by Freeman Dyson
The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007
1.
It has become part
of the accepted wisdom to say
that the twentieth century
was the century of physics
and the twenty-first century
will be the century of biology.
Two facts about the coming century
are agreed on by almost everyone.
Biology is now bigger than physics,
as measured by the size of budgets,
by the size of the workforce,
or by the output of major discoveries;
and biology is likely to remain
the biggest part of science
through the twenty-first century.
Biology is also more important than physics,
as measured by its economic consequences,
by its ethical implications,
or by its effects on human welfare.
These facts raise an interesting question.
Will the domestication of high technology,
which we have seen marching
from triumph to triumph
with the advent of personal computers
and GPS receivers and digital cameras,
soon be extended from
physical technology to biotechnology?
I believe that the answer to this question is yes.
Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction.
I predict that the domestication of biotechnology
will dominate our lives during the next fifty years
at least as much as the domestication of computers
has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.
I see a close analogy
between John von Neumann’s
blinkered vision of computers
as large centralized facilities
and the public perception
of genetic engineering today
as an activity of large pharmaceutical
and agribusiness corporations
such as Monsanto.
The public distrusts Monsanto
because Monsanto likes to put genes
for poisonous pesticides into food crops,
just as we distrusted von Neumann
because he liked to use his computer
for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight.
It is likely that genetic engineering
will remain unpopular and controversial
so long as it remains a centralized activity
in the hands of large corporations.
I see a bright future
for the biotechnology industry
when it follows the path
of the computer industry,
the path that von Neumann
failed to foresee,
becoming small and domesticated
rather than big and centralized.
The first step in this direction
was already taken recently,
when genetically modified tropical fish
with new and brilliant colors
appeared in pet stores.
For biotechnology to become domesticated,
the next step is to become user-friendly.
I recently spent a happy day
at the Philadelphia Flower Show,
the biggest indoor flower show in the world,
where flower breeders from all over the world
show off the results of their efforts.
I have also visited
the Reptile Show in San Diego,
an equally impressive show
displaying the work
of another set of breeders.
Philadelphia excels in orchids and roses,
San Diego excels in lizards and snakes.
The main problem for a grandparent
visiting the reptile show with a grandchild
is to get the grandchild out of the building
without actually buying a snake.
Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake
is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder.
There are thousands of people,
amateurs and professionals,
who devote their lives to this business.
Now imagine what will happen
when the tools of genetic engineering
become accessible to these people.
There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners
who will use genetic engineering
to breed new varieties of roses and orchids.
Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots
and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets.
Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too.
Domesticated biotechnology,
once it gets into the hands
of housewives and children,
will give us an explosion
of diversity of new living creatures,
rather than the monoculture crops
that the big corporations prefer.
New lineages will proliferate
to replace those that
monoculture farming
and deforestation have destroyed.
Designing genomes will be a personal thing,
a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.
Few of the new creations will be masterpieces,
but a great many will bring joy to their creators
and variety to our fauna and flora.
The final step in the domestication
of biotechnology will be biotech games,
designed like computer games
for children down to kindergarten age
but played with real eggs and seeds
rather than with images on a screen.
Playing such games, kids will acquire
an intimate feeling for the organisms
that they are growing.
The winner could be the kid
whose seed grows the prickliest cactus,
or the kid whose egg
hatches the cutest dinosaur.
These games will be messy
and possibly dangerous.
Rules and regulations
will be needed to make sure
that our kids do not
endanger themselves and others.
The dangers of biotechnology are real and serious.
If domestication of biotechnology
is the wave of the future,
five important questions
need to be answered.
First, can it be stopped?
Second, ought it to be stopped?
Third, if stopping it is
either impossible or undesirable,
what are the appropriate limits
that our society must impose on it?
Fourth, how should the limits be decided?
Fifth, how should the limits be enforced,
nationally and internationally?
I do not attempt
to answer these questions here.
I leave it to our children
and grandchildren
to supply the answers.
2.
A New Biology for a New Century
Carl Woese is the world’s greatest expert
in the field of microbial taxonomy,
the classification and understanding of microbes.
He explored the ancestry of microbes
by tracing the similarities
and differences between their genomes.
He discovered
the large-scale structure of the tree of life,
with all living creatures descended
from three primordial branches.
