An Interview with Brian Alexander, author of Rapture: How Biotech Became the New ReligionBy James M. Pethokoukishttp://www.usnews.co...1.htm?track=rssIn Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion, science journalist Brian Alexander provides a fascinating and funny travel guide through the cutting-edge world of genetic engineering. Alexander focuses on the scientists who are trying to radically extend the human life span and the people who hope and think such advances—even immortality—are coming soon. Here is the first half of a recent E-mail chat I had with him.
Next News: Is the science progressing much faster than most people realize? Francis Fukuyama, the author of Our Posthuman Future, seemed to think so in a recent chat I had with him. And there’s the recent news that controversial geneticist Pavos Zanos has cloned a human embryo and implanted it in some unnamed woman
Alexander: [As for Zavos,] it's no accident that he held his little press conference announcing his clone embryo implantation in London. In the United States he would have gotten almost no coverage. No serious press here believes him. (I certainly don't.) You know, I have a lot of respect for somebody like Frank Fukuyama. He is a very smart guy. But he told me once that the United States could lead a worldwide effort to ban technology he and other bio-Luddites find scary. Yet already Singapore has a major embryonic stem cells initiative. It's built a city within the city called Biopolis and attracted leading researchers there. Japan, too. Where have some of the best cloners gone? Japan. Even the United Kingdom is setting up a human embryonic stem cells bank. It has authorized the creation of embryo clones for research. The reason they are doing all this is that they see that the next revolution in technology will be a biological revolution and that economies will be changed by it. If a company did come up with a pill you could take to improve your memory, how valuable would that company be. Imagine a company that makes a life extension drug! The market would be every living human being. And if it were banned in the United States, people would happily fly to Singapore. The thinking of some in Congress that it can ban Americans from going overseas to use embryonic stem cell therapies is a joke. Just ask any American smoking Cuban cigars.
Next News: What common threads, if any, run through the various "bio-utopians" you met in writing and researching your book?
Alexander: The most common thread, the uniting thread, was a deep-seated belief in the power of science and technology to change lives for the better. All bio-utopians, and many who I would not necessarily classify as bio-utopians, like some of the scientists in Rapture, truly believe that answers to some, if not most, human problems can be found through science. They are optimists, mostly.
They also have serious doubts, if not outright antipathy, toward standard, god-based religions of all kinds. They see old-style religion as superstition. They don't believe in heaven or life after death and so, looking into the void which currently awaits us all, they say "Hey! Let's do something about that!"
I have to say one of the joys of reporting the book was meeting so many interesting people. Like Miller Quarles. Miller is an octogenarian oil geologist from Houston who founded the Cure Old Age Disease Society. Through his connections in the life extension subculture, he ran across Mike West, a young scientist and medical student who had made it his life's mission to cure death. One thing led to another, and Miller wound up providing West with some seed money to help create what became Geron, the California biotech that financed the culture of the first sustainable human embryonic stem cells.
Or John Sperling, the billionaire founder of the University of Phoenix who created an antiaging (now he uses the phrase "optimal health") clinic called Kronos. Sperling is a fascinating guy who has become a biotech entrepreneur.
Deeper into the bio-utopian subculture, you get transhumanists, those who believe in a transformative era in which human beings will cease to be completely human and will become a new species, some mix of biotech and machine enhancements that will deliver super brain power, immortality, and perfect health.
On the other side are the top scientists I feature. Cynthia Kenyon, for example, is a serious, critical, skeptical scientist and yet she carries an enthusiastic amazement for her own work in extending the lives of lab animals. That work has helped lead to a new company that will try to create drugs, and she's optimistic it will all pan out.
Of course, for me, the most fascinating of all the characters is William Haseltine, CEO of the biotech Human Genome Sciences. I would not classify him as a bio-utopian necessarily. He's a mainstream guy from an elite academic background. But he does foresee greatly extended life spans and has declared that "the goal is to keep people alive forever." He thinks the path will be "regenerative medicine." He can be a prickly character, but I grew to like him and to admire his fearless willingness to say what others only think.
