, if continued indefinitely, it will lead to the endless pursuit of unnecessary things." (I confess my usual sources of Smith arcana could not turn up this quotation anywhere online, but no matter, let's assume Smith wrote it.) Revkin uses the quotation as a launch point for a discussion of sustainable development. He sums up his concerns in two questions:

How many people will inhabit Earth in the next few generations? How much stuff—energy, land, water, marine life—will they consume?

Let's look first at Revkin's population concerns. World population increased from about 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6.5 billion today. Along the way, Malthusians predicted that massive famines would occur. They didn't. Food supplies increased faster than population growth and food became cheaper and more abundant. In addition, the amount of land devoted to farming barely changed. As a consequence of growing food security and the spread of improved public health and medical technologies, global human life expectancy more than doubled. Perhaps the Malthusians are at last right? There are good reasons to think not.

Globally fertility rates have been falling since the 1960s. What does this mean for the future? At the Transvision 2007 conference, Jerome Glenn, head of the United Nations' Millenium Project and author of its annual State of the Future report, pointed out something what I've been saying for years—that the U.N.'s low variant trend appears to be the path that world population is following. If that trend holds, Glenn noted, that would mean that world population would grow to about 8 billion in 2050 and start declining to 5.5 billion in 2100. That's a billion fewer people than currently live on the planet.

So if overpopulation isn't the problem, then perhaps overconsumption is? Americans are held up as the poster children of overconsumption and Revkin's column plows that well-worn furrow with its meditation on "the endless pursuit of unnecessary things." But before looking to see what things are unnecessary, let's look at the resource consumption trends that worry Revkin. He quotes long-time limits-to-growth proponent and current President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science John Holdren on the challenges of sustainability. Holdren (along with his colleagues Paul Ehrlich and John Harte) famously lost a bet with economist Julian Simon that prices of a basket of mineral resources valued at $1,000 and chosen by Holdren et al. would increase between 1980 and 1990. They didn't. Holdren and his colleagues mailed a check to Simon for $576.07.

Revkin also mentions land. So what's happened with trends in land usage? A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that "among 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and Agriculture Organization's comprehensive Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, no nation where annual per capita gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative rate of growing stock change." Biotech tree plantations would enable humanity to produce all the timber we need on an area roughly 5 percent to 10 percent of the total forest today. This would mean that more of the Earth's forests could remain in their natural states.

Similarly, the amount of land needed to grow enough food to feed a person has plummeted from about one-and-a-quarter acres in 1950 to about half an acre today. Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, finds, "If the world farmer reaches the average yield of today's US corn grower during the next 70 years, ten billion people eating as people now on average do will need only half of today's cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia. This will happen if farmers sustain the yearly 2 percent worldwide yield growth of grains achieved since 1960, in other words if social learning continues as usual."

And what about water? Americans are using less water per capita too. Water withdrawals peaked in 1980 and have been flat since. All kinds of innovative techniques for stretching freshwater supplies are being developed. An example of that is the low-cost drip irrigation systems designed by International Development Enterprises that can reduce the cost of irrigation in poor countries from about $6,000 per acre to about $37. In addition, strides are being made in developing seawater agriculture.

Overconsumption of marine resources is an institutional problem—fisheries are open access commons which encourage wanton plundering. If a fisher doesn't take a fish, the next guy will, so fishers have no incentive to leave fish in the sea to replenish themselves. This can be changed via privatization and by the expansion of aquaculture.

What about non-renewable resources? This is a tougher issue. Even as workers in modern societies have shifted from manufacturing to service jobs, the raw stuff used to make goods has not declined. We are, however, getting far more value and services out of the stuff we do use. For example, between 1980 and 2000, the amount of stuff consumed in the European Union 15 was essentially flat while their economies grew by 50 percent. As the poor in the developing world become wealthier, they will want better housing, transport, and modern energy supplies. Can the world's resources meet their desires? Again, there are good reasons to think so.

People do not get rich just by doing more of the same—they get rich by doing things better, cheaper and with less stuff over time. As Stanford University economist Paul Romer argues, humans become wealthier by improving the recipes for how we make stuff. Sand and iron used to be just building materials; now we use them to make computer memory. As described above, there are strongly positive trends in the future supply of renewable resources, such as food, fiber, wood, and so forth.

