My Take

C-PET’s Synthetic Biology Roundtable, first round

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

I’ve had a couple of encounters with synthetic biology before. The National Science Foundation invited me to join a site visit to the main federally funded synbio research project, with a mandate to review all the non-technical aspects (ethics, security, law, and so on); and Nature Biotechnology asked me along with the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Caplan, doyen of contemporary bioethicists, to write commentaries for a special number back in 2009. So I’ve thought about what’s going on, and was very pleased to host and moderate round 1 of C-PET’s synbio process.

As those who were there (from think tanks, universities, a slew of embassies, federal agencies, the House science committee, and elsewhere) will recall, the discussion took off in some fascinating directions. C-PET is, of course, a think tank. But think tanks come in various shapes and sizes. Unlike most, we are non-partisan. We like process. We see ourselves as helping build a collaborative knowledge network. We don’t believe naively in win-win, but we do work for outcomes with a net benefit to everyone in the room. And our roundtables are designed to engage. Short presentations, not least as many in the room could readily be on the panel and probably everyone has relevant expertise. Short presentations, because engagement in the knowledge network is the key. And while some of our longer events have formal keynotes, our roundtable panels are designed for process. No PowerPoint. Plenty of exchanges, as the knowledge network builds and deepens. Not so much Q and A as participation. Having a large conference table at the center of things certainly helps. It may not be circular, like King Arthur’s (and, as it happens, the cabinet table of 19^th century British leader Benjamin Disraeli, around which I recently dined in the basement of a London club), but it is rounder than most Washington tables.

We decided to take at least two bites at this cherry. Next up is November 5. Round 1 was a scoping exercise. And the scope of synbio is hard to grasp. It ranges from industrial process and a concern about over-regulation (Rina Singh from the trade group BIO’s focus) to the ethics of “playing God” (raised by Penn’s Jonathan Moreno) to security scenarios of unimaginable scariness (“what if the Unabomber had been a biologist?” asked security expert Jonathan Tucker from the Monterey Institute, after stating that the #1 synbio anxiety of security experts is that smallpox could become the WMD of choice). From that we got into the problem of silo-ing individual technologies (and is “bioethics” becoming yet another silo, I asked?), the deep lack of long-term tech policy interest in the DC community, and the problem of policy driven by press release – as happened back in 1997 with Dolly the Sheep. Craig Venter’s latest announcement of his work in synthetic biology led to a presidential letter to the current bioethics commission to come up with a quick report and recommendations (though Penn’s Amy Gutmann, chair of the Obama commission, has six months for hers; back in 1997, Bill Clinton demanded that Dolly’s implications be clarified within three).

From around the table, perhaps the most perceptive of many shrewd observations came from Martin Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. As technologies develop, he averred, we need to ensure that, in parallel, we see the negatives and threats even as we focus on the benefits. When I pressed him, he distinguished this approach from the common European “precautionary principle,” which is more cautious in its method and would hog-tie (my term!) innovation and the development of tomorrow’s technologies. Jonathan Tucker’s emphatic statement of the scary possibilities that could flow from synbio (scary is also my term, though was synbio guru Drew Endy’s word in the New Yorker piece a year ago that brought this stuff to the attention of the cognoscenti) led to reflection on the emergence of asymmetric threats, and the fact that (as he noted) a smart teen will soon be able to go bio rogue. How are we to contain such a situation? Moreno set context by drawing us back to Plato and the eugenics of Sparta and the relations of politics and biology in every age. Yet the terms of trade have changed, the stakes are raised: what is the emerging biopolitics of tomorrow? The discussion also focused on the international arena. One of BIO’s concerns is that the strong US focus on biosecurity is not matched by equivalent approaches from Europe, and especially not Asia. Regulatory regimes can have the effect of curtailing U.S. competitiveness.

I pressed the issue of asymmetry. While the 21^st century tends to be defined in tech terms (“Biotech Century,” as Jeremy Rifkin titles one of his books; “Nano Century,” as I did one of mine), it might make more sense to see it as the asymmetric century. We don’t need to wait for biosmart rogue teens. Competence in QWERTY, that 19^th century skill, recently enabled Wikileaks to publish tens of thousands of secret files, and a hacker to share 200 million sets of Facebook info. I shared a recent book purchase, a new study of the Battle of Cannae (perhaps Imperial Rome’s greatest defeat). Rome raised a huge army to bring Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, to his knees. Hannibal, the man who wrote his name in history by bring elephants over the impassable Alps in winter, was a master of asymmetric tactics, like bin Laden in our day. He trapped this great army and killed probably half its men. My point: today, all he would have needed was a keyboard. The 21^st century has given asymmetry its head. Synbio offers asymmetric tools that lie far beyond the imagining of former generations.

