Science, semi-science and nonsense

You write a little bit about the way the government approaches science. It's interesting because of the Kyoto Protocol and the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is science, isn't it? Are there scientists who would tell President Bush that it hasn't been proven?

Yes, there are. The debate is over the range. The legitimate scientific debate might be: Is the Earth going to warmer by 1.5 degrees centigrade or 5.5 degrees centigrade over the next 100 years? But even the most skeptical environmentalists that I've met don't deny that the world is warming. The evidence is pretty overwhelming.

The fuzzier areas are things like species extinction. No one's out there counting. There are projections based on E.O. Wilson's curve, which has to do with the area of a rain forest and the number of species in it. If you destroy 90 percent of the area, you destroy 50 percent of the species. But it's very difficult to count every single species. There's been some attempts to fog an entire tree and all the little bugs fall out of it and they get down on the ground and count them all. It's amazingly hard. E.O. Wilson was at this conference recently, and Richard Dawkins was there and we're sitting around the bar having a beer talking about how many species there are. You know what? They don't know how many species there are! I'm amazed! But that's what makes these environmental issues so difficult.

So maybe Bush is being a good skeptic?

Well, his motives involve economic consequences, that's obvious. There are economic consequences, and we have to be careful about the decisions we make. You really have to prioritize and do a cost-benefit analysis of the change you want to implement for how many lives you want to save.

First, you have to establish what kind of criteria you're going to base this on. Is it lives saved? Is it quality of life? Is it life five generations from now? That isn't settled. If you want to invest money in lives saved, you wouldn't bother with global warming, you'd go straight for feeding Third World nations. That's the No. 1 cause of death in the world. And you can go right down the line; 50,000 people die per year in automobiles. That would make a good investment. Somebody was talking about guardrails on curvy roads -- but that doesn't get much press. Global warming gets a lot of press, but I'm not sure if it's best to spend trillions of dollars cooling the world off. What if you spent it on guardrails, air bags, seat belts and a campaign to get people to quit smoking? Right there, that would save a lot of lives.

The U.S. government had to weigh in on cloning, too. Why did you decide to devote a chapter to it in this book?

It pushes all those frontiers of big questions about where science butts up against theology and philosophy -- the meaning of life and how it begins and where you define it.

How did you feel about how Clinton first handled that?

Governments are always too cautious. I mean, that's good when considering whether to go to war. Let's not just go kill people. But when it comes to science, they err on the side of too much caution. They fall into the slippery slope argument: if we carry this to the extreme, everybody will be cloning themselves and we'll have an overpopulation problem. Come on. In the surveys that came out when the Dolly story broke, almost nobody said they would clone themselves. You get a handful of goofy people like the guy in Chicago who wanted to be the first to clone himself, but that's it.

But this particular slippery slope argument does seem scarily slippery. It's way too easy to imagine what evil humans might do with the possibility of making new evil humans. And maybe there are more goofy guys out there than we think.

In any case, cloning is such a meaningless concept. You can't clone an individual. You can have his DNA pattern, maybe, and that's it. Now, since I've written that chapter, it looks like the genome is not where the action is, it's the proteome -- the proteins that are constructed by the genome. This is a far more complex system. The proteome project will be much bigger and take much longer than the genome project.

What's the difference?

We are made of proteins. All of our cells are made of protein chains. DNA dictates how those things are constructed, but there's an interactive feedback loop involved in the construction. How the developing organism interacts with its environment -- from the womb to its present existence in the environment -- affects how the genes interact and construct proteins.

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