The vast majority of non-renewable material flows are used in construction (housing and infrastructure) and energy production. There is no likely future shortage of construction materials. In addition, fossil fuels will not run out in the 21st century. However, humanity will either have to figure out how to control the pollution produced by fossil fuels or shift away from them because of their deleterious effects on the environment, including their contribution to man-made global warming. There are good reasons for optimism with regard to pollution control. Air pollution in the U.S. has been declining for decades and even China's notoriously bad air pollution may be decreasing. Supplying adequate clean energy is the central challenge to future human well-being. Fortunately, the ideas for sustainably improving and increasing energy, food, and any other form of industrial production are far from being depleted.

Revkin entertains the suggestion by Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor that we should all relax and stop working so hard and instead "opt for a new economic and social vision based on quality of life, rather than quantity of stuff." Quality of life can have all sorts of dimensions, but one important aspect is increased leisure and access to learning. And that's what people in modern societies have done throughout the last couple of centuries, plus getting all the nifty new stuff.

In a 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research study, economists Jeremy Greenwood and Guillaume Vandenbroucke found, "Over the course of the last century there was a precipitous drop in the average length of the workweek, both in the marketplace and at home. In 1830 the average workweek in the market place was 70 hours. This had plunged to just 41 hours by 2002. At the same time there was a 9-fold gain in real wages." In other words, people in modern societies aren't working harder, they're working better. So what do we do to fill up all those extra hours of leisure? Perhaps we buy "unnecessary things" with which to entertain and enlighten ourselves. And then there is that horrible suspicion that most people actually like to work.

Which bring us to the question: Just what are all those "unnecessary things" that allegedly clog our shopping malls? Which does Revkin think we should want to give up? He mentions not a single product—yet the implication is that the mandarins of good taste and restraint know best what the rest of us really need. Our cellular phones? Our iPods? Our pink sunglasses? Our kids' paint-by-number set? The 246 varieties of dog food and 165 kinds of cat food, and even Valentine gifts for your favorite mutt? Necessity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And in fact, consumers in markets winnow out all kinds of unnecessary things every day.

The Malthusian meme always insists "things just can't go on like this." Of course, if "things can't go on like this," then they don't. Humanity changes course and things get better. At least that has been the story of the last two centuries and the evidence is that it will be the story of the 21st century as well.

Disclosure: I think that the cat toys my wife bought for our two felines are unnecessary. And does she really need that many pairs of black shoes?

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

Perfect (Bio)Chemistry

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:25:00 EST

No luck on Match.com? Angry that eHarmony excludes gays? Too gentile for jDate? Your prayers have been answered:

A new dating service that launched this week for Boston-area singles claims that it can get the chemistry right when fixing up potential mates -- literally. ScientificMatch.com uses DNA samples from customers to match them with others who have different alleles for major histocompatibility complex genes.

MHC proteins sit on the surface of cells and detect pathogens, but they also appear to play a role in sexual attraction. In sniff tests of dirty t-shirts, people tend to be most attracted to the scent of the shirt whose owner has different MHC alleles from the sniffer. One explanation is that this phenomenon evolved to promote genetic diversity between mates.

For $1,995 and a cheek swab sent off for DNA analysis, customers can find the love of their lives, or so says Eric Holzle, a Massachusetts engineer and long-time dater. Kerry Grens spoke to him on December 11, the day the site went live. At the time, he was driving, and didn't know if anyone had signed up.

Read an interview with the founder here.

NB: For the record, reason's resident biotech early adopter Ron Bailey is already married, ladies. So don't go getting any ideas.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Ron Bailey in Guatemala, Talking Biotech Crop Blues

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:03:00 EST

In October, reason's science correspondent Ronald Bailey gave a couple of talks at Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala. The topic was how crop biotechnology can spark a new Green Revolution which will help feed hungry people in developing countries.

Click the image above to see one of Bailey's lectures plus an interview with the man himself.

Wilhelm Reich: 50 Years in Hell and/or Heaven

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:08:00 EST

Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich had his books burned by the U.S. government in the 1950s and died in prison 50 years ago, in prison basically for refusing to agree with the FDA that his work and devices had no medical value. The Boston Globe notes the opening of his personal paper archives at Harvard, and a possible trend in revival of interest in and furthering of his research.

The Wilhelm Reich Museum.

A devotee's history, with links.

A skeptic's analysis of Reich, with links.

The FBI on Reich.

Robert Anton Wilson's harrowing and wonderful play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell.

I operated a cloudbuster once. I cannot authoritatively state whether it had any effect on the weather.