Case for shutting laboratory door

As the Greens make a stand over GM, scientists debate whether their most radical advances help or threaten society. Science reporter SIMON COLLINS reports.

In January last year, Australian scientist Dr Bob Seamark issued "a worldwide warning".

His team at the Canberra-based Co-operative Research Centre for the Biological Control of Pest Animals had accidentally created a mousepox virus that killed all the mice in his laboratory within days.

The mousepox itself was no danger to humans. But the technique used to create it could be applied to the human disease of smallpox, which Seamark warned would be deadly in the hands of terrorists.

Sixteen months later, after the still-unsolved anthrax attacks in the United States late last year, no one doubts the real threat of biological terrorism.

Other threats from fast-advancing technology may be just as real. Two years ago, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy warned the world against three growing dangers - genetically modified organisms, new organisms created from molecules by "nanotechnology", and even robots which might soon be able to reproduce themselves.

In the past week New Zealanders have been unexpectedly forced to confront the first issue by the Greens' GM ultimatum to Labour.

And tonight Auckland University's Liggins Institute has invited Seamark and Auckland biologist Dr Peter Wills to hear Joy on video and then debate the question, "Will technology destroy society as we know it?"

Joy, who sees a clear risk that it will, wrote: "The only realistic alternative I can see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge."

Wills, who gave evidence for the Green Party to the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification, agrees. He says the Greens are right to stand out against releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment, even though that stand threatens to bring down the next government.

Tonight's debate could provide an interesting clash of views. When Seamark issued his "worldwide warning" about mice and smallpox, Wills sent him an angry email condemning him for playing around with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the first place.

"You clearly had no idea of the potential outcomes, but you cloned a transgene with multiple functions into an active, pathological vector," Wills wrote. "You hide behind the charade of official regulation as if it gives some reasonable means of protecting the world from the consequences of your bringing to reality our pathetically inadequate vision of how biological cells operate.

"We do not need your 'products'. Have the courage now to bring all of such projects under your control to a halt."

Seamark emailed back his "thanks for expressing your views so cogently".

"On this issue we clearly disagree," he wrote. "I do, however, have continuing respect for your public advocacy for your viewpoint on GMOs and trust that we both retain a capacity to listen objectively to the full range of viewpoints."

Seamark told journalists at the time that the mousepox was developed "for completely humanitarian motives".

"Our aim is to counter the enormous damage and human suffering which rodents cause by devouring a major part of the global grain harvest, especially in developing countries and in Australia," he said.

But Joy's main concern with genetic modification is that "it gives the power - whether militarily, accidentally or in a deliberate terrorist act - to create a White Plague".

Even without Seamark's lethal twist, the world is highly vulnerable to any release of smallpox because it is widely assumed to have been eliminated and people are no longer vaccinated against it.

Other critics, such as the Washington-based Turning Point Project, warn that it is a short step from testing foetuses for genetic defects to selectively breeding babies to be more intelligent, strong or good-looking.

"Nanotechnology" holds potentially even greater threats, as well as huge promise. It is the technology of making things that are only nanometres - billionths of a metre - wide, the size of individual molecules.

At this scale, scientists and engineers can change things that have to be taken for granted on larger scales.

This may make possible lighter and stronger materials, faster computers, "smart concrete" that will detect signs of weakness and release chemicals to combat it, and medical implants that will attract raw materials out of bodily fluids and use them to rebuild bone or skin.

Even though the technology is in its infancy, Governments in the developed world are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on it. US venture capitalists sank US$100 million ($211 million) into nanotech-related start-ups last year.

In New Zealand, the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology is one of five centres of research excellence which will share $60 million of state funding in the next four years.

One of the institute's principal investigators, Dr Steve Durbin of Canterbury University, says it is looking for cheaper materials and fabrication techniques, including alternative methods of transferring patterns on to computer chips.

"There is quite a lot that we don't understand. The closer we look, the more questions we ask," he says.

But Joy worries that new kinds of bacteria created by nanotechnology could reproduce exponentially and reduce the whole natural environment to dust "in a matter of days".

This prospect of marauding gooey bacteria has become known as the "grey goo problem" - a threat to life as we know it.

More surprisingly, Joy sees even robots as a potential threat as they become more intelligent than people.