There is of course disagreement among the most expert of experts as to the real significance of Venter’s latest move. But our panel was unanimous that while press releases are given to exaggeration, what Venter has accomplished is a big deal, and has handily set in motion a serious engagement with its implications.

C-PET’s round 2 will, we hope, bring us nearer some sort of conclusion. We look forward to being joined by Venter’s colleague Robert Friedman. By then perhaps the President’s bioethics commission will have written a draft report. My personal hope is that they will venture far beyond bioethics, assess synbio in its wider possibilities, and perhaps even urge our short-term, technology-unfocused Washington culture into a far wider engagement with the 21^st-century implications of these explosive developments.

Back in the early 2000’s, the National Science Foundation hosted a series of events under the banner “Converging Technologies.” They (conferences and books) had something of a “transhumanist” flavor (“enhancing human performance”), which seemed to me unfortunate as it distracted from what they were really saying: that, as it were, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Driven by extraordinary advances in science, technology is set to reshape the human experience over and over. The digital revolution has hardly begun. And what awaits us in nano, bio, IT and cognitive science (NBIC, the NSF watchword for these events) – and, perhaps especially, the development of Artificial Intelligence – is vast, if impossible to predict. The marriage of engineering and biology which is synbio is set to cut a vast swathe through the experience of the human community, for good and for ill. In parallel, the AI/robotics discussion takes a different but no less potentially transformative approach.

Meanwhile, the prophets of risk continue in their labor. Stephen Hawking, who some claim is Newton’s equal, tells us to evacuate the earth within 100 years. Martin Rees, cosmologist and top UK scientist (president of the Royal Society which essentially founded modern science in the 18^th century) tells us in his book Our Final Century (ridiculous and demeaning U.S. title, Our Final Hour) that the odds are against our survival on planet Earth. And Bill Joy, uber-technologist and guru at Sun in its heyday, famously told us back in 2000 “Why the Future doesn’t need us.” (Answer for those too young to be reading Wired 10 years ago: because we make a ghastly mistake, or (more subtly) because we make seemingly sensible choices that add up to the voluntary extinction of Homo sapiens sapiens.)

In his presentation, Moreno had suggested that he would not be alive in 100 years’ time to see what might eventuate. I reminded him that Ray Kurzweil, prophet of an AI-driven future and for all his (perhaps undue) optimism respected as thinker and inventer by some of the smartest minds on the planet, not only believes he has a shot at living for ever but is a year or two older than both Moreno and me.

My take? I’m concerned about “bioethics” as yet another silo, but hopeful that Amy Gutmann will take on a wider range of issues and be heard. Concerned that because “playing God” language doesn’t play with the cognoscenti that over-reaching claims of some bioscientists will go unchallenged (I’ve never liked the “playing God” way of playing, though probably all of us know what it means and find its implications intuitively disturbing). Concerned that asymmetry could doom us to an either/or between an Orwellian/Kafkan state and a situation of constant and dire threat from smart sociopath teens and QWERTY-certified Mullahs.

But come join us at 10, G Street NE (tucked away behind the Post Office for those who know DC) on November 5. Perhaps all will be resolved, as the C-PET knowledge network brings yet more smart minds into collaborative engagement and takes forward this global conversation.

My Take

C-PET’s latest Roundtable: Privacy and Emerging Technologies

Nigel M. de S. Cameron, President and CEO

Questions raised at the interface of privacy and emerging technologies go far beyond recent controversies over the way Google, Facebook and other social media giants use our information. (As the saying goes, we ain’t seen nothing yet: what about nanodust tracking? And long before that problem may come along, what about the security uses of our info?) But it’s here in our near-universal embrace of social networking and search that the most problematic questions have been raised for general discussion.

It’s problematic for many reasons – for starters, it really isn’t clear whether and how much most people are particularly concerned about privacy. Companies grasping for business models are loathe to limit their options. And because the apps can be so complicated that setting out privacy options that do indeed permit the user to control what is and is not revealed and to whom can prove terminally complex. When experts confess to confusion as to their choices (as plenty of them do), the choice mechanisms (well-intended or not) are plainly shown to be fake. Just as communication is all about your audience actually getting the message, not just your delivering it and hoping for the best; so consent must be informed and its mechanisms as easy to work through as the typical less-smart and less-techie user. That much is simple.