Before Woese, the tree of life
had two main branches
called prokaryotes and eukaryotes,
the prokaryotes composed of cells
without nuclei and the eukaryotes
composed of cells with nuclei.
All kinds of plants and animals,
including humans,
belonged to the eukaryote branch.
The prokaryote branch contained only microbes.
Woese discovered, by studying
the anatomy of microbes in detail,
that there are two fundamentally
different kinds of prokaryotes,
which he called bacteria and archea.
So he constructed
a new tree of life
with three branches,
bacteria, archea, and eukaryotes.
Most of the well-known microbes are bacteria.
The archea were at first supposed
to be rare and confined
to extreme environments such as hot springs,
but they are now known to be abundant
and widely distributed over the planet.
Woese recently published two provocative
and illuminating articles with the titles
“A New Biology for a New Century”
and (together with Nigel Goldenfeld)
“Biology’s Next Revolution.”*
Woese’s main theme
is the obsolescence of reductionist biology
as it has been practiced for the last hundred years,
with its assumption that biological processes
can be understood by studying genes and molecules.
What is needed instead is a new synthetic biology
based on emergent patterns of organization.
Aside from his main theme,
he raises another important question.
When did Darwinian evolution begin?
By Darwinian evolution
he means evolution
as Darwin understood it,
based on the competition
for survival of noninterbreeding species.
He presents evidence that Darwinian evolution
does not go back to the beginning of life.
When we compare genomes
of ancient lineages of living creatures,
we find evidence of numerous transfers
of genetic information from one lineage to another.
In early times,
horizontal gene transfer,
the sharing of genes between
unrelated species, was prevalent.
It becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time.
Whatever Carl Woese writes,
even in a speculative vein,
needs to be taken seriously.
In his “New Biology” article,
he is postulating a golden age
of pre-Darwinian life,
when horizontal gene transfer
was universal and separate species
did not yet exist.
Life was then
a community of cells
of various kinds,
sharing their genetic information
so that clever chemical tricks
and catalytic processes
invented by one creature
could be inherited by all of them.
Evolution was a communal affair,
the whole community
advancing in metabolic
and reproductive efficiency
as the genes of the most
efficient cells were shared.
Evolution could be rapid,
as new chemical devices
could be evolved simultaneously
by cells of different kinds
working in parallel
and then reassembled
in a single cell
by horizontal gene transfer.
But then, one evil day,
a cell resembling a primitive bacterium
happened to find itself one jump ahead
of its neighbors in efficiency.
That cell, anticipating Bill Gates
by three billion years,
separated itself from the community
and refused to share.
Its offspring became
the first species of bacteriae
"and the first species of any kind"
reserving their intellectual property
for their own private use.
With their superior efficiency,
the bacteria continued to prosper
and to evolve separately,
while the rest of the community
continued its communal life.
Some millions of years later,
another cell separated itself
from the community
and became the ancestor of the archea.
Some time after that,
a third cell separated itself
and became the ancestor
of the eukaryotes.
And so it went on,
until nothing was left
of the community and all life
was divided into species.
The Darwinian interlude had begun.
The Darwinian interlude
has lasted for two or three billion years.
It probably slowed down
the pace of evolution considerably.
The basic biochemical machinery of life
had evolved rapidly during the few
hundreds of millions of years
of the pre-Darwinian era,
and changed very little
in the next two billion years
of microbial evolution.
Darwinian evolution is slow
because individual species,
once established, evolve very little.
With rare exceptions,
Darwinian evolution
requires established species
to become extinct
so that new species can replace them.
Now, after three billion years,
the Darwinian interlude is over.
It was an interlude between
two periods of horizontal gene transfer.
The epoch of Darwinian evolution
based on competition between species
ended about ten thousand years ago,
when a single species, Homo sapiens,
began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere.
Since that time, cultural evolution
has replaced biological evolution
as the main driving force of change.
Cultural evolution is not Darwinian.
Cultures spread
by horizontal transfer of ideas
more than by genetic inheritance.
Cultural evolution is running
a thousand times faster
than Darwinian evolution,
taking us into a new era
of cultural interdependence
which we call globalization.
