Your genetically modified future (18/3/2003) | |
18 March 2003 YOUR GENETICALLY MODIFIED FUTURE "For obvious reasons, the vast majority of the world's middle-class people will not want to beta-test genetic software on their offspring. But history shows that there is nothing so stupid that someone won't try it - look at the parents today attempting to turn their children into star athletes by pumping them full of steroids and growth hormone." *** New and Improved! A user's guide to your genetically modified future By Charles C. Mann *SUPERBACTERIA SUPERBACTERIA The Peril: Even modified by industry, the microworld will maintain its own Darwinian agenda. Containing bacteria in a lab is relatively straightforward, but when bioengineered bugs end up on the factory floor, they'll be under the care of Homer Simpson. Accidents will be inevitable, and microorganisms are capable of such astonishing evolutionary feats that predicting the consequences of escapes is impossible. Environmental activists fear we could enter a new era of infectious disease - one due entirely to our own folly. The Prediction: Superbugs will be common - and so will bug accidents. SUPERGEEZERS The Peril: For obvious reasons, the vast majority of the world's middle-class people will not want to beta-test genetic software on their offspring. But history shows that there is nothing so stupid that someone won't try it - look at the parents today attempting to turn their children into star athletes by pumping them full of steroids and growth hormone. By 2013, dictators could be trying to mass-produce super-speed skaters for the 2030 Olympics. Most of the negative human consequences will presumably be aborted. But some will make it into the world, and medical researchers will be busy striving to figure out a way to give them normal lives. Equally problematic will be the occasional successes: What about those speed skaters, anyway? What are the odds that society would welcome them? The Prediction: Moral objections to medical advances will be overcome, if only because holding these opinions is a poor survival strategy. SUPERTREES The Peril: Genetically modified plants could interbreed with their wild relatives. Consider Johnson grass, an invasive cousin of sorghum that farmers and the government spend millions a year to control, mainly with herbicides. The prospect of genetically engineered sorghum transferring its powers to Johnson grass is an activist's nightmare. Short, nearly branchless trees would be fine in remote paper plantations, but if they spread to real forests they could unleash an ecological disaster. The Prediction: Extremely strange-looking forests in extremely strange places - like the Outback and the Pampas. SUPERPHARMA The Peril: Call it Carl Sagan syndrome, after the self-proclaimed ultra-rationalist who spent millions on unproven - and ultimately pointless - cancer treatments. But as the desire for longer life fuels the biotech industry, that attitude could bankrupt the larger economy. Already, a huge percentage of the budgets of developed nations, especially the US, is directed toward taking care of the old, and as societies tie up a greater proportion of their resources in postponing death, Generations X, Y, and Z could begin to resent the baby boomers - a scenario envisioned in Bruce Sterling's gerontocratic novel, Holy Fire. Meanwhile, the ancient wealthy will live in fear that their insurance companies will refuse to cover the newest life-extension methods. Just as Marx predicted: the dictatorship of the actuaries. The Prediction: With any luck, the new pharma economy will catalyze a long boom greater than that of 1982-2000. The leaders of the most powerful nations on Earth have failed us. The Security Council has failed us. The world stands on the brink of war. If ever there was a need for the United Nations to rise to the challenge it was conceived to meet, now is that time. Through a little-used mechanism known as Resolution 377A, the "Uniting for Peace" resolution, the General Assembly may be the last hope for disarming Iraq peaceably and stopping the US war machine. You can write to your UN ambassador to support this resolution from here: The Uniting for Peace resolution empowers the General Assembly to meet in emergency session to address acts of aggression or a breach of the peace when the Security Council has been unable to act. Its was first used to bring about a cease-fire in the Suez crisis of 1950, forcing Britain and France to withdraw from Egypt within a week, even after they had vetoed calls for a cease-fire in the Security Council. It's been used ten times since then, most often at the request of the United States. If you believe, as we do, that the very future of the world, and of the United Nations, is being put at risk in the name of a pre-emptive war, please join the call for the UN General Assembly to respond. Ask that the Uniting for Peace resolution be invoked, that the war on Iraq be condemned, and that peaceable means of disarming Iraq be sought. The next hours may provide our last chance to change a dangerous course in history. The United Nations must not allow a world order based on multilateralism to be replaced with one in which the mightiest and richest make the rules. You can read more here: http://www.greenpeace.org/international_en/news/details?item_id=179491 and, again, you can write to your UN ambassador to support this http://act.greenpeace.org/aas/e?a=ufp&s=amb_s Visit the No War website for more news: http://nowar.greenpeace.org Please take a few minutes to act now. |