Regenesis (38 page)

One of the most common objections people make about the prospect of human immortality is the unintended consequence of overpopulation. They also worry about long-lived individuals taking away jobs from younger people.

People have been worried about overpopulation ever since Malthus and his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” which was published in 1798 (and in which he said, amid an outpouring of dire forecasts: “I happen to have a very bad fit of the tooth-ache at the time I am writing this”). Thomas Malthus died in 1834 worried about the world population of 1 billion people doubling every three hundred years. Currently at 7 billion
and doubling every forty-seven years, we are now well beyond the situation that worried him. But instead of the global starvation and misery he envisioned, we have seen rises in wealth, standard of living, health, personal hygiene, and life expectancy. There is a reason for this: as economist Julian Simon once explained, “Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air. Minds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species”

The world population has more than doubled since the beginning of the Green Revolution in 1943. Among the new technologies that have made this possible are pesticides, new irrigation strategies, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, and mutant high-yielding varieties (HYV) of maize, wheat, and rice plants that are of shorter stature and use the new fertilizers. Since 1996 soybeans and other types of crops every year have been engineered to be resistant to herbicides, enabling a potent strategy potentially reducing erosion and the energy costs of plowing. However, now that weeds may be developing resistance to pesticides we need to be much more strategic in our planning.

The wide use of perennials may go even further in this direction. The return of our great American prairie made of deeply rooted perennial grasses would out-compete weeds, and greatly reduce erosion, irrigation, herbicides, and fertilizer. These perennials are similar enough to their annual growing season cousins, that developing a win-win perennial grain through genome engineering seems entirely feasible. Examples already under development include perennial rice and intermediate wheatgrass. But the land now must provide not only food but also the biofuels and other petrochemicals that were once cheaply available from underground. One solution, as we have seen, is engineered cyanobacteria, which can grow on marginal lands and use brackish or ocean water unsuitable for most conventional crops, possibly reclaiming land recently lost to desertification. And they can do so at photosynthetic efficiencies far higher than corn, switchgrass, and other favorite crops. Creative food technology might make cyanobacteria-derived cuisine taste the same as chicken or beef (or even better!), with consequent fifteen-fold reductions of energy
use relative to animals together with a much lower risk of starting drugresistant pandemics. The rapid diffusion of these technologies could lead to increased local production of simple and complex goods and hence reduced transportation costs.

But remember that there has been a worldwide shift from rural to urban life (worldwide, 3 percent urban in 1800 to 80 percent urban projected for 2050). In the course of this shift, the average number of children per family drops from an average near 7 to well below the break-even point of 2.1, and often as low as 1.2. This means that overpopulation may not be the problem that many people reflexively imagine it to be. Indeed, population may implode rather than explode, reversing the conventional wisdom on this topic.

The vision of a nearly immortal populace squelching the job prospects of youth is strongly reminiscent of Luddite concerns about machines taking over jobs from humans. Population implosion, coupled with increasing numbers of older, healthier citizens, and more women in positions of power, could have huge consequences for child rearing, consumer advocacy, philanthropy, and diplomacy. The assumption of ever expanding numbers of descendants and consequent fighting for their lands is hard to shake. With children a rarer resource, education may go from being among the lowest paying jobs to the highest. We may embrace much greater human diversity, not merely ancestry but vast spectra of personality, age, and intellectual capacities (e.g., an intentional increase in highfunctioning autistics, bipolars, and ADHDs). This may require very specialized and highly trained parenting—well beyond the current random assignment of child to parent.

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Here I use the conventional formulation of Moore's Law. In 2000 Gordon Moore stated: “I never said eighteen months. I said one year, and then two years . . . Moore's Law has been the name given to everything that changes exponentially in the industry. If Gore invented the Internet, I invented the exponential.”

Societal Risks and Countermeasures

A popular theme in techno-thriller novels is the story of mutant microbes running amok and almost, but not quite, wiping out the human race. The
locus classicus
for this scenario is Michael Crichton's
The Andromeda Strain
(1969). Here a deadly microbe of extraterrestrial origin lands near the fictional town of Piedmont, Arizona, and the invading organisms slaughter the town's entire population, with the exception of two residents who mysteriously survive. The microbe responsible, the Andromeda strain of the title, mutates with each cell division and acquires new and even more destructive biological properties. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance, until a government scientist working inside a secret and secure biological containment facility somewhere in Nevada heroically carries out a last-minute save. The Andromeda microbes then depart for the upper atmosphere, whose lower oxygen content better suits their growth. (This story line seems to be a Michael Crichton specialty. His 2002 novel,
Prey
, depicts a race of artificially alive nanorobots that escape from the lab, collect themselves into swarms, and then hunt down and kill people.)

