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Let Us Not Play God - Jeremy Rifkin

For the last forty years two technology revolutions have emerged: Computers and genes. These two revolutions have recently begun to fuse to create a powerful new paradigm: Companies are using advanced computers to decipher, download, manage and exploit the ‘new’ resources – genes. Genes for building materials, energy, construction, food and pharmaceuticals. We are moving from the age of physics and chemistry, which dominated the industrial revolution, to the age of genes and computers. These two will dominate the biotechnology revolution.

In the 1970s, scientists accomplished a feat in biology: They took slices of genetic material from two different organisms and recombined them to create a new life form. When objections were raised scientists said: ‘What’s the problem? We’ve been manipulating nature since the dawn of the Neolithic Revolution. Isn’t this just a more sophisticated and efficient way to get the job done?’

I disagree. Experiments have been carried out that could never have been done in classical breeding and that haven’t been seen in evolution. For instance, genetic scientists took a human growth hormone gene and injected it into mice embryos. These mice grew twice as big, and they passed that human genetic information to every generation of their offspring. You can’t do that with classical breeding. In classical breeding close relatives can be crossed – for instance a horse and a donkey to breed a mule – but you cannot cross a donkey and an apple tree. Occasionally genes can cross biological boundaries with viruses and bacteria, but not on this scale. Now we have a technology revolution that allows scientists and companies to bypass every single biological boundary in the plant and animal kingdoms. That’s why it’s both exciting from an investment perspective and terrifying from a social, cultural and environmental perspective.

We all missed the point of the recent report of Dr. Wilmut’s cloned sheep. The story wasn’t Dolly; the story was Polly, the second sheep. That’s the sheep that the investment industry was interested in, because a human gene had been customized into a sheep’s cell and the sheep was then cloned. This demonstrated that it is now possible both to customize and mass-produce identical copies of an original living being with the same quality controls and design principles that were used on the assembly line with chemical products in the twentieth century. That’s why we call this ‘genetic engineering’ – not therapy, but engineering!

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