One reason these discussions matter so much lies precisely in the way in which social networking has got under our skin. It’s helped to integrate the internet in our lives with almost the character of a utility (interesting note: Finland just made broadband access a legal right). Our being so used to online social engagement has helped blind users to the question of what’s happening to their information. Do they care? Would they if they thought about it? It’s also providing a context in which we can road test what privacy means in a world of high digital penetration – in which, for example, Facebook alone claims nearly 10% of the species among its regular users. And more than two-thirds of Homo sapiens have mobile “telephones,” as we still call these exponentially multi-purpose handheld devices. (Another note: thinking of them as phones has helped habituate us to them and at the same time made us less aware of their revolutionary significance.) Facebook’s stewardship of our info, and our capacity to hold such companies to account and work their “privacy settings,” will prove potent shapers of the assumptions of the next generation of networking technologies.

Our panel noted that there had been progress in the efforts of these companies, though these settings remain “still barely usable.” It’s not clear, at least to the companies, how sensitive their market really is to the privacy question. The development of the Internet of Things will greatly raise the stakes as vastly more of our planet will end up interconnected. The trend to the consolidation of online identities, and the move away from pseudonymity, has taken place partly deliberately and for good reasons, but has had the effect of worsening the privacy situation as distinct areas of our online lives become conflated and accessible to others. The gap between what we think we have in the way of privacy, and what we actually have, is getting bigger.

I raised my own questions at the end. Will privacy become the most costly commodity of the 21^st century? Will it take the collapse of one of the great internet brands in a privacy controversy – their equivalent of Deepwater, but without the oil reserves to mitigate the collapse of public confidence and stock price – to shift the gears of the industry and make privacy protection into its central value? Why not a TQM (total quality management) approach to privacy from top to bottom? One thing seemed clear: these issues are far from resolved, and as technology evolves and business and social patterns morph the nature of the issues will keep shifting.

We are planning more Roundtables on privacy, moving from social media into issues of biometrics and security.

Preparations for our Roundtable on privacy and emerging technologies are now complete: tomorrow’s event will be fascinating as it brings together industry and civil society perspectives. My suspicion is that privacy, in its many aspects, is emerging as perhaps the single biggest issue of the 21st century. Yet the said 21st century has yet to wake up to the fact.

News that Finland has taken the lead in making broadband access a “legal right” has been quickly followed by the report from a major UK foundation that it is now regarded as part of a social baseline – those items “no longer regarded as luxuries but as essentials.”

News that movable type is on its way out in China, where it was invented (pre-Gutenberg) and has involved using and storing upwards of 4,000 characters (versus the alphabets of western languages), offers a potent reminder of the gains and losses of transformative technologies. In juxtaposition: a jeremiad from Luke Johnson, the UK business leader who tried (and failed) to turn around the fortunes of the Borders bookstore chain, and now says that high street bookstores are dead. (http://www.deadline.com/2010/06/ex-c4-boss-warns-bookstores-are-doomed/)

I can predict one thing about the future with confidence: the “August” issue of the Smithsonian magazine will tell us what Americans think about the somewhat more distant future (2050). Whether they are right is another matter. But it’s good they are thinking. Unless we have some clear notion of what is likely to happen tomorrow, it’s not really possible to make good decisions today.

The Smithsonian report is introduced by the assertion that, “If the U.S. has a national religion, the closest thing to it is faith in technology.” Odd statement from the director of surveys at Pew, since, well, surveys show that America certainly has a national religion, and it is, well, mainly, Christianity. What’s more, the idea that Americans have blind faith in technology is something of a myth. I just checked the latest (2010) of the annual surveys conducted by Virginian Commonwealth University on public attitudes to science. If you ask the question, has science “created as many problems for society as it has solutions,” you get a whopping YES from half the population (50%, precisely, in the 2010 poll, though the numbers range from mid-40s to mid-50s). That’s a result that should get the attention of investors and technology gurus even as it makes the rest of us thoughtful. Here’s the poll: http://www.vcu.edu/lifesci/images2/survey2010.pdf

As to what we think as we speculate 40 years hence, the Smithsonian survey is well worth reading. People are upbeat about many things, traditionally split on immigration policy, worried that despite their high-tech hopefulness technology won’t preserve the environment, and . . . well, read it yourself.

It’s very good that we are thinking about the future. Let’s do more of it.

I mentioned the project hosted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center back in 1998. The EPPC website no longer carries details, and it would seem that the mooted book project did not work out.

What an interesting afternoon, though an odd one as we sat for 4.5 hours without a break (well, we all took our own breaks, but odd all the same; and no chance to mingle). Video apparently will soon be posted, and I recommend you take a look. Roger Scruton kicked off in splendid style, with a strong supporting cast of Stephen Morse (Penn), Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke), Raymond Tallis (London) and Sally Satel (AEI).

