Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  But biology had become larger than physics in terms of its impact on the economy, larger in its immediate contribution to human welfare, and potentially more portentous in its implications for ethics.20

  Dyson looks at the growth of the immense computer game industry, enabled by the advent of the personal computer, as being a foretaste of our new biological world. This new market won’t just be for scientists at elite labs. Dyson expects bio amateurs to get involved the way amateur astronomers, with their sophisticated scopes and software, contribute to making modest celestial discoveries.21 Popular biotech gaming can be bigger than that:

  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.22

  Cutest dinosaur? For those who would be conjuring up the horrors of Jurassic Park unfolding in their own basements, Dyson offers an addendum. “Rules and regulations will be needed to make sure our kids do not endanger themselves and others. The dangers of biotechnology are real and serious.”23 His caveat seems rather matter-of-fact. Should we be alarmed? What are the rules? Who makes the rules? Who enforces the rules about dinosaurs in the home?

  Dyson once sat on a committee of citizens in Princeton appointed to assess the relative hazards and benefits of genetic research at the local university. In the end they decided that the research should proceed.24 Dyson doesn’t pretend there are no problems ahead. He regards the discovery of DNA manipulation techniques to be just as significant for biologists as the discovery of fission was for physicists.25 “Whoever can read the DNA language can also learn to write it.”26 Dyson has spent years trying to head off a nuclear war, but even he figures that a nucleic war, one exploiting biological manipulations in some fiendish way—of the kind described by H. G. Wells in his novel The Island of Doctor Moreau—could be worse.27

  Biotech is here now whether you like it or not. One of the most controversial biotech topics is genetically modified (GM) food. Dr. Moreau did his experiments on a remote Pacific island and Dyson’s pet dinosaurs won’t be escaping from apartments into Central Park this year. But “frankenfood,” as GM food is sometimes called, is available to consumers right now at the corner grocery, at least in the United States.

  GM food was a prime topic of discussion at the January 2001 meeting of the World Economic Forum, held annually for many years in Davos, Switzerland. Here, on a mountaintop retreat, the same one depicted in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, lords of finance and heads of state gather. The celebrities are supplemented with artists and scientists who, as Dyson points out, are there to provide entertainment. The 2001 meeting featured a food fight between Europe and Africa. In Dyson’s characterization of the dispute, many Europeans stood against genetically modified food, since they saw biotech innovation primarily in terms of the potential for catastrophe, such as the release of difficult-to-reverse biological forces into a fragile ecology. Even a tiny chance of disaster, they maintained, was too risky, considering the stakes.

  Many Africans, by contrast, saw the problem in terms of the present danger of malnutrition. Feeding a burgeoning population is a problem needing solution now. Dyson felt that genetic modifications in food would help alleviate the palpable ecological problems already under way in Africa now: overgrazing, pollution of water supplies, lack of hygiene, and overcrowding in cities.28

  Prophets like to dispute with other prophets. At Davos the specter of edible biotech reached a high point in the matched talks by Dyson and computer designer Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems. Joy argued that high technology, including the machines he himself had invented, might be creating conditions under which determined madmen or small terrorist groups could contrive weapons of great destructiveness. These deadly instruments wouldn’t necessarily depend on explosions but rather on rapidly dispersed chemical or biological agents.

  The greater danger might come, Joy intimated, not from renegades with deliberate malice in mind but rather from well-meaning scientists inadvertently unleashing hazardous organisms into the ecosphere in the form of nanoscopic materials or ingested substances containing microbes that could later result in cancer.29

  Dyson urged strict guidelines for biotech work. Such guidelines have been in place for several decades, he pointed out, ever since the first recombinant DNA work in the 1970s, experiments in which segments of genetic material were removed from or added to a chromosome. The main impetus behind the research was not to produce games or frivolously spawn new forms of pets but to understand disease and to feed starving people.

  In the spring of 1997 Dyson gave a series of lectures at the New York Public Library about tools that underlay progress in science. He expected these tools to help level the playing field between poor rural and rich urban societies. This became a central concern of his—how science and engineering could help to further social justice by narrowing the gap between haves and have-nots and an important theme of his book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet.

  Genetically enhanced food is just one component of the biotech revolution. Why not turn the creatures of the Earth into factories? Grow flowers with silicon leaves that could harvest sunlight at 15 percent efficiency rather than plants with green leaves yielding only 1 percent. Bioengineer worms that can mine metals from the earth, or termites that eat junked autos, or trees that turn sunlight directly into fuel.30

  Early biotech inventions are evident. Human population skyrocketed over the past century and a half owing to better sanitation, the introduction of antibiotics, and the advent of artificial fertilizer. According to Princeton biologist Lee Silver, half of the nitrogen passing through human bodies comes from food grown using that fertilizer, which is processed in factories chemically extracting nitrogen from air.31 Millions would starve in the absence of this biotech invention.