And now, as Homo sapiens
domesticates the new biotechnology,
we are reviving
the ancient pre-Darwinian practice
of horizontal gene transfer,
moving genes easily from
microbes to plants and animals,
blurring the boundaries between species.
We are moving rapidly
into the post-Darwinian era,
when species other than our own
will no longer exist,
and the rules of Open Source sharing
will be extended from the exchange
of software to the exchange of genes.
Then the evolution of life
will once again be communal,
as it was in the good old days
before separate species
and intellectual property were invented.
I would like
to borrow Carl Woese’s vision
of the future of biology and extend it
to the whole of science.
Here is his metaphor for the future of science:
Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream,
poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current,
thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms.
The child disperses it again.
Again it reforms, and
the fascinating game goes on.
There you have it!
Organisms are resilient patterns
in a turbulent flow
-patterns in an energy flow….
It is becoming increasingly clear
that to understand living systems
in any deep sense, we must
come to see them not materialistically,
as machines, but as stable,
complex, dynamic organization.
This picture of living creatures,
as patterns of organization
rather than collections of molecules,
applies not only to bees and bacteria,
butterflies and rain forests,
but also to sand dunes and snowflakes,
thunderstorms and hurricanes.
The nonliving universe
is as diverse and as dynamic
as the living universe,
and is also dominated
by patterns of organization
that are not yet understood.
The reductionist physics
and the reductionist molecular biology
of the twentieth century will continue
to be important in the twenty-first century,
but they will not be dominant.
The big problems,
the evolution of the universe as a whole,
the origin of life,
the nature of human consciousness,
and the evolution of the earth’s climate,
cannot be understood by reducing them
to elementary particles and molecules.
New ways of thinking
and new ways of organizing
large databases will be needed.
3.
Green Technology
The domestication of biotechnology
in everyday life may also be helpful in solving
practical economic and environmental problems.
Once a new generation
of children has grown up,
as familiar with biotech games
as our grandchildren
are now with computer games,
biotechnology will
no longer seem weird and alien.
In the era of Open Source biology,
the magic of genes will be available
to anyone with the skill
and imagination to use it.
The way will be
open for biotechnology
to move into the mainstream
of economic development,
to help us solve some
of our urgent social problems
and ameliorate the human condition
all over the earth.
Open Source biology
could be a powerful tool,
giving us access to cheap
and abundant solar energy.
A plant is a creature
that uses the energy of sunlight
to convert water and carbon dioxide
and other simple chemicals
into roots and leaves and flowers.
To live, it needs to collect sunlight.
But it uses sunlight with low efficiency.
The most efficient crop plants,
such as sugarcane or maize,
convert about 1 percent of the sunlight
that falls onto them into chemical energy.
Artificial solar collectors
made of silicon can do much better.
Silicon solar cells can convert sunlight
into electrical energy with 15 percent efficiency,
and electrical energy can be converted
into chemical energy without much loss.
We can imagine that in the future,
when we have mastered
the art of genetically engineering plants,
we may breed new crop plants
that have leaves made of silicon,
converting sunlight into chemical energy
with ten times the efficiency of natural plants.
These artificial crop plants
would reduce the area of land needed
for biomass production by a factor of ten.
They would allow solar energy
to be used on a massive scale
without taking up too much land.
They would look like natural plants
except that their leaves would be black,
the color of silicon, instead of green,
the color of chlorophyll.
The question I am asking is,
how long will it take us
to grow plants with silicon leaves?
If the natural evolution of plants
had been driven by the need
for high efficiency of utilization of sunlight,
then the leaves of all plants would have been black.
Black leaves would absorb sunlight
more efficiently than leaves of any other color.
Obviously plant evolution
was driven by other needs,
and in particular by the need
for protection against overheating.
For a plant growing in a hot climate,
it is advantageous to reflect
as much as possible of the sunlight
that is not used for growth.
There is plenty of sunlight,
and it is not important
to use it with maximum efficiency.
The plants have evolved
with chlorophyll in their leaves
to absorb the useful
red and blue components of sunlight
and to reflect the green.
That is why it is reasonable for plants
in tropical climates to be green.
But this logic does not explain
why plants in cold climates
where sunlight is scarce are also green.
We could imagine that in a place like Iceland,
overheating would not be a problem,
and plants with black leaves
using sunlight more efficiently
would have an evolutionary advantage.