Next News: There seems to have been a lot of important research in the stem cell/germ-line area in 2003. Is the science progressing much faster than most people realize?
Alexander: I have a contradictory answer for that. I think the science is progressing much slower than most people realize in some areas, and faster in others. The whole stem cell/germ-line arena is very confusing for most people. Embryonic stem cells? Adult stem cells? What kind of adult stem cells? Germ-line engineering (creating a heritable change that's passed on to the next generation)? They are all somewhat related yet very different and in very different states of progress. You have to sift them into their little piles.
Embryonic stem cell work in the United States is moving very slowly. This is partly because of Bush's restrictions, partly because science oversold the near-term potential during the debate leading up to those restrictions. People are still figuring out how to tell when you've actually got embryonic stem cells. A standard way to characterize them is being developed. Private money is financing some new colonies, and some work has been done to see if, for example, they can be made into islet cells for the pancreas as a cure for diabetes. So far there's been little success.
Adult stem cells suffer from some of the same issues. How do you tell when you've got an adult stem cell? Are adult stem cells actually created by the fusion of two different kinds of cells? How powerful is an adult stem cell? Science is coming to the conclusion that cells in the body can be much more powerful and much more flexible than anybody ever thought, that they can be literally transformed into an earlier, more flexible, state of being. This opens up the possibility of using the body as its own Play-Doh. This appears to have happened in the lab of Denise Faustmann at Harvard where diabetes was apparently cured in mice by switching cell fates. Islets simply regenerated. I think this sort of thing is the real future of therapy. I don't think it will take embryonic stem cells or cloning to get those cells.
[But] there has been some big work done in 2003 regarding germ-line engineering or science that could lead to germ-line engineering. Scientists were able to take the cells that make sperm and genetically alter them so that all sperm made after that would have the genetic change. The work was done mainly as a means to produce mice for experiments. But that and other work means that it is possible now to make germ-line changes in people. It would be possible to eliminate a disease, say Tay-Sachs, from a family line. But again, there's that valley. How safe is it? What are the surprises? The translation of science into technology useful for people is often a tortuous path. People should not be afraid that tomorrow mad scientists for the L.A. Lakers are going to start engineering a fleet of Shaqs.
Will genetic engineering someday allow mankind to transform itself into a race of super strong, super smart, near immortals? And if you think it will, can such a belief form the basis of an incipient 21st-century technoreligion? Science writer Brian Alexander tackles these questions and others in his new book, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. Here is the second half of my recent E-mail chat with Alexander.
Next News: Are the dreams of the life-extension/genetic engineering crowd just that, fantasies? What really appears doable? And what sort of timeline are we talking about?
Alexander: Life extension already exists. Scientists have made lab animals live far longer than their natural life span, up to six times longer. Translating that to people will take a long time, but it will eventually be done.
Second, we already see the first tentative steps in life extension. I think drugs like cholesterol-lowering statins, for example, could be considered life extension drugs, and I think that we will see some members of the generation now in their 70s or 80s who take these drugs regularly live beyond the current record of 122 years.
What I don't think will happen is the scary sci-fi scenario of fully designed people, at least in the commonly interpreted meaning of that. For example, it would be possible, right now, to enhance human beings by inserting genes into their genomes to make them more muscular, taller, maybe even smarter. Why isn't anybody offering that (at least publicly)? Because 20 years into gene therapy, there has never been an unequivocal success story. The recent case of children in France who suffered from a severe immune deficiency–the bubble-boy defect–illustrates how hard it is. Gene therapy appeared to cure them. In fact, it did cure them of their defect. But in some of the cases, the vehicle used to insert the curative gene lodged in a bad spot in the genome and apparently activated a cancer-causing gene that created leukemia.
Whole genome engineering of people would probably require lab-created embryos that would be engineered on a massive scale–more than one or two genes. Who's going to want that for their children or themselves? The scare mongers out there seem to discount the human nature they extol. Sex is free. Making babies the old-fashioned way will always be the first choice of almost everybody, even the rich. Brave New World makes an easy sound bite, but it's not terribly realistic.
