Posts Tagged ‘Jacques Monod’
“The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress”*…
The obligations of a multi-day meeting (and the travel involved) mean that, from this issue, (R)D will be on pause until February 12 or 13 (depending on how connections play out…)
… and indeed the evolutionary progress of others species. But, Deputy Co-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Melanie Challenger asks, have we been sufficiently thoughful about the implications of this power?…
In 2016, Klaus Schwab announced that we had entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is the era of the industrialization of biology, the leveraging of technologies to modify biological materials to meet human goals. While the first two Industrial Revolutions exploited energy and materials and the Third exploited digital information, the current revolution is a direct manipulation of life-forms and life’s substances.
The signature invention of this new era is CRISPR, dubbed “genetic scissors.” CRISPR is a ground-breaking method of making precise changes to DNA for a wide range of possible uses from disease reduction and elimination to the eradication of “pest” species and increases in the productivity of farmed animals. CRISPRs (the best-known system being CRISPR-Cas9) originate in RNA-based bacterial defense systems. Naturally occurring in species of bacteria, the Cas9 enzyme cuts the genomes of bacteriophages (viruses that will attack a bacterium), saving a record for defense against future infections. Scientists realized that this immunological strategy could be coopted to innovate a general tool for cutting DNA.
The optimism among those that seek to utilize these tools has been palpable for some time. As noted by the researchers at The Roslin Institute, creators of Dolly the Sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal: “Until recently, we have only been able to dream of…the ability to induce precise insertions or deletions easily and efficiently in the germline of livestock. With the advent of genome editors this is now possible.”
But the technologies of this new industrial era present ethical dilemmas and unknown consequences. What will it take to ensure that this revolution avoids worsening the enormous challenges we already face, especially from biodiversity loss and climate change? How can we get the balance right between the benefits and risks of human inventiveness?
In the 1980s, tech theorist David Collingridge presented his eponymous dilemma for those seeking to control potentially disruptive technologies. First, there is an “information problem” in which significant impacts are often invisible until the technology is already in use. Second, there is a “power problem” in which the technology becomes difficult to shape, regulate or scale back once it has become integrated in our lives. If we are going to navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution successfully, we need to examine our use of CRISPR through the Collingridge dilemma.
The investors and engineers of the first industrial revolutions in the nineteenth century provide a vivid example of the information problem. They hoped that innovations like the combustion engine would unlock efficiency across multiple human sectors, from transportation to logistics to tourism. Such optimism was not unwarranted. Yet, as Collingridge’s dilemma suggests, it is easier to picture gains than to predict trouble. Building road systems and infrastructure carved capital movements into the landscape, symbolising freedom and the flow of wealth and creativity. Yet the striking visual parallels with our circulatory system did not stimulate anyone to forecast the ninety per cent of people today who are exposed to unsafe pollution levels from traffic or the associated health burdens from heart and lung disease to asthma. Nobody then foresaw the yearly deaths of two billion or so non-human vertebrates on our roads today, or that high traffic areas would cause localised declines in insect abundance of at least a quarter and, in some studies, as much as eighty per cent.
And, of course, most calamitous of all, there is climate change. Traffic emissions account for a fifth of all contributions to global warming. Yet the idea that a profitable and efficient machine like the combustion engine might precede devastating shifts in temperature and weather patterns was scarcely conceivable at the time. Now, it is a near ubiquitous feature of our understanding of the world.
When it comes to the engineering of biology, a similar information problem abounds. Not only is our understanding of biological life incomplete, but we know little about what the industrial processes that we are advancing inside the cells of organisms will do. The changes are both physically and ethically occluded. The ramifications of this and other related biotechnologies are not only rendered uncertain by the inherently complex nature of biological systems but are largely inaccessible to our imaginations.
We must struggle with the radical character of the industrialization of biology. Gene drives (a tool to increase the likelihood of passing on a gene) can weaponize the bodies and reproductive strategies of organisms to bias evolution in a directed way. Artificial chimeric organisms (those composed of cells from more than one species) mix and match biological traits and functions to bring about beings that wouldn’t occur otherwise, transforming autonomous organisms into useful parts for plug and play. But while evolutionary processes will sift those forms and strategies that most benefit future organisms, our acts of creation primarily benefit us alone. Survival of the fittest gives way to the contrivance of the functional.