The recent spate of twittering about Twitter prompts a somewhat longer than 140-character observation. As you will know if you tweet, the algorithms of this hottest “social network” are designed to encourage somewhat incestuous conversations; a battery of them resulted from the Nielsen research suggesting a 60% churn of members from month to month, twice that of FaceBook and MySpace when they were the same size. Yet given how different Twitter is from FB, the category “social network” (SN) becomes part of the problem.

I’ve been engaged in my own exploration; there really is no other way. Only by jumping in and swimming can you understand what the water is like. Theoretical reflection doesn’t cut it. Each SN has its own character; is sui generis, as we used to say when we looked to Latin rather than tweets to summarize. Hence one of my (and I know others’) pet peeves: people who post the same posts to several networks at once. A habit encouraged by platforms like TweetDeck (which I like for other reasons, like its built-in tiny url option; why doesn’t Twitter do that for you?). I’m not sure if Twitter:FB is as FB:LinkedIn. But it’s something like that. We are working by analogy. Sure, SNs are all the same kind of thing. But they are also very different kinds of that thing. (Not sure if anyone calls Second Life an SN site, but by rights it is. And one would have thought dating sites certainly were. And so on.) In any case, we have always had social networks; the significant feature of these sites is that they are web-based networks which may or may not have much of a “social” element.

Which reminds me, am I alone in being perplexed why journalists seem to feel obliged when they refer to FB, for example, to describe it as a social networking site? Or Twitter as a microblogging site? As if anyone who knew what a social networking site was would not know about FB. And a fortiori, as if anyone who would go around using the category microblogging would have a clue what it meant were they not the kind of people who were familiar with Twitter (and very likely first came across the generic term microblogging only as a result of that familiarity). I’m not sure if it is a sign of the rather aged novelty of the medium (my favorite free-wifi coffee house chain Panera Bread still invites one to “surf the internet” on its login page), of the angst of sub-editors who may only just have discovered the fax (oops, facsimile, as hotels still seem to want to call them), or of the precious stylistic tendencies of journos who want to look hip (I know more than you do about the cool stuff; you have heard of the site, I know the meta-narrative).

FB’s move to help us segment friends from, well, less-than friends is no doubt one straw in the SN wind. LinkedIn is immensely and very differently useful, seen as an opportunity to shape one’s online c.v. presence in the age of Google and as a self-updating address book for people we may or may not “know” but did at least exchange cards with. Just what Twitter “followers” (who include friends, bots, and seemingly quite random adherents) have in common with even FB “friends” is unclear. But some people have developed the knack of acquiring them in droves (and, of course, in certain cases, monetizing the fact).

Point being: the SN category is not helping us, any more than we would be helped by calling airlines, buses and motor cars transportation networking – and having solicitous sub-edited journos talking about “United Airlines, the transportation networking company” (it is annoying enough to have the Wall Street Journal insist in every single reference to American Airlines, per its house style, that it is “a unit of AMR”).

Back to Twitter. I think of the 100+ whom I am following only two actually answer the question and tell me what they are doing; and of those only one does it literally, without side comments, essentially offering snapshots of his schedule. I keep following as it makes him a curiosity. As to the other 100, they seem to be doing rather different things from each other. This is part of Twitter’s fascination: a very basic tool with many, many uses; a street one may walk down with very different destinations in mind – and indeed with now hundreds of external applications being developed to enhance such uses. Some may be monetizing, others merely self-aggrandizing (and which of us would not want to have our telegrams read by myriads?) or replicating in Twitland networks from outside, or indeed developing a “presence” simply because they are expected to set up shop in every e-venue. Why do some Twitters not understand that posting dozens of tweets is a turn-off? (It’s the only reason so far that I have unfollowed people.) That posting multi-tweet messages that therefore read backwards is bizarre, even when there are not intervening posts from elsewhere? That being “followed” by a celebrity (BarackObama seems to be following all over the place) offers a new level of weirdness (one assumes it is a crass, or perhaps not so crass, method of acquiring followers who wish to return the “compliment”)? Of course, all this goes some way to explain the high level of churn.

Needless to say, celebrities (political and otherwise) have found the perfect medium with which to communicate with fans/followers/voters – to pump out carefully message-controlled mini-bites without the messy need for journalists to get in the way (let alone ask pesky questions). The Obama campaign’s mastery of web strategy is rightly legendary (is it 13 million email addresses they acquired?), and the presence of Oprah and Brittney and Kuchner suggests smart adaptation to new PR opportunities. On the other hand, Twitter as-is is hardly designed for the readers of People Magazine (which once quoted me, so I can’t be too hard on it); expect more obviously and user-friendly PR platforms to follow. Which raises a broader point: there are many Twitters, and if microblogging continues to take off we may expect segmentation, both within the site and among twitteresque brands and functionalities.

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.