For some reason
which we do not understand,
natural plants with black leaves never appeared.
Why not? Perhaps we shall not understand
why nature did not travel this route
until we have traveled it ourselves.
After we have explored this route to the end,
when we have created new forests
of black-leaved plants that can use sunlight
ten times more efficiently than natural plants,
we shall be confronted
by a new set of environmental problems.
Who shall be allowed to grow the black-leaved plants?
Will black-leaved plants remain
an artificially maintained cultivar,
or will they invade
and permanently change the natural ecology?
What shall we do with the silicon trash
that these plants leave behind them?
Shall we be able to design
a whole ecology of silicon-eating microbes
and fungi and earthworms to keep
the black-leaved plants in balance
with the rest of nature
and to recycle their silicon?
The twenty-first century will bring us
powerful new tools of genetic engineering
with which to manipulate our farms and forests.
With the new tools will come
new questions and new responsibilities.
Rural poverty is one of the great evils of the modern world.
The lack of jobs and economic opportunities
in villages drives millions of people
to migrate from villages into overcrowded cities.
The continuing migration causes immense
social and environmental problems
in the major cities of poor countries.
The effects of poverty
are most visible in the cities,
but the causes of poverty
lie mostly in the villages.
What the world needs
is a technology that directly attacks
the problem of rural poverty
by creating wealth and jobs in the villages.
A technology that creates industries
and careers in villages would give
the villagers a practical alternative to migration.
It would give them a chance to survive
and prosper without uprooting themselves.
The shifting balance of wealth and population
between villages and cities is one
of the main themes of human history
over the last ten thousand years.
The shift from villages to cities
is strongly coupled with a shift
from one kind of technology to another.
I find it convenient to call
the two kinds of technology green and gray.
The adjective “green”
has been appropriated and abused
by various political movements,
especially in Europe, so I need
to explain clearly what I have in mind
when I speak of green and gray.
Green technology is based on biology,
gray technology on physics and chemistry.
Roughly speaking, green technology
is the technology that gave birth
to village communities ten thousand years ago,
starting from the domestication of plants and animals,
the invention of agriculture, the breeding
of goats and sheep and horses and cows and pigs,
the manufacture of textiles and cheese and wine.
Gray technology is the technology
that gave birth to cities and empires
five thousand years later,
starting from the forging of bronze and iron,
the invention of wheeled vehicles and paved roads,
the building of ships and war chariots,
the manufacture of swords and guns and bombs.
Gray technology also produced
the steel plows, tractors, reapers,
and processing plants
that made agriculture more productive
and transferred much of the resulting wealth
from village-based farmers to city-based corporations.
For the first five of the ten thousand years
of human civilization, wealth and power
belonged to villages with green technology,
and for the second five thousand years
wealth and power belonged to cities
with gray technology.
Beginning about five hundred years ago,
gray technology became increasingly dominant,
as we learned to build machines
that used power from wind and water
and steam and electricity.
In the last hundred years,
wealth and power were even
more heavily concentrated in cities
as gray technology raced ahead.
As cities became richer, rural poverty deepened.
This sketch of the last ten thousand years of human history
puts the problem of rural poverty into a new perspective.
If rural poverty is a consequence
of the unbalanced growth of gray technology,
it is possible that a shift in the balance
back from gray to green might cause
rural poverty to disappear.
That is my dream.
During the last fifty years
we have seen explosive progress
in the scientific understanding
of the basic processes of life,
and in the last twenty years
this new understanding
has given rise to explosive growth
of green technology.
The new green technology
allows us to breed new varieties
of animals and plants as our ancestors
did ten thousand years ago,
but now a hundred times faster.
It now takes us a decade
instead of a millennium
to create new crop plants,
such as the herbicide-resistant varieties
of maize and soybean that allow weeds
to be controlled without plowing
and greatly reduce the erosion
of topsoil by wind and rain.
Guided by a precise understanding
of genes and genomes
instead of by trial and error,
we can within a few years
modify plants so as to give them
improved yield, improved nutritive value,
and improved resistance to pests and diseases.
Within a few more decades,
as the continued exploring of genomes
gives us better knowledge
of the architecture of living creatures,
we shall be able to design new species
of microbes and plants according to our needs.
