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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
In April 2000, the loosely organized anti-biotechnology movement known as Biodevastation came to Boston to protest genetically modified crops, corporate usurpation of genetic heritages, eugenics, nanotechnology, consumerist attitudes toward nature, and basically the notion that any good at all can come from having learned how DNA works. Two days of workshops and lectures at Northeastern University culminated with a rally on Copley Square on a beautiful spring day, and bio-Luddites of all stripes -- including many distinctly hippie-looking stripes -- held posters in favor of organic food and against the patenting of genes, while giant black puppets acted out a morality play that evidently had something to do with a Monsanto-Mordor connection.
There were plenty of police around, and lots of television news vans. On the TV news that night there was much sensational prattle about how "another Seattle" had been miraculously averted, but in truth the Biodevastation crowd was about as peaceful as they come. Unsurprisingly, none of the news reports I saw showed the least understanding of what the protests were all about.
Instead they showed clips of barefoot people dancing to drums in the park juxtaposed with clips of articulate spokespersons from the Biotechnology Conference lamenting the pathetic ignorance of their well-intentioned adversaries. The implication given by the corporate news shows was that Biodevastation was the equivalent of a Flat Earth Society convention, that the protesters lacked the most rudimentary understanding of the principles of scientific inquiry, to say nothing of DNA polymerase or protein chemistry.
In fact, although there was indeed a sizable proportion of people at Biodevastation who wouldn't know a nucleotide from a nuclear submarine, I found that the workshop leaders were knowledgeable and persuasive. While some speakers were organic farmers with a mystical rather than scientific worldview -- whose argument boiled down to "nature good; technology bad" -- in general the discussion was much more nuanced.
The basic point being made by Biodevastation was not (as the corporate media implied) that science in itself was bad. It was that the biotechnological agenda was being set by a hubristic elite whose motives were, at the least, worthy of close scrutiny. How could ordinary people, the public, be confident that engineered genes would not escape their vectors? That's what Biodevastators wanted to know. What were the long-term implications of a patent regime that rewarded companies for laying claim to genetic patterns that they did not create, but only "read"? And what were, in the long run, the implications of fostering a society where the worth of any person could be inferred from a quick look at her phenotype?
I had some amount of sympathy with the whole Biodevastation program, but mainly I was there to sell copies of my bioinformatic nanonovel, "Acts of the Apostles," which I did from a bench near where Biodevastation Central had set up lunch. As you might expect, lunch was organic and vegetarian, and amid the peasant dresses, bare feet, guitars, anti-consumerism and attitude of defiance to the establishment I did experience a wee '60s flashback, which I kinda liked. But mainly I was trying to sell books.
But as at the O'Reilly conferences, I found the people friendly and engaging; in fact, many of them were deeply thoughtful, but thoughtful in a different way from informationtologists. Successful bioinformaticians think with Boolean precision about things that take place in a second, things that are so small you need an electron microscope to see them. Successful organic farmers think intuitively, imprecisely, about things that happen over decades, that cover tens of acres. I did not agree with everything they said, but certainly I supported their resistance to corporate hegemony. So I bought a T-shirt for my wife.
My wife herself is a retrograde Luddite who doesn't have a very high opinion of molecular biologists. "Those DNA manipulators are out of their minds," she says. "They have no idea what they're unleashing and they couldn't care less. They terrify me." My wife sometimes seems the very caricature of the anti-scientific ignoramus. When I try to tell her about the latest human gene that has been published on the Internet, she puts her fingers in her ears and hums.
But here's another fact: My bio-Luddite wife, she who is so terrified of the DNA manipulators, who thinks they are out of their minds, is indeed the same hot chick who 25 years ago presented her research on multiple reading frames in single-stranded DNA viruses at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. That was in 1978, three years before our genetically imperfect daughter was born.
Yes, my wife, that woman over there sucking down the certified-organic fruit smoothie with her Unitarian pagan cohorts, is the phenomenological sequel to the woman I once saw pack a bikini for a virologists' conference in Hawaii. But my wife the ex-scientist doesn't go to scientific conferences anymore. She hasn't done bench work in a molecular biology laboratory since shortly after our disabled son was born in 1983. She's been too busy watching our children's backs.