Paranoia about exotic microbes is not confined to fiction, however. In real life it underlies the hostility toward, and temporary suppression of, the first generation of recombinant DNA experiments during the mid-1970s. It's what motivates panic reactions to genetically modified foods. And it's also what incites some knee-jerk criticisms of synthetic biology. “Scientists are making strands of DNA that never existed,” claims Jim Thomas, a synthetic biology critic with the ETC Group, a technology monitoring organization based in Ottawa. “So there is nothing to compare them to.”

Well, not exactly. Every two parents who conceive a child are creating “strands of DNA that never existed” Bacteria are constantly exchanging genes in a process called conjugation, thereby giving rise to yet more “strands of DNA that never existed.” In fact, the creation of DNA that never before existed is a constant and pervasive feature of life on earth.

Despite the fear evoked by the idea of genetically modified organisms, those of the natural variety are hard to beat when it comes to posing serious threats to humanity.
Yersinia pestis
, the causative agent of bubonic plague, is estimated to have killed as many as a third to a half of all Europeans in the Black Death epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The bacterium made a comeback appearance in the Great Plague, another wave of annihilation that swept through the Continent in 1665-1666. The smallpox viruses,
Variola
major and minor, are thought to have caused more deaths than any other disease in human history, wiping out as many as 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. (The disease was eradicated in 1979.) Tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, AIDS—all are products of microbial agents of mass destruction that are natural in origin.

So it's not as if we have to look to genetically altered microbes to find models of successful microbial killing machines. Still, the question has to be faced whether the process of genetic engineering is likely to make existing microbes even more deadly, giving rise to one or more Andromeda strains that originated in biotechnology labs here on earth.

And if genetically modified microbes pose a threat, what about genetically enhanced human beings, so-called transhumans? It's a cliché that the human being is the most dangerous animal. Would a race of trans-humans be even worse?

The term “transhuman” harnesses the prefix “trans,” as in across or beyond, or acts as an abbreviation for transitional human. The transhuman occupies an intermediate stage between a normal biological human and one of the posthuman variety, a being whose capacities so far outstrip those of ordinary, everyday mortals as to constitute a new and separate species. The nomenclature is a bit imprecise, however, owing to the fact that the concept of improving human qualities to the point where they make up a species difference is a blend of ideas from science fiction, science, folklore and legend, and sheer crackpottery.

Nonetheless, transhumanism (sometimes symbolized as H+) has been taken seriously enough by some as to warrant attention and criticism. In 2004, for example, the magazine
Foreign Policy
published a special report, “The World's Most Dangerous Ideas” In it, Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, proposed the idea of transhumanism as one of the most dangerous and revolting products of those he referred to as “genetic bulldozers” (such “bulldozers” apparently being people who push their transhumanist agenda with lots of force).

This was puzzling inasmuch as the author acknowledged that trans-humanism (which he defined as the attempt to “use biotechnology to make ourselves stronger, smarter, less prone to violence, and longer-lived”) had a certain inherent logic and appeal. Part of the contemporary biomedical research agenda, he admitted, was focused on procedures and technologies that were designed as much to enhance ourselves psychologically and biologically as to cure illness; medical science presented us with a range of mood-altering drugs, prenatal genetic screening tests, and gene therapies, among other things. Moreover, the author also conceded that “the human
race, after all, is a pretty sorry mess, with our stubborn diseases, physical limitations, and short lives.”

Fukuyama, nevertheless, was an implacable foe of transhumanism, his reason being that “the first victim of transhumanism might be equality.” By this he meant political equality, or equality before the law, not economic equality or uniformity of outcomes. He imagined that transhumans, with their heightened powers, better health, better looks, smarter minds, and longer life spans, would claim comparably outsize rights for themselves.

But by any standard this was an odd argument. There is already a wide variation in talents among members of the human race, but those with great intelligence, strength, and good health do not claim special rights for themselves on that account. Conversely, those with severe physical and/or mental disabilities are nevertheless accorded full human rights by the legal structures of enlightened democratic governments.

This is not to say that transhumanism presents no dangers whatever or that it entails no unintended or unwelcome consequences. A small number of individuals already exist who possess qualities that could be regarded as “transhuman” in a limited and qualified sense of the term. Rare double mutants in the myostatin gene (a.k.a. MSTN) have lean muscle and low body fat. Rare mutants in the LRP5 gene have extra-strong bones. Mutants in PCSK9 have 88 percent lower coronary disease. Double mutants in CCR5 are HIV resistant (see
Chapter 9
). Double mutants in FUT2 are resistant to stomach flu (e.g., noroviruses).