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1.How Much Risk Can We Risk?
2.INTERVENTION: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet
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1.How Much Risk Can We Risk?
By Don Hazen
Alternet, December 22 2006 2006 http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/45870/

Intervention: Confronting The Real Risks of Genetic Engineering And Life On A Biotech Planet, a new book by former NY Times business columnist Denise Caruso, aims to get ahead of the curve regarding how vulnerable we are making ourselves as a species, hurtling forward at breakneck speed with all number of biotech creations and mutations.

Caruso's book is just emerging, and she recently received a strong testimonial from Steven Johnson, one of the very smartest of interdisciplanary thinkers and technologists, who always seems to have his eye on both important tech advances and the ramifications. He writes about Caruso's book on his blog: With ... "as crucial an issue as, say, genetically modified food, Intervention is wrestling with an even more profound question: how we measure and anticipate risk with such complex, open-ended technologies. Denise makes it clear how "spectacularly nearsighted" we tend to be when evaluating radical new advances. And when we're meddling with the primary forces of nature -- to quote Ned Beatty's speech from Network -- we can't afford to be nearsighted. Fortunately, we have people like Denise Caruso to improve our vision."

Look for a full interview with Caruso early in 2007 on AlterNet conducted by Manager editor Heather Gehlert. Go to hybridvigor.org/intervention to order the book.

(Denise Caruso is a member of the board of the Independent Media Institute, the parent organization of AlterNet.)

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.
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2.INTERVENTION: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet
By Denise Caruso* http://www.hybridvigor.org/intervention/

Intervention challenges two of the most sacred tenets of modern society, innovation and technology, from the perspective of the unique risks they present. Using genetic engineering and emerging biotechnologies as its model, it paints a vivid picture of the scientific uncertainties that biotech risk evaluations dismiss or ignore, and lays bare the power and money conflicts between academia, industry and regulators that have sped these risky innovations to the market. Intervention champions an alternative method for a more democratic assessment of the risks of technology, developed by the world's top risk experts, that can eliminate such conflicts. Even better, it can help renew the public's trust in science and government, and drive research and development toward safer, more useful products.

Chapter Synopses

Introduction: (Gene)sis

In their unguarded moments, scientists will admit how little they know about the long term effects of genetic engineering and other biotechnology products. The larger question is how do we continue to benefit from scientific progress, but still protect the public from the unanticipated consequences of biotechnology? The answer is in our definition of risk. I question the safety of genetic engineering based on my perception of how much we don't know about it. Scientists are confident that it's safe, based on their perception of how much they do know. Until we can square our definitions, we can't even have the conversation.

Chapter 1: What If the Experts are Wrong?

It doesn't take a degree in genetics to see that radically new technologies like genetic engineering are bound to have risks in equal measure to their benefits; the history of technological advancement is rife with examples. Yet time and again, it's been scientific shortsightedness, sometimes willful, that has exposed us to the serious risks posed by the products of other scientific breakthroughs and interventions. What if the experts are wrong about the safety of genetic engineering?

Chapter 2: Of Mice, Men and Uncertainty

DNA can explain some of the most distinctive aspects of heredity, like why and how the traits of living things are so consistently similar from generation to generation. But science is still trying to figure out how organisms that share all or much of the same genetic makeup - like mice and humans, for example - look and behave so differently. If science can't explain this simple fact, it can hardly assert with authority that adding to or otherwise rearranging the DNA of a living, reproducing organism is risk-free.

Chapter 3: The Effects of Biotech at Scale Living organisms are heavily influenced by threshold effects, when too much of some harmful thing builds up over time and pushes an individual, a population or sometimes an entire ecosystem over the brink, beyond repair. Because transgenic organisms are officially "safe" in the U.S., at least, none are tracked or monitored in the field. But what if some harm is building up that we’re not tracking? Even a brief inventory of the massive scale at which have transgenics already been released, and those in development, provides some indication of what is at stake.

