"Enough" book report for HSU class

This weekend my wife went out of town... A perfect opportunity to drink booze... However, I voluntarily chose to write this homework book report instead... I came to the realization that I would have to suffer through the hangover that always happens and that pain is not worth the chemical pleasure of drinking booze...

ENOUGH Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben
NRPI400 Book Report by Greg Vanderlaan

This book is about Genetic Engineering of Humans, Cloning, Nanotechnology and Robotics. The author is strongly opposed to all these sciences. He feels that even though we may be able to do these things we would be better off if we did not. The dangers outweigh the possible benefits. I have to disagree with McGibben. It makes a good story to predict disaster, but reality does not support his claims.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Recent newspaper articles state that people in South Korea have mastered all technological aspects of Human Cloning. They have taken all the steps needed except the very last one... The actual birth of a cloned Human. They have proved beyond all doubt that this technology is not Science Fiction but Science Fact. Should we take that last step? Is it inevitable that we will? Is it possible to NOT use these techniques? Designing better Humans and Nanotechnology may be possible in the future but Cloning and Robotics are real right now. One basic fact of life is that every animal pursues it's own goals and ambitions. If we design a new species of Human, they will follow their own dreams. Their dreams may be compatible with ours but they may be completely different. He points out that we may be able to design smarter Humans in the near future. If we do, I hope that they like us. It is entirely possible that they will decide that ObsoleteHumans should all be exterminated or sterilized. They could insist that only SuperHumans be allowed to have children. If they in fact are smarter than us, they will be able to think up means to enforce their will. We cannot predict if the SuperHumans will be nice. The history of mankind shows countless examples of powerful people exterminating or enslaving the less powerful. Hopefully, the SuperHumans will be enlightened Masters that would keep ObsoleteHumans as pets for amusement. They may conclude that we are mostly harmless and treat us with compassion like we treat the mentally retarded. Our own knowledge of the Human Brain and the consequences of genetic engineering are rather limited now. We have no actual understanding of personality changes due to DNA manipulation. The consequences of designing Frankenstein's Monster are so devastating that most people automatically oppose Human Genetic Engineering. Modifying the DNA of Humans is a change that will be passed down to their children forever. This aspect of science is the one that causes me the most doubt about actually doing it. Fortunately, it requires massive government funding or corporate funding to make it a reality and no government or large corporation is spending money on germline engineering.
~

However, some people think that it is a great idea. The followers of RAEL, think that this is the one really big idea... More important than fire, the wheel, electricity or The Pill... They feel that our destiny is to design our children to be better than ourselves. They keep on claiming to have cloned many children. The RAELIANS founded a corporation called Clonaid that supposedly created 13 cloned people. They also are doing research into storing all the memories of a persons lifetime on a computer so that your clone will be exactly like you. Create an identical body and fill it with identical memories and a person can live forever. My search on the internet shows that they have not had these children tested to compare their DNA to that of the parent. My feeling is that this is all a publicity stunt to attract attention to the RAELIAN organization. This test is so standard that the only conceivable reason for not having it done is that they fear the results will expose their fraud. This particular organization is rather extreme in their beliefs (for example: we are all descendents of space aliens) but they do point out the fact that someone, somewhere will clone humans. It may be the billionaire that wants to live forever or it may be the pimp that wants to create a harem of Susan Sarandon clones or it may be the UFO cult but if we can, we will. Fortunately, the science of DNA modification is rather difficult. Actually designing SuperHumans is beyond the ability of scientists today. Making Identical copies is possible but modification is still science fiction. We are close. Researchers have created genetically modified pigs. These improved pigs contain some DNA from a mouse. This makes the pigs manure have less phosphorous. The advantage to these pigs is that a farmer could raise more pigs per acre of land. Private industry has no great financial reward in sight for designer Human babies. The amount of money to be made selling "new and improved" people is tiny in comparison to other branches of research. The corporation GENENTECH is so busy building anti-cancer drugs in their laboratories that they have put no effort into human design. The anti-cancer drugs are worth billions of dollars. Since the goal of any corporation is to make a profit they will keep on spending research dollars on life-forms that can be marketed. It would take a great investment into research to perfect human design technology. The bad publicity generated by news reports of Human Engineering would outweigh the profits made from selling genetically improved people. Even if the price for a designer baby was $50,000. Not an unreasonable price.