The way will then be open for green technology
to do more cheaply and more cleanly
many of the things that gray technology can do,
and also to do many things
that gray technology has failed to do.
Green technology could replace
most of our existing chemical industries
and a large part of our mining
and manufacturing industries.
Genetically engineered earthworms
could extract common metals
such as aluminum and titanium from clay,
and genetically engineered seaweed
could extract magnesium or gold from seawater.
Green technology could also achieve
more extensive recycling of waste products
and worn-out machines,
with great benefit to the environment.
An economic system based on green technology
could come much closer to the goal of sustainability,
using sunlight instead of fossil fuels
as the primary source of energy.
New species of termite could be engineered
to chew up derelict automobiles instead of houses,
and new species of tree could be engineered
to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight
into liquid fuels instead of cellulose.
Before genetically modified termites and trees
can be allowed to help solve
our economic and environmental problems,
great arguments will rage
over the possible damage they may do.
Many of the people who call themselves green
are passionately opposed to green technology.
But in the end, if the technology
is developed carefully and deployed
with sensitivity to human feelings,
it is likely to be accepted
by most of the people
who will be affected by it,
just as the equally unnatural
and unfamiliar green technologies
of milking cows and plowing soils
and fermenting grapes
were accepted by our ancestors long ago.
I am not saying that the political acceptance
of green technology will be quick or easy.
I say only that green technology
has enormous promise
for preserving the balance of nature
on this planet as well as
for relieving human misery.
Future generations of people
raised from childhood
with biotech toys and games
will probably accept it
more easily than we do.
Nobody can predict how long
it may take to try out the new technology
in a thousand different ways
and measure its costs and benefits.
What has this dream
of a resurgent green technology
to do with the problem of rural poverty?
In the past, green technology
has always been rural,
based in farms and villages
rather than in cities.
In the future it will pervade cities
as well as countryside,
factories as well as forests.
It will not be entirely rural.
But it will still have a large rural component.
After all, the cloning of Dolly occurred
in a rural animal-breeding station in Scotland,
not in an urban laboratory in Silicon Valley.
Green technology will use land
and sunlight as its primary sources
of raw materials and energy.
Land and sunlight cannot be concentrated in cities
but are spread more or less evenly over the planet.
When industries and technologies
are based on land and sunlight,
they will bring employment
and wealth to rural populations.
In a country like India
with a large rural population,
bringing wealth to the villages
means bringing jobs other than farming.
Most of the villagers
must cease to be subsistance farmers
and become shopkeepers or schoolteachers
or bankers or engineers or poets.
In the end the villages
must become gentrified,
as they are today in England,
with the old farm workers’ cottages
converted into garages,
and the few remaining farmers
converted into highly skilled professionals.
It is fortunate that sunlight
is most abundant in tropical countries,
where a large fraction of the world’s people
live and where rural poverty is most acute.
Since sunlight is distributed
more equitably than coal and oil,
green technology can be a great equalizer,
helping to narrow the gap
between rich and poor countries.
My book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999)
describes a vision of green technology enriching villages
all over the world and halting the migration from villages to megacities.
The three components of the vision are all essential:
the sun to provide energy where it is needed,
the genome to provide plants that can convert
sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently,
the Internet to end the intellectual
and economic isolation of rural populations.
With all three components in place,
every village in Africa could enjoy
its fair share of the blessings of civilization.
People who prefer to live in cities
would still be free to move
from villages to cities,
but they would not be compelled
to move by economic necessity.
LETTERS
'Our Biotech Future' October 11, 2007
IN RESPONSE TO:
Our Biotech Future from the July 19, 2007 issue
To the Editors:
Freeman Dyson has written
his usual insightful essay
[“Our Biotech Future,” NYR, July 19],
but I differ on one important point
regarding how evolution works.
He points out that black leaves
would be more efficient
than green ones at capturing sunlight,
and then tries to explain
why leaves are not black.
In doing so,
he implicitly assumes
that natural selection,
left to itself after enough time,
will always zero in
on the most efficient means
for improving adaptation.
However, natural selection
proceeds via a narrow
point-to-point pathway,
not a wide all-encompassing one.
In solving any given problem
it can make use of only
what happens to be available
at that particular time.
An anecdote illustrates
this better than a discourse.
Many years ago I was in a group
of chemists making new antibiotics.
One path taken was
to synthesize cephalosporins
with the ring sulfur atom
replaced by oxygen,
a chemically profound alteration.
These oxy-cephs turned out to be
orders of magnitude more potent
than the natural ones.
Why then did Nature
not discover them,
given so much time?
Because the immediate precursors
of cephalosporins on the synthetic pathway
Nature had created to make them had a sulfur atom,
not an oxygen atom, in the key position.
The corresponding oxy precursor
either did not then exist
or was chemically
unsuited to that pathway,
and there was no going back
a dozen steps to find
a missing link that could go on
to oxy-cephs, because every step
in natural selection must
be adaptive in its own right.
The basic premise
is that every step
in evolutionary change
is stochastic and adaptive.
No new structure that appears in this way
persists unless it is immediately adaptive,
even if just one more step might
produce something very superior.
Thus green leaves dominate
because they happen to have come
along before black ones,
and also because chance uncovered
no route from green to black
that was adaptive at every new step.
Raymond A. Firestone
Stamford, Connecticut
Freeman Dyson replies:
Raymond Firestone correctly points out
that evolution is constrained
by the laws of chemistry
and can only move one step at a time.
His analogy between antibiotics and leaves is a good one.
Evolution has failed to produce black leaves
because they must be made of silicon,
and the chemical reduction of silicate rock
or sand to silicon cannot be done in one step.
Although silicon is one of the most abundant elements,
it occurs naturally in rock and sand in combination with oxygen,
and no form of life has evolved a chemical pathway
leading from silicon dioxide to pure silicon.
'Our Biotech Future': An Exchange September 27, 2007
IN RESPONSE TO:
Our Biotech Future from the July 19, 2007 issue
To the Editors:
Science is valuable and admirable
for its ability to establish
a certain kind of truth
beyond a reasonable doubt,
for its precise methodologies
and its respect for evidence.
And so it is disconcerting to see
an eminent scientist such as Freeman Dyson
using his own prestige and that of science
as a pulpit from which to foretell
the advent of yet another technological cure-all.
In his essay “Our Biotech Future” [NYR, July 19],
Mr. Dyson sees high technology
as “marching from triumph to triumph
with the advent of personal computers
and GPS receivers and digital cameras,”
and he foretells the coming
of a “domesticated” biotechnology
that will become the plaything
and art form of “housewives and children,”
that “will give us an explosion of diversity
of new living creatures, rather than
the monoculture crops
that the big corporations prefer,”
and will solve “the problem of rural poverty.”
This of course is only another item
in a long wish list of techno-scientific panaceas
that includes the “labor-saving” industrialization
of virtually everything,
eugenics (the ghost and possibility
that haunts genetic engineering),
chemistry (for “better living”),
the “peaceful atom,”
the Green Revolution,
television,
the space program,
and computers.
All those have been boosted,
by prophets like Mr. Dyson,
as benefits essentially without costs,
assets without debits,
in spite of their drawdown
of necessary material
and cultural resources.
Such prophecies are in fact only sales talk
—and sales talk, moreover, by sellers
under no pressure to guarantee their products.
Mr. Dyson has the candor to admit
that biotechnological games
for children may be dangerous:
“The dangers of biotechnology are real and serious.”
And he lists a number of questions
—serious ones, sure enough—
that “need to be answered.”
But perhaps the most irresponsible thing
in his essay is his willingness to shirk his own questions:
“I do not attempt to answer these questions here.
I leave it to our children and grandchildren to supply the answers.”
This is fully in keeping with our bequest
to our children of huge accumulations
of nuclear and chemical poisons.
And isn’t it rather shockingly unscientific?
If there is anything at all to genetics,
how can we assume that our children
and grandchildren will be smart enough
to answer questions that we
are too dull or lazy to answer?
And after our long experience of problems
caused by industrial solutions,
might not a little skepticism be in order?
Might not, in fact, some actual cost accounting be in order?
As for rural poverty, Mr. Dyson’s thinking
is all too familiar to any rural American:
“What the world needs is a technology
that directly attacks the problem of rural poverty
by creating wealth and jobs in the villages.”
This is called “bringing in industry,”
a practice dear to state politicians.
To bring in industry,
the state offers “economic incentives”
(or “corporate welfare”) and cheap labor
to presumed benefactors,
who often leave very soon
for greater incentives
and cheaper labor elsewhere.
Industrial technology,
as brought-in industry
and as applied by agribusiness,
has been the cleverest means so far
of siphoning the wealth of the countryside
—not to the cities, as Mr. Dyson appears to think,
for urban poverty is inextricably related
to rural poverty —but to the corporations.
Industries that are “brought in”
convey the local wealth out;
otherwise they would not come.
And what makes it likely
that “green technology”
would be an exception?
How can Mr. Dyson suppose
that the rural poor will control
the power of biotechnology
so as to use it for their own advantage?
Has he not heard of the
patenting of varieties and genes?
Has he not heard
of the infamous lawsuit of Monsanto
against the Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser?
I suppose that if, as Mr. Dyson predicts,
biotechnology becomes available—cheaply,
I guess—even to children, then it would
be available to poor country people.
But what would be the economic advantage of this?
How, in short, would this work to relieve poverty?
Mr. Dyson does not say.
His only example
of a beneficent rural biotechnology
is the cloning of Dolly the sheep.
But he does not say how
this feat has benefited sheep production,
let alone the rural poor.
Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Port Royal, Kentucky
To the Editors:
In his excellent article titled “Our Biotech Future,”
Freeman Dyson makes a number of stimulating points
about the nature of life, evolution, and most importantly
about the uses of so-called “green” and “gray” technologies.
I fully believe that in order to achieve sustainable economies,
the world will have to embrace green technology fully.
However, as Dyson continues,
popular acceptance of widespread
or complete use of green technology
is far from a foregone conclusion,
and for whatever reason,
I think that a piece of the puzzle
has been left out of this treatise
on technological conversion.
The connecting concept I speak of
is the in-between realm
that is the integration
of green and gray technologies.
To a certain extent,
such combinations already exist.
For instance, our current abilities to work with DNA
—to transfer bits of genetic code around at will,
to silence or amplify the effects of specific genes,
to read off the code—clearly relies heavily
both on industrial manufacturing processes
(to make the tools used)
and on basic uses of physics and chemistry
(electrophoresis, mass spectroscopy, etc.)
to achieve their ends.
Beyond these implicit syntheses
of the technological types
described by Dyson,
two examples come to mind.
First, in my own field of neuroscience,
it has long been troubling
that there is so much difficulty
in directly controlling neural circuits.
There is only so much
that can be learned from observation
of neural systems and thus
direct manipulation becomes necessary.
By harvesting the DNA that instructs algae
how to make photosensitive ion channels
(the membrane proteins which individual cells
use to control their electrical states)
and putting that code into animals
such as the oft-studied nematode C. elegans,
it becomes possible to blend that green technology
with our existing gray abilities to manipulate light
and measure the responses of the nervous system
in ways that are sure to advance our understanding of brains. [1]
The second example
is perhaps even more relevant
to a point raised by Dyson.
He points out that plants
are only about 1 percent efficient
in harvesting light energy.
However, this is not true
of the initial stages of photosynthesis,
specifically in the transfer of light energy
through excited electrons
to the reaction centers
of the two photosystems
found in the membranes
of the substructures of chloroplasts
where energy extraction occurs.
In these early stages,
the plants are 95 percent or more efficient,
a figure we can only hope to someday achieve
with our silicon-based photoelectric cells.
This feat is accomplished
by the fact that evolution
has discovered how to overlap
the quantum states of pigment molecules
such that the transfer of excited electrons is coherent,
that is to say achieved not by thermal bumping of molecules
into one another like the heating of a pot of water,
but by a nearly lossless, smooth transfer of excitation. [2]
If we were able to figure out how
to harvest and incorporate
such green technology with existing gray,
perhaps we could improve our abilities
to use sunlight, a key element in Dyson’s vision
of narrowing economic gaps between rich and poor countries.
Once again,
I must say that I strongly believe
that we must fully become
a species of green technology users,
as we were and animals are,
in order to sustain ourselves in the long term.
There is much territory to be explored,
however, before we reach that point.
The amalgamation of green and gray technologies
offers us a path to move in that direction
which will allow the public to become comfortable
with the ubiquitous use of such means
and facilitate understanding and discovery
of phenomena which have as of yet remained out of reach.
James P. Herman
Graduate Student
Department of Neuroscience
City College of New York
New York City
Graduate Student
Department of Neuroscience
City College of New York
New York City
To the Editors:
The fascinating speculations
for the growth of technology
in the twenty-first century
in Freeman Dyson’s “Our Biotech Future”
apply directly to medicine.
If one considers the biggest achievements
of the twentieth century in medicine,
they are all largely “gray technologies”:
artificial heart valves, hemodialysis,
arterial stents, organ transplantation,
internal cardiac defibrillators, heart-lung machines,
deep brain stimulators, internal screw-fixation of bone,
radiosurgery, etc.
Up until now relatively few medications
have successfully altered genes
or caused organs and tissues to regenerate.
The promises of biotechnology
are just barely starting
to challenge the “nuts and bolts”
of twentieth-century medicine.
The primary reason the achievements
in cardiac care in the twentieth century
have outpaced other areas is that the heart
(a pump) is uniquely suited
to technology based on physics.
On the other hand,
the nanoscale of the central nervous system
cannot be so easily manipulated by “gray technology.”
Therefore, limited progress has been made
in reversing neurological diseases
such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease
or even other common ailments like arthritis.
The biggest question is how medicine
will achieve its paradigm shift
to the new biotechnology
in a research environment largely controlled
by drug and device manufacturers
with billions of dollars already
at stake in “gray technology.”
Christopher B. Michael, MD
Department of Neurosurgery
Baylor University Medical Center
Dallas, Texas
Department of Neurosurgery
Baylor University Medical Center
Dallas, Texas
Freeman Dyson replies:
My thanks to Wendell Berry, James Herman,
and Christopher Michael for their illuminating comments.
As usual, I learn more from critics than from flatterers.
I value Berry’s criticism especially
because it comes from Kentucky,
a state that I know only superficially
from a visit to Center College in Danville,
where I was a guest of the local chapter
of Phi Beta Kappa students.
In Danville I saw three things
that agree with my vision of the future:
a world-class performance
of the Verdi Requiem by a local choir,
a bookstore where the owners
know and love what they are selling,
and a roomful of bright students
arguing about science and technology
in the midst of a rural society.
I am aware that Danville is not all of Kentucky,
and that large parts of Kentucky do not enjoy
the blessings of gentrification.
But I still see Danville as a good model
for the future of rural society,
when people are liberated
from the burdens of subsistence farming.
I am not foretelling any “technological cure-all.”
I am only saying that science
will soon give us a new set of tools,
which may bring wealth and freedom
to the countryside when they become
cheap and widely available.
Whether we greet these new tools
with enthusiasm or with abhorrence
is a matter of taste.
It would be unjust and unwise
for those who dislike the new tools today
to impose their tastes on our grandchildren tomorrow.
I agree with James Herman
that gray technology
will continue to provide essential tools
for exploring the mysteries of biology.
In his own field of neurology,
recent dramatic progress resulted
from the use of magnetic resonance imaging
to observe transitory changes in local brain activity
associated with specific perceptions and movements.
In the future, it is likely that the gray technology
of electrical and optical sensors will allow us
to study neural activities with far greater precision.
But the green technology of genetic engineering
will still be crucial to our understanding
of the development and architecture of brains.
Gray technology observes
brains and neurons from the outside,
green technology from the inside.
Dr. Michael raises an important question
that will soon be answered.
Large investments have already been made
in companies that advertise themselves
as providing “personalized medicine.”
Their business plan is to extract information
from the genome of a patient
and to tailor the therapy to suit
the patient’s genetic constitution.
It remains to be seen whether “personalized medicine”
will be successful, either medically or financially.
This application of “green technology”
has nothing to do with the domesticated biotechnology
that I described in my article.
I am not suggesting that oncologists and neurologists
should be replaced by do-it-yourself gene-therapy kits.
[1] Feng Zhang et al.,
"Multimodal Fast Optical Interrogation of Neural Circuitry,"
Nature, Vol. 446, pp. 633–639.
[2] Gregory S. Engel et al.,
"Evidence for Wavelike Energy Transfer
through Quantum Coherence in Photosynthetic Systems,"
Nature, Vol. 446, pp. 782–786.
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