Chapter 4: The Risks of Going Native

One of the main risks cited by scientists who are concerned about transgenics in the field - particularly transgenics such as so-called "pharm" crops or animals (organisms that are engineered to produce drugs or chemicals) - is that they'll become feral, and start to compete with wild populations just like any other invasive species. Since it's impossible to physically confine them, an entirely new field of biotechnology, called "bioconfinement," is being developed to keep them from reproducing, but no one - not even the scientists developing the techniques - really believes they will work.

Chapter 5: What Gets Measured Is What Matters Used properly, traditional risk calculations are a powerful tool to forecast the odds that a future hazard will come to pass. But they often are useless in forecasting the likelihood of brand new hazards, like those that often result from innovations in science and technology. Traditional methods of calculating risks are prone to both ask and answer the wrong questions, and because they’re based on mathematics, infer a scientific precision that isn't there. These shortcomings have significant impact on the "official" risk assessments for the products of genetic engineering.

Chapter 6: Politics, Science & 'Substantial Equivalence'

In 1994, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that the first genetically engineered tomato was as safe as conventional tomatoes. What’s more, it declared, as a class, transgenic foods presented no different or greater safety concern than foods developed by traditional plant breeding. This statement became codified into law as the doctrine of 'substantial equivalence' and, as a result, transgenic foods are for all intents and purposes, entirely unregulated. But upon closer examination, the "scientific" basis upon which the FDA made its far-ranging conclusion was hardly scientific at all.

Chapter 7: Silent Genes

Transgenic organisms are in wide circulation, and are firmly established in the ecosystem. Any damage these organisms may be causing is invisible by today's risk assessment practices and irreversible with today's science. This begs the question: How could genetic engineering be used as a weapon? A look at the biological mechanisms that bad actors could exploit, and how (or whether) we will be able detect them.

Chapter 8: The Promise of Transgenics

You would think that by now the promise of transgenic food crops, the most widely commercialized product of biotechnology, grown and consumed by people all around the world, would have either come to pass or not. What is actually happening out in the field? Have the industry's claims held up over time? Why haven't the successes of transgenic crops silenced the critics once and for all? Why hasn't there been a study of benefits of these products - one that’s as rigorously conducted and reviewed as those the biotech industry demand for risk?

Chapter 9: The Tricky Calculus of Cost and Benefit Virtually every risk decision in government or the corporate environment is supported formally or informally by a tightly focused calculation called a "cost benefit analysis." How openly and honestly their calculations balance public and private concerns - in other words, how they determine who pays and who benefits - determines how we invest our trust in government decisions that require scientific expertise. Cost-benefit is clearly not the right tool for the job.

Chapter 10: Trusting Our Appointed Arbiters of Risk The same problems that have kept us from a defensible risk analysis on the products of genetic engineering are the same ones that have long plagued the assessment of all risky technological innovations: our existing definitions are not working. There are many reasons to challenge the dominant, "trust us, we're experts!" paradigm that now rules the practice of risk assessment. New and better methods, developed and field-tested by some of the top risk experts in the world, have already been proposed to government agencies. But regulators have yet to take their advice.

Chapter 11. Putting Pigs to the Test

More than a decade ago, risk scholars figured out that the problems with assessing the risks of scientific interventions wasn't so much a failure of traditional analysis per se, but a failure to involve other people in the process, people who inevitably have important knowledge and perspectives to contribute. With so much at stake, this failure to enlarge the conversation about risk is no longer tenable. We assemble a panel of experts to put these inclusive methods to the test, by taking a shot at a wickedly difficult risk problem: the consequences of using transgenic pigs as human organ donors.

Chapter 12: What Then Shall We Do?

The mantra in the U.S. has always been "let the market decide," but if the market is obfuscating or ignoring the risks of the technologies it invents and sells, how do we intervene to change course? The most effective way is through better regulation and better advice-giving to lawmakers. First, we must ask our governments to adopt these more inclusive assessment methods. And until they do, we can learn to use them ourselves, to powerful effect. Contrary to popular belief, people have consistently proven themselves smarter and more capable of understanding the complexities of risk than decision makers give us credit for. Now we have a way to prove it.

[*For Caruso's bio: http://www.hybridvigor.org/people.html#caruso ]