~~~

McKibben does cite organizations that are doing research in primate DNA modification. In 2001, Oregon Health Sciences University inserted jellyfish DNA into a rhesus monkey embryo to create a transgenetic monkey named ANDi. The goal of this study was to practice inserting DNA so that someday they could insert Human DNA that contains a disease into a monkey. Then they could test cures for that disease to develop new medicines. Instead of using humans for testing, they would do testing on monkeys. At what point is a monkey actually a human? They propose blending monkey and Human DNA. A large quantity of monkey DNA and a small part of Human. Since our DNA is already extremely similar, would inserting 5% human DNA make the animal a Human? 10%? 1%? There is public opposition to modifying humans but this laboratory has blurred the definition of exactly what a human is. In this experiment, the jellyfish gene is the one that causes them to glow green. ANDi does not glow green. He appears to be healthy and happy. This points out the unexpected results of gene splicing. I would have predicted that the monkey would glow. Of the three monkeys born, two did not survive but their hair and fingernails did glow green. Oregon Regional Primate Research Center has provoked the anger of P.E.T.A. There are 2,500 monkeys there. This animal rights organization questions the need to keep all these monkeys in cages and perform experiments on them that are often fatal. Dr. Gerald Schatten was in charge of the monkey research and recently he took a job at the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences of the University of Pittsberg School of Medicine. He works with humans now. Oddly, no major events have happened since 2001 in the field of glowing monkeys. A web search does reveal that you can buy mice that have a firefly gene at www.xenogen.com. The mice glow when it catches a disease. The Chicago artist Eduardo Kuc created a glowing rabbit as a piece of performance art. He currently has a show at the Exploratorium in San Francisco using genetically modified plants and Chess playing computers.http://www.ekac.org
~

Advanced Cell Technology: This company has cloned a cow called a banteng from frozen skin cells of a dead animal. The parent cow died in 1980 and the children were born in 2004. This particular cow was an endangered species. With advances in cloning, extinction need not be forever. The main area of research by this company is in stem cells. Stem cells are cloned DNA from a patient specifically grown to make medicine that is compatible with the patient. Genetic Savings and Clone offers cloning services for your cat. Two years ago they successfully cloned a cat named CC: (carbon copy) and will do it for you. Supposedly they charge $50,000 USD for this service and have made 8 sales. Their website does not quote a firm price. There is one space available for anyone to get their cat cloned. For some reason cats clone easily but dogs are more difficult. They call this cloning service �The First Nine Lives Extravaganza�. This company was started out of research at Texas A&M University on the Missyplicity Project This was an attempt to clone the dog Missy. They have been unsuccessful in cloning the dog but have stored her DNA in a gene bank so that as soon as they get the technology perfected, Missy will be the first dog clone. This raises doubts in my mind about the reality of cloning humans. Many cloned animals die quickly after birth. The Koreans say that they can do it but will not make real human babies because they fear public attack. They say that the only use they make of the embryos is to create medicine out of stem cells. I remember a scene in the movie Frankenstein of peasants with torches storming the castle.

Nanotechnology: It is almost entirely funded by the US government. At a 2004 conference, most of the speakers were government employees. DARPA and NASA lead the way. This science is mostly fiction and still awaits something significant to happen. The DOD is looking to use nanotechnology to build smaller memory chips for computers and lighter backpacks for soldiers. They feel that there is room for improvement in the amount of weight a soldier carries.Creating lighter materials hold promise for many construction projects. Bigger but lighter bridges would be able to span greater rivers. Lighter automobiles would require less fuel. At this conference there was no mention of the concept of molecular assemblers. This was an Idea by Eric Drexler where nano machines would build other nano machines. Eric Drexler is a futurist writer exploring the frontiers of science. He is not an actual scientist that designs nanomachines. The real scientists at the 2004 conference felt that his idea was unnecessary and unworkable. In the McGibben book, he gets all excited about molecular assemblers and Artificial Intelligence. As with all printed paper books, the information gets stale quickly. Like so many other doomsday predictions, these concepts simply did not happen. At one time, there was fear that computers would learn to think and people that thought for a living would be put out of work. It didn't happen. Also, nano enthusiasts were excited about nano machines being able to reproduce themselves. The idea was to feed raw material into one end of a machine and out the other end would come whatever you wanted. Feed in agricultural waste and output steak... Input garbage and output consumer products... Input raw matter and nanomachines would create other nano machines that would in turn create other nano machines... Similar to sex for robots...There was fear that these nano machines could get out of control and eat the entire planet... So far, the end of the world has not happened. What has happened is that we have stain resistant clothes made out of nanofibre. Eddie Bauer sells these pants for $50.00 a pair. Unfortunately for McGibben, better clothes is not a good subject for a book. He needs to have some looming crisis to write a book with the title ENOUGH!