  Dyson credits Silver with teaching him a lot about the awesome implications of genetic research. Tinkering with animal chromosomes, for example, allows animals to manufacture parts or substances for human bodies. Bacteria began making human insulin in the 1980s. Silver predicts that pigs will one day manufacture human skin, while cows will produce human blood.32 With cloning and stem cell technology, we’ll be able to grow simple human organs, such as livers, within the next ten years or so, Silver estimates; complex organs, such as the heart, will take longer.33

  In 1999 Dyson spent a semester at Gustavus Adolphus, a small Christian-oriented college in Minnesota. Most of the students taking the class, “Genetics and the Moral Universe,” were biology majors. Class discussion, not surprisingly, took up bioethics issues such as human cloning, organ donation, denying expensive medical procedures for very old patients, and moving genes from one species to another.

  One of the professors who taught this course with Dyson, chemist Lawrence Potts, remembers Dyson’s modesty, humility, and gentleness. Ever in demand as a speaker, Dyson had to make frequent departures from the campus. It was Potts’s pleasurable task to take Dyson to and from the airport. On these drives the men spoke about many things: how to care for aging parents, how to raise children, and how science kept changing. Whenever he attended meetings of the American Physical Society, Dyson enjoyed watching odd sessions where speakers would describe perpetual motion or faster-than-light-speed travel.34

  MEET VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN

  Bioethics classes taught in colleges can go only so far in allaying concerns about biotech advances. Lingering worries, even dread, still cling to the notion that somewhere, most likely in a dank basement laboratory, some infernal adjustment is proceeding. It’s one thing to tinker with the genetic makeup of pine trees. But now they’re going to do it with humans.

  Mary Shelley,
beside the shores of Lake Geneva and urged on by her husband, Percy Shelley, and his friend Lord Byron, conceived of a yarn about a scientist (is he mad?) who makes an artificial man from (exhumed) parts of other men and then jump-starts his (or should it be “its”?) nervous system by siphoning electricity from a thunderstorm. The exhumations are a matter for the civic authorities but bestowing the spark of life is surely only for God alone. Twitching the patchwork cadaver into living flesh is what made Dr. Frankenstein’s Promethean action blasphemous. Frankenstein suffered grievously for it.

  Modern biologists don’t use atmospheric electricity to create life. Instead of secretly stitching sundry organs from a crypt, they delicately restitch genes in government-funded labs. Freeman Dyson’s practical involvement in this work is peripheral. The one time he actually used DNA manipulation equipment, as part of a Jason site visit, his trial experiment failed.35

  Dyson points to Silver’s particular expertise, extending genetic biology to human reproduction, a subject Silver calls “reprogenetics,” in underscoring the solemn importance of biotech. One of the most powerful human instincts is the desire by couples to have children. One of the great triumphs of fertility science was the development of in vitro fertilization. Millions of healthy babies have been conceived this way, babies that would probably not have come to life otherwise. There was a time when such human fertilization outside the womb was considered by many to be immoral. Now the process is routine.

  What about the use of genetic science to combat disease by manipulating the fertilized egg cell through the selective removal or substitution of genes implicated in specific diseases?36 Curing disease sounds like a good thing. How about using genetic science to produce “superior” children. What if substituting certain genes would result in higher intelligence or beauty? Are we now in a position to play God and make the human race into anything we want? Would only rich families be able to afford this expensive form of eugenics? The next step after that would be do-it-yourself genetic kits. “Having reprogenetic babies at home,” Dyson said, “might become a popular hobby, like desk-top publishing today.”37 Writing genomes will become an art form, sort of like writing screenplays.38 Dyson, who revels in this sort of provocative writing, is not necessarily advocating such genetic alterations, especially if they unleash a class war between the rich, who can afford enhancements, and the poor, who cannot.

  More disturbing scenarios are out there. Silver says that it is possible for humans and chimps to mate and bear living offspring. One of his female students even offered to donate an egg cell for the sake of attempting such an experiment.39 No responsible scientist is calling for such experiments, but they remain possibilities.

  Dyson says different things on different occasions about altering the human genome. At an invitation-only convocation of scientists he had the following to say about human genetic modifications:

  We would be wise to keep ourselves as much as possible the way we are, and I hope we will be successful in it. I don’t see any great likelihood if you monkey around with humans that you’ll produce anything much better.40

  But another time he’ll say something else. Biotech tinkering won’t just alter the human genome, but splinter it. Reprogenetics will lead to a branching of the human race: “When desires for different ways of living can be translated into reality, the diversity of desires will be translated into a diversity of species.”41

  Along with this splitting Dyson expects irresolvable conflicts to arise. As recently as 30,000 years ago at least two human species (or subspecies) coexisted, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. Interspecies rivalry would probably have been much more pronounced than any intertribal or interdenominational strife of the kind that spurred the Children of Israel out of Egypt or launched the Mayflower across the Atlantic.

