Breaking the Code of Life

#46, July 12, 2000

In the beginning, there was the raw planet, with its new mountains and plains, rivers and oceans. But there was no life. Nothing alive but Kale and Akima, the two who stood witness to its birthday, 15 years After Earth. Uh, excuse me, they're not wearing space suits…where did the oxygen come from?

My daughter tells me that good science fiction should start off from good science, but I was too captivated by the wonderful new animated film, Titan AE, to be bothered by some of its scientific loose ends. Like, even if the atmosphere was chemically concocted to just the right proportions for earthly life, how will that balance be