Yet, despite the disruptive nature of these technologies, CRISPR is already entrenched in our research and economic landscape: here is the power problem of our new technology. The efficiency of modern versions of CRISPR has allowed the technology to pick up users fast. It is now a commonplace tool in labs around the world – with uses amplified during the pandemic – and continues to be utilized in ethically provocative trials, including the cloning of mammal species. CRISPR has been normalised by stealth.
This largely uncontested rollout has been enabled by biases in the evaluation of who is at risk. Put bluntly, humans worry about humans, and take risks to non-humans less seriously. As such, there are vastly different acceptance thresholds for certain kinds of uses and these can be exploited by those that seek to deregulate or profit from the technologies…
… This discrepancy is evident in the anxieties of Jennifer Doudna, one of the Nobel-winning scientists who made the CRISPR breakthrough. In her book, A Crack in Creation, she writes of a dream in which Hitler appears to her with the face of a pig and questions her excitedly about the power she has unleashed. Doudna’s anxieties relate not to the pigs of her dream (who are subject to a wide range of CRISPR applications) but to the potential of eugenics re-emerging in human societies. Her dream reflects not only the inevitability that any technology such as this will be equal parts destruction to rewards, but also that we must confront uncomfortable ideas about what it is to be a creature as much as a creator. Recognizing that these technologies work in the bodies of all biological beings, including humans, is a continual assault on the reasoning behind a hard moral border between us and them.
At present, the lives of non-human animals are the experimental landscape for our technologies. Their powerlessness to protest the uses of their bodies, wombs, physical materials, or futures leaves them vulnerable to being the test sites for a wide range of possible human applications. As a direct consequence of the serviceability of the bodies of organisms, CRISPR has been integrated into our world with little fanfare, directly facilitating the power problem that will, eventually, impact us too. Given Collingridge’s dilemma, what concepts and strategies could help us reduce the risks from CRISPR?
The first thing we need is a new definition of pollution. When it comes to combustion engines and other technologies of the first industrial revolutions, pollution is by far the most consequential harm. Direct impacts include the release of particulate matter or chemical compounds like nitrogen oxides or carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Pollution from traffic has an immediate impact, especially fifty to one hundred metres from the roadside, with effects that we can measure, such as reduced growth rates or leaf damage in plants, or changes to soil chemistry and nutrient availability. On the other hand, long term effects of emissions, such as global warming, or the sustained impacts of waste on organisms and ecosystems, have proven tricky to anticipate and even harder to hold in mind…
…What is curious about the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that while several branches of science are arming us with the evidence that justifies an expansion of the moral circle to encompass a larger range of organisms, other branches are cranking up the objectification and exploitation of life-forms. As a result, there’s an obvious gap. Without addressing this, most concepts of pollution will remain anthropocentric. This may prove a critical misstep…
A provocative argument that “Gene Editing is Pollution,” from @TheIdeasLetter. Eminently worth reading in full.
See also: “The Ethics and Security Challenge of Gene Editing” and “The great gene editing debate: can it be safe and ethical?“
* Isaac Asimov
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As we ponder permuted progeny, we might send microbiological birthday greetings to Jacques Lucien Monod; he was born on this date in 1910. A biochemist, he shared (with with François Jacob and André Lwoff) the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, “for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis.”
But Monod, who became the director of the Pasteur Institute, also made significant contributions to the philosophy of science– in particular via his 1971 book (based on a series of his lectures) Chance and Necessity, in which he examined the philosophical implications of modern biology. The importance of Monod’s work as a bridge between the chance and necessity of evolution and biochemistry on the one hand, and the human realm of choice and ethics on the other, can be seen in his influence on philosophers, biologists, and computer scientists including Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Dawkins… and as a context setter for the deliberations suggested above…
“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present”*…
Iwan Rhys Morus suggests that we’re enthralled to a Victorian paradigm that haunts us still: the idea that inventors and entrepreneurs hold the keys to the utopian future…
Tech titans like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos present themselves as men who could single-handedly shape the future. For their supporters, their ruthless drive toward success is their key virtue. And their showmanship — Musk sending a Tesla Roadster into space on a Falcon Heavy rocket, or Bezos sending Captain Kirk into orbit with Blue Origin — is a way of demonstrating that virtue and asserting they are in control.
We owe to the Victorians the idea that there is a firm link between virtue and technological agency. They established a powerful paradigm that continues to haunt us: that the future is (or can be) a utopia, and inventors and entrepreneurs are the ones who know how to get there.
While our notions of virtue have shifted today, we still assume that future-making is the prerogative of very specific sorts of innovators — even as their imagined identities have fractured and transformed. The assumption that innovation is the property of charismatic individuals still underlies the way we think about technology.
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The seductive power of Victorian thinking about the relationship between character, technology, and the future remains pervasive, even if views about just what the proper character of the inventor should be have shifted….
With its focus on individual virtue, the Victorian vision of the future is an exclusive one. When we subscribe to this paradigm about how — and by whom — the future is made, we’re also relinquishing control over that future. We’re acknowledging that tomorrow belongs to them, not to us.
“Back To The Victorian Future,” by @irmorus1 in @NoemaMag. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Albert Camus
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As we ponder power and its purpose, we might send inclusive birthday greetings to Jacques Lucien Monod; he was born on this date in 1910. A biochemist, he shared (with with François Jacob and André Lwoff) the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, “for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis.”
But Monod, who became the director of the Pasteur Institute, also made significant contributions to the philosophy of science– in particular via his 1971 book (based on a series of his lectures) Chance and Necessity, in which he examined the philosophical implications of modern biology. The importance of Monod’s work as a bridge between the chance and necessity of evolution and biochemistry on the one hand, and the human realm of choice and ethics on the other, can be seen in his influence on philosophers, biologists, and computer scientists including Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Dawkins.
“In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance”*…
Prince Hamlet spent a lot of time pondering the nature of chance and probability in William Shakespeare’s tragedy. In the famous “To be or not to be” speech, he notes that we helplessly face “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” — though a little earlier in the play he declares that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” suggesting that everything happens because God wills it to be so.
We can hardly fault the prince for holding two seemingly contradictory views about the nature of chance; after all, it is a puzzle that has vexed humankind through the ages. Why are we here? Or to give the question a slightly more modern spin, what sequence of events brought us here, and can we imagine a world in which we didn’t arrive on the scene at all?
It is to biologist Sean B. Carroll’s credit that he’s found a way of taking a puzzle that could easily fill volumes (and probably has filled volumes), and presenting it to us in a slim, non-technical, and fun little book, “A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You.”
Carroll (not to be confused with physicist and writer Sean M. Carroll) gets the ball rolling with an introduction to the key concepts in probability and game theory, but quickly moves on to the issue at the heart of the book: the role of chance in evolution. Here we meet a key historical figure, the 20th-century French biochemist Jacques Monod, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on genetics. Monod understood that genetic mutations play a critical role in evolution, and he was struck by the random nature of those mutations…
Carroll quotes Monod: “Pure chance, absolutely free and blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: This central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact.”
“There is no scientific concept, in any of the sciences,” Monod concludes, “more destructive of anthropocentrism than this one.”
From there, it’s a short step to the realization that we humans might never have evolved in the first place…
The profound impact of randomness in determining destiny: “The Power of Chance in Shaping Life and Evolution.”
See also: “Survival of the Luckiest.”
* Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places
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As we blow on the dice, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, the French mathematician and physicist who is probably (if unfairly) better known as Voltaire’s mistress; she was born on this date in 1706. Fascinated by the work of Newton and Leibniz, she dressed as a man to frequent the cafes where the scientific discussions of the time were held. Her major work was a translation of Newton’s Principia, for which Voltaire wrote the preface; it was published a decade after her death, and was for many years the only translation of the Principia into French.
Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that great scholar, this star that shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do. It may be that there are metaphysicians and philosophers whose learning is greater than mine, although I have not met them. Yet, they are but frail humans, too, and have their faults; so, when I add the sum total of my graces, I confess I am inferior to no one.
– Mme du Châtelet, to Frederick the Great of Prussia
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