People get caught up in the sci-fi and forget that science lurches in small, step-like movements. Always has, always will. That may be the biggest fantasy of the bio-utopians, that their dreams will come true soon. They won't. Everybody can relax and take a deep breath. Eventually, we will wake up and realize that we're living to be 250 years old, just like we realize now that average life expectancy in the 20th century went from something like 40 to nearly 80.
Next News: You call biotech a religion. Does the religious aspect have to do with faith that biotechnology will surely bring radical life extension or, rather, faith that biotech advances will result in some sort of Paradise on Earth?
Alexander: Well, both. It's all part of the big vision these folks have. Think about what we imagine paradise to be. Religion promises everlasting life, perfect well being, happiness, a bliss that's unencumbered by the usual woes of life on earth. Biotech as the new religion has begun to promise all these things in one way or another, and those who adhere to the new religion–they hate that I call it that, by the way–think that more will come and that eventually, the promised paradise will be created by science. One word for it is the Singularity, which I explain in the book. But even those who don't buy into the Singularity, even those who are not bio-utopians at all, just regular folks who read the newspaper, have come to think that miracles are around the corner. We have come to this conclusion because biotech's promoters, the genome sequencers, the corporate news releases, have all said so as a way to justify investment. In convincing us that the genome project was a good thing, we were told great stuff was coming. Cures. Answers. We believed it, even though such things are still, mostly, in the future.
Next News: You seem to say that even if people are living to be 500 with improved capacities, they will still complain, still be unhappy, etc.? Yet at the same time you think biotech will make religion less and less tenable. As long as the world is full of flawed creatures, won’t people be looking for the sort of answers that religion tries to provide?
Alexander: Yes. I don't think biotech as religion will replace traditional religion. I explore biotech as an emerging religion which is joining the list of other belief systems, a kind of secular religion. When I write about the threat that some feel from biotech and from science in general, I quote E. O. Wilson, the naturalist, who sees that as more and more questions are answered by science, people will look less and less to religion to explain the universe. I believe that is why the people I call "bio-Luddites" are so threatened by biotech. I think they see the ability to alter natural-given existence, or God-given existence, as heresy. All heresies become heresies because the old order is threatened by them. They don't want life-extension science to proceed, because it defies God or nature. Same with in vitro fertilization for Leon Kass, the chairman of George Bush's bioethics council. He has opposed it for 30 years, not because he hates babies, but because making a baby that way gets around the constraints that God or nature has seen fit to impose on human beings. It unclips us from an eternal source of truth and wisdom and allows us to float free guided by our own wisdom. That's scary. So he thinks we should just take our imperfections and gain strength from our limitations–object lessons from God.
My argument is that he needn't worry. Human beings are on a never-ending treadmill. As amazing as biotech is and as amazing as its future will be, we will have the same motivations, the same desires as we have always had. Living to 500 only delays the ultimate questions. Why are we here? What's the point of life? Is death really the end? If you die at 500 or you die at 47, you still die. The question does not go away. How can we make a better planet, a better community, a better family? How can we find happiness in love?
Next News: Would you like a much longer life span, say, 150 years or more? If so, do you think you will get it? And would you want to be frozen and then thawed at some point in the future when medical technology has greatly advanced?
Alexander: If I could have health with my 150 years, sure. Why not? I like life. I find great joy in it. There's thinking abroad in the land that it is the duty of people living now to die on time to make way for people who do not exist yet. I find that perverse. By that logic, we should deny medical care to people over 80. We ought to send them out to the forest. But we don't do that because we treasure life. I'll die soon enough. Don't rush me.
No, I don't think I'll live to be 150. I think I have an outside chance of making it to 100, now that I know that alcohol is actually good for you.
And no, I'd never be frozen. I don't think cryonics will ever work. I have nothing against those who want to give it a shot. I don't think they are loony. But I'd rather create some other legacy with whatever money I have left at the end rather than sinking into a tank of liquid nitrogen.