That may happen sooner than we think. It is already five years since an IBM computer named Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov. Massey University Professor Bob Hodgson told engineers in Wellington in March that by 2020 the typical $1000 computer will exceed the computing power of the human brain.

Within a few more decades, he predicted, that typical computer will exceed the computing power of all human brains combined.

"Machines will claim to be conscious, and that claim will be accepted," he said.

"All sorts of things are possible, including a symbiosis between silicon and the organic. It's very likely that some hybrids will develop.

"This is going to raise a lot of issues if we have hybrids that are partly human, for example, the brains of brain-damaged people."

Seamark, on the phone this week from Adelaide, where he now heads the Flinders Medical Research Institute, said his mousepox virus was being "refined" to achieve its original goal of preventing the mice from reproducing rather than killing them on the spot.

"It's up to the technologists to make a compelling case that it could be used safely."

There are precedents. Myxomatosis was introduced in Australia 50 years ago to kill rabbits. Rabbit calicivirus disease (RCD) was introduced there in the late 1980s and brought to New Zealand illegally in 1997 by farmers desperate to control rabbits.

Mousepox in its accidentally lethal form could be introduced in the same way.

"RCD kills rabbits humanely. They don't appear to suffer. They just become listless and sit down and die quite quietly," Seamark said. "If mousepox kills the mice fairly effectively, but arguably in a humane way, it could be released.

"But we'd still prefer to have full control over the process so we could make that determination exactly. We wanted it as an agent which sterilises so we could use it as a preventive agent rather than a killing agent."

Seamark is a biotech pioneer. At Adelaide University in 1970, his laboratory was the world's third to make frozen human semen available for in vitro fertilisation. Later he was the first to insert foreign genes into pigs, sheep, cattle and fish. Later still, he cloned sheep and cattle.

He says technologists should not be blamed for what is really society's failure to deal with problems such as food production and pest control in other ways.

When he realised the terrorist potential of the techniques he used with mousepox, he urged the world to strengthen the 30-year-old Biological Weapons Convention. He believes this may now happen after last year's anthrax scare.

"In the long term the only resolution of this will be better distribution of educational opportunities and resources around the world so we don't disenfranchise a lot of human beings and give them a reason for wanting to go off and destroy 'evil empires'."

Another scientist at the MacDiarmid Institute, Otago University chemistry lecturer Dr Kate McGrath, says humanity should not give up the potential benefits of genetic modification, nanotechnology or robotics just because some people might use that knowledge for evil ends.

She opposes cloning animals - for ethical reasons, not because of any risk to the environment. "I do not approve of cloning animals because I associate with them some semblance of identity," she says.

But it is a difficult line to draw. "Where you decide that a cell is a cell, and not an animal or a human or whatever, is an issue that is being debated around the world."

But Wills says he would, like the Greens, prefer to keep genetic modification "inside the laboratory" because any attempt to modify an organism is liable to have the kind of unintended effects that Seamark found with his mice.

Like Seamark, Wills has spent years in the field. But he specialised in researching "prions", the biological agents that produce brain disorders such as mad cow disease.

He has learned that the biological systems in humans and other animals are intensely complex, and there is "no simple one-to-one relationship between genes and biological traits".

"Our lack of knowledge and understanding of the diffuse, intertwined processes of self-organisation on which all of life depends creates an overriding uncertainty in analyses of the consequences of genetic manipulation," he has written.

He is willing to see genetically engineered medicines such as insulin created inside the laboratory, as long as the organisms that created them are not released.

But the best potential safeguard he can see would be for scientists to refuse to practise their science for "partisan ends" - whether military or commercial.

"Today the Prime Minister sounded off at the Green Party," he said on Monday.

"It's a clash of values between those who want to commercialise the changing of organisms at the genetic level, and those who see that as a bad way to organise the next hundreds or thousands of years of human stewardship of the biosphere.

"Most of the partisan ends that scientists are working for now are global political interests, so this is a highly political question - what science should be controlled for, what is the common good.

"That is what we have democracy for. The only way we are going to get control of this stuff is if we really have participatory democracy."

* Tonight's debate is sold out. Seamark will give a public talk on "biowarfare and pest management" at 4.30pm tomorrow in the Robb Lecture Theatre at the Auckland Medical School.

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