~~

Kurzweil and Zyvex: The author McGibben seems to feel that the pursuit of nanotechnology is a bad idea. "We would be insane to take risks like this". He is referring to the risk of nanorobots eating the entire planet to replicate more nanorobots like themselves. Other people disagree with McGibben. Raymond Kurzweil founded a company called Zyvex to build new and better nano machines. Many of Kurzweils ideas have turned out to be brilliant. His reading machine for blind people allows printed books to be spoken out loud. When Stevie Wonder bought one of these machines, he asked Kurtzweil if it was possible to make a music synthesizer that could sound like real orchestral instruments. These synthesizers sound wonderful. I have played a Kurzweil and loved it. I feel that any idea that Kurzweil wants to research is a good one. He has been fantastic in the past and will probably continue to lead us into a glowing future. He helped invent the scanner that allows people to scan photographs into a computer for emailing. My DAD sent me pictures from his vacation to Mexico. Our family has become closer together because I can see pictures from my Dad, brother and mother-in law. I eagerly await Kurzweils next invention.

Robots: McGibben is worried that robots will take away all our jobs.For example: With the invention of robotic spot welders for the fabrication of automobiles, people were laid-off and machines took their jobs. Robots have been used in assembly lines for decades now. Somehow, people seem to get other types of employment. Work today has a tendency to be cleaner and safer than it was before the invention of robots. The new technologies provide new types of jobs to use the skills of displaced workers. I see a great many jobs that involve people typing at computer keyboards. My wife has a job like this. It may be fun to shout in alarm that the robots will take all the good jobs, but I bet that people who were employed as welders do not miss the burns on their skin caused by flying hot metal. They are happier working in an air-conditioned/heated office. He is concerned that computers will be able to write books and he will be unemployed. The field of Artificial Intelligence was a very exciting topic about 20 years ago. People were making predictions that computers would think but all these visions turned out to be pie in the sky dreams. He quotes ideas that have been clearly proven to be unworkable as if they were true... No, computers will not be writing books nor thinking up new ideas anytime soon. Some revolutionary programs have been written. There are people using AI and Neural networks to predict the stock market. On the website www.deepinsight.com they sell a computerized trading program that allow people to win money on the stock market. I do not personally know if their program works but this type of question is certainly a field of study that is suited to AI. Another area of interest to AI programmers is the "Chatterbot". This is a program that simulates a conversation. Real people ask it questions and the computer generates answers. A practical application of this technology is to answer repetitive questions asked by visitors to a website. These chatterbots have a lovely animated look and can handle repetitive chores. They give a friendly personality to basic "search" algorithms. Fun and harmless.
~

He talks about the popular television show robot wars. This is an amusing show where robots try to kill each other. This is an example of harmless science being harnessed for silly purposes. One aspect of robotics that he does not talk about is the new and improved killing machines that we use in our war with Iraq. The smart bombs and laser guided missiles are a technology that we invented that should definitely be not used. We have invented astonishing machines without having the gained the personal wisdom needed to live a sane life. This is like giving a chimpanzee a loaded pistol.
~

The meaning of life: McKibben wonders about what makes people happy. He states in his own life that the challenge of running a marathon footrace gives deep satisfaction. He feels that people that are genetically engineered to run farther and faster will not enjoy the same emotions he goes thru at mile 23 of a 26 mile run. The ability to breakthrough the wall of endurance causes a timeless space where total focus on the next step is all he can do. I have experienced a similar feeling of focus. My hobby of computer art requires that I create mathematical formulas to tell the computer what to do. The thinking up of these formulas is often done in public. I experience a distortion of time. I will be thinking and then I look at the clock and hours have passed. I am still subliminally aware of my surroundings but the feeling of focus truly make life worthwhile. My mother in law has told me that she experiences this peak experience when she is doing oil paintings. We can have the peak experience without running 23 miles. Genetically Engineered Humans will have the increased intelligence to create new hobbies for them to explore. They will be able to think up creative methods of art and culture that we cannot possibly imagine... We, the obsoleteHumans will be able to go listen to concerts of music composed by SuperHumans. They entertainment industry will certainly benefit from the advances in Human Design if it ever happens at all. We now enjoy the productions of geniuses. Bring on the SuperBeatles!

