Back in 1997 when the world heard the news of the first mammalian cloning (Dolly the sheep, of course) it gripped the imagination of a global audience and provided endless copy to the news media. More than once since then it has broken surface again – such as when the Raelian group claimed to have succeeded in human cloning efforts. In parallel, politicians in many countries (and diplomats at the United Nations) responded with assorted legislative and regulatory efforts. The cross-cutting debate about embryonic stem cells (which can be got from cloned embryos, even if so far they have usually been culled from embryos created by in vitro fertilisation), and the hyped prospect of “therapeutic cloning,” gained political traction in many places – and had the effect of distracting attention from the cloning issue as such.

This time around, the story is not so big. But it has made it to the front pages, even though there seems no more in the way of substantiation that the work (to produce cloned born humans) has been or can be done than in the earlier press-conference explosions of the past decade. There’s no doubt that publicity-hungry researchers (and cultists) can still milk the word, but it is yielding less as time passes.

Lessons? Well, for one, the five-letter word clone continues to have enormous drawing power. It fascinates, with some combination of the fascination of the horrible and the excitement of the future. The technology behind it (so-called somatic-cell nuclear transfer) may be rather passe – as Sir Ian Wilmut, Dolly’s creator, re-stated on a panel we shared during the recent Cambridge (UK) Science Festival – he is now looking elsewhere for stem cell success. But like “genetically-modified foods” (mainly in Europe) “clone” is a word to be conjured with. And conjurors intent on media coverage or policy debate have shown its magical powers. Whether these technologies are good, bad, indifferent, tedious, exicting, or some combination of the above (and my own views on cloning itself have been made clear elsewhere), they grip the public imagination.

Secondly, the public does not – in general – have much understanding of S and T issues on which it may have very strong opinions. This is not to insult the public intelligence (though the wisdom of crowds is not necessarily wisdom) but to underline the problems that emerge when matters that have generally been considered “technical” explode onto the public stage. Perhaps the biggest problem lies in the area of risk. As our economy migrates increasingly into dependence on technology-driven innovation which in the nature of the case will prove disruptive and not simply replicate the products and processes it supersedes, where are the bombs buried? When public understanding is low, economic and social impact high, and something highly novel and sci-fi in character at stake, we have reason to be scared. Nanotechnology has offered the best and most widespread example of the problem so far.

The answer? Well, platitudes about the need for “public engagement” are true, though the problem of engaging the public early enough in the development of new things is one we have yet to solve.

Perhaps we should be grateful to Dr. Zavos, the self-promoting would-be cloner, for reminding us.

As we focus on the financial collapse and its economic consequences – and the routines of elections and wars and whatever the New York Times and Washington Post deem to be “news” – in the background we hear the drip, drip, drip of something else. Technologies of this kind and that are slowly but surely enabling us to start remaking not Iraq and Afghanistan, or even Wall Street, but human nature itself.

To say that is to raise the $64,000 question: who picks the stories and decides what is “news”? Who decides the weighting of A and B and C? And were there an ombudsman or an internal affairs department to ask if they got it right, what would he or she say?

For some of us, while the lead news stories are important, there is something else at least equally so. And the latest illustration (brought to us, not least, by the New York Times, though on an inner page, is the development of drugs to enable individuals to get rid of unpleasant memories. Not in the way alcohol can – getting rid of all memories for a few hours; but as a surgical exercise in brain/memory management. Did you catch the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Go see it. It’s zany. But it’s on point. Do we want a world in which we can edit our memories? To which the answer is surely yes, and no, and yes, and no . . . .

Whatever the answer, the idea that we should be able to take charge of what we have remembered is, well, huge. Think about your own memories. Of love, of abuse, of disappointment, of triumph. Of guilt. Of childhood, which sets the memory patterns most of us spend our lives working through. This is big deal.

Of course, there is a lot more to the brain than memory. And efforts to harness its other capacities proceed apace. The brain-machine interface (BMI) may prove to be the biggest deal of the century. Implants to make us smarter or more connected (Google? Instant messaging?) are not any longer in the land of science fiction. Brainwaves, which sounds like a term from the black-and-white world of the 1950s along with ray-guns, are already being harnessed to control video games. Neuro-marketing (which may use MRIs to see how focus groups respond to ad messages) is up and running. The colonization of the brain is already in progress.

Good? Bad? Inevitable? I don’t think we know. Of enormous importance? Indubitably, yet how many of us have grasped that point? Its implications for just about all of human activity are hard to gauge. Hard, partly, because hardly anyone who is not an enthusiast has begin even to think about that they could be. For education, for security, for freedom and privacy, for jurisprudence, for democracy, for business?

We humans have been around a long time. It’s taken all that time for us to come to this particular point, where not only our bodies but our very brains are becoming the subject of our efforts at control and design and, to use the old term, dominion. Shouldn’t we be spending as much attention on this as we are on all the other stuff?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/health/research/06brain.html