  Dyson likes to end his books with a bang. With The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, he concludes with a vision of multiple human species:

  Sooner or later, the tensions between diverging ways of life must be relieved by emigration, some of us finding new places to live away from the Earth while others stay behind. In the end we must travel the high road into space, to find new worlds to match our new capabilities. To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body which our genomes can evolve, one planet is not enough.42

  POLYNESIANS ON PLUTO

  Freeman Dyson is a preacher; he brings not brimstone but hope. He speaks about the future not to make specific predictions, not to scare people, but to encourage them. All of Dyson’s heresies—nuclear, religious, climate, biotech—can be aggregated into a single grand heresy: that humanity will largely outgrow its home planet and will migrate into the outer parts of the solar system and across the galaxy. What makes this heretical? Isn’t space colonization the theme of a thousand romantic science fiction thrillers?

  What makes Dyson’s off-Earth scenario heretical is that, like the Hebrew prophets, he sees the future as a mixture of glorious adventure and lengthy warfare. Not against some distant foe but against ourselves. He anticipates that as genetic experimentation proceeds, and as the human race occupies new niches in the cosmos—the interplanetary equivalent of Darwin’s finches inhabiting the various Galápagos Islands—it will split into numerous breeding species. Not only is one Earth not enough, but apparently one human species is not enough.

  In this breathtakingly grand endeavor, there is no such thing as inherent safety as there is in the design of the TRIGA reactor. Whether in terraforming the Earth, rearranging the geology and ecosystems to suit human society, or in refining the human genome, there are great risks. Paraphrasing J. B. S. Haldane on the future of science, Dyson remarked “that the progress of science is destined to bring enormous confusion and misery to mankind unless it is accompanied by progress in ethics.”43

  A prophet must be steadfast. Dyson did not come tardily to his comprehensive view of human development. Much of that vision was present in a 1972 lecture he made at Birbeck College in London. The speech celebrated the reissue of The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, a 1929 book by biologist John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971), who, like Dyson, seemed to be ahead of his time in writing about human evolution. Bernal’s title referred to an ambitious program to deal with what he saw as the chief constraints on humanity’s further development. The first threat consisted of the material conditions of our world, including a finite food supply. The second threat was our own physical mortality. The third was the irrational side of human nature, which often led to strife.

  A prophet sometimes invokes other prophets. Dyson, who would later formulate his own list of most pertinent technologies, recounted Bernal’s proposed solution. In 1929 Bernal suggested that (1) to surmount material wants on Earth, human colonization of space was necessary; (2) to overcome bodily ailments we should develop artificial implantable organs; and (3) to overcome human irrationality some kind of emotion control was required.44

  Dyson subscribes to the first two points but disagrees with Bernal on the third. Dyson sees the emotions not as a drawback but as the very heart of what it is to be human: “Human beings cannot be human without a generous endowment of greed and love.… The central complexity of human nature lies in our emotions, not in our intelligence.”45

  The human trek out of Africa took thousands of years and it might take that long to plant human colonies on Titan or on comets. Predicting how such a colossal journey will unfold is impossible, and Dyson is sure that qualitative changes will outweigh all quantitative changes we can foresee;46 biotechnology will trump any mere innovations in rocketry we can imagine;47 the main problems to be overcome in launching extraplanetary trips will not be economic but spiritual in nature.48

  Dyson likens himself to the sixteenth-century Englishman Richard Hakluyt. Just as Dyson wrote about cross-galactic schemes from his Princeton armchair, so Hakluyt, from his university post in Oxford, promoted English colonies in the cross-oceanic land that would later be called Virginia.49 Hakluyt, a true Jason, hoped the Admiralty
would enlarge its navigational skills, and he advised Queen Elizabeth to consider the economic and cultural benefits of expanding her realm in North America. Hakluyt urged Englishmen to venture out onto the ocean, but he never went himself, just as Dyson will not be shot into space, much less visit the rings of Saturn, his Orion goal in the 1950s.

  For the immediate future space travel is a joke, Dyson says.50 It will, however, eventually happen. Occasionally his enthusiasm prompts him to make overly specific estimates for achieving cheap space travel—by the year 2085, he once said, as long after Sputnik as the Mayflower came after Columbus.51 But usually he is circumspect, and for good reason. Without knowing the time frame for any of the intermediate steps he can’t make hard predictions. He imagines that something like this will happen: we will develop new economical forms of transport, such as solar sailing; we will bioengineer plants that can adapt to low temperatures, gravity, and pressure, and, having sent these plants on ahead, we will eventually shelter in the greenhouses grown by the plants on the surfaces of distant moons and comets.

  All this, or something like it, will happen because it must happen, unless the human race destroys itself first right here on Earth. Irresistibly, he reaches for the sublime:

  This unimaginably great and diverse universe, in which we occupy one fragile bubble of air, is not destined to remain forever silent. It will one day be buzzing with the murmur of innumerable bees, rustling with the flurry of feathered wings, throbbing with the patter of little human feet. The expansion of life, moving out from Earth into its inheritance, is an even greater theme than the expansion of England across the Atlantic. As Hakluyt wrote that there is under our noses the great and ample country of Virginia, I am saying that there is under our noses the territory of nine planets, forty moons, ten thousand asteroids, and a trillion comets.52