He envisions a future where people will be unemployed and robots will do all the work. The unemployed people will feel a lack of direction in their lives due to not having a job to do. His idea that welders will miss the assembly line is laughable... I know some welders, they love collecting unemployment checks and disability checks. We, the wage slaves, find that in our world we do not have ENOUGH! The world is not good ENOUGH. In reality, most of the world lives a lifestyle that does not include enough food to eat. The vast majority of people live an extremely non technological life. Genetically engineered foods have become very popular. During the 1990s, farmers in America embraced these advances in agriculture.Corn, cotton, soybeans, and canola are currently being grown. The main goal of these new foods is to resist insects. The dramatic superiority of these foods has caused over half of the corn and soybeans to be transgenetic. We need more research into better crops because we will need these crops to make ethanol and biodiesel to fuel our cars. I certainly hope that when he criticizes genetically engineered foods that he does not talk with his mouth full.
~

He believes that we should voluntarily not use these technologies because our world already has enough. Then he gives three examples of societies that intentionally refused to use technology that they had access to. The Amish are an example of people that refuse to embrace all technology but selectively choose which ones they want to use. They collectively decided that having a telephone in each home would be distracting and detrimental to homelife. They voluntarily selected to have one telephone for everyone in the village to use. His point is that the Amish select which technologies make sense and only use those that do. The Amish lifestyle is overwhelmingly rejected by the vast majority of mankind. A big business right now is installing cellular telephones in the third world. Real people want to talk on the phone and are willing to pay for it. I can see his point. We should not blindly accept every new invention but be discriminating. The second example is the Chinese of the 1400's. They had sailing ships and started exploring the world. They could have founded colonies like the Europeans did a century later but voluntarily decided not to. This decision profoundly effected the history of the world. We could all be speaking Chinese right now. The Chinese government outlawed sailing ships capable of traveling great distances and put their energy into making China itself a great society. One factor in their decision was that the people they met in the outside world were primitive savages that were not worth talking to. The Europeans perfected the sailing ship technology later and went on to conquer the world. At one time the "Sun never set on the English Empire". The third example is of guns and Japan. In the 1500's Europeans arrived in Japan and brought with them firearms. These weapons became very popular and made swords and Samurai warriors obsolete. Then a Shogun named Tokugawa decreed that guns were not to be made. The samurai regained the honor of swordsmanship. They felt that guns were crude and even an ignorant peasant could use them. During this time (1600-1900) Japan had a great society and realized many practical public works projects. Great universities, tap water pumped to all the homes and advances in medical care turned Japan into a wonderful world. It could be because they were not killing each other with guns but intentionally chose the honorable way of the Samurai. These three lessons from history show that on occasion it is better to not use technologies that have been invented. Another example from history that is relevant is the Atomic Bomb. We certainly have the technology to defeat our enemies but we intentionally never use it. He has a valid point here. We should carefully consider the consequences of our actions. Look before you leap. During the reign of George Bush the father, there was a proposal to design cocaine eating insects and let them loose in South America. This proposal was strongly opposed by scientists because they felt that the insects could get out of control and mutate into bugs that would eat the entire Amazon rainforest. What our government leaders did not understand about life forms is that they will follow their own agenda. What we want them to do is not guaranteed to be what they want to do. I wish that he could have found more compelling examples of the benefits of saying ENOUGH! My immediate reaction to the stoy of the Chinese that missed their opportunity to rule the world was to exclaim. OOPS! They made a mistake.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This book was an interesting story and fun to read. It caused me to want to research on the internet the subject to find out what has happened in the years since publication. He sounds an alarm that predicts disaster but it turns out to be a false alarm. In my humble opinion, we may continue to follow these areas of research without worry. Actual design of better humans is still science fiction. Nanotechnology has turned into a benign science and a great source for DOD grant money. Cloning is for pet owners that really love their cats and useful medicine. We have co-existed with robots for so long now that it would be hard to remember what life was like before robots. Artificial Intelligence has very limited applications and has turned out to be a big disappointment for enthusiastic computer people. One advance in AI is the internet search engine google. People love google. It has become a very profitable business and a great silicon success story. He admits in the last part of the book that his fears are not based upon reality. He says that the really threatening technologies have not been made real yet. He recommends that we take question their wisdom before we make them real. Good advice! It is fun to read speculative science fiction and play what if games. It is interesting to speculate about what would happen if we really could design better humans. One aspect that he talks about would be to design smarter humans. These SuperPeople could do research into genetic engineering and help design the next generation of SuperPeople. A runaway feedback loop would be created and the end result could be fantastic. Our planet needs all the smart people it can get. These geniuses could usher in a new age of enlightenment beyond our wildest dreams. There are problems that we face right now that we could use some wise answers to. If we had super intelligent children they might be able to think our way out of the mess we created on this planet. I will be watching the newspapers for interesting advances... I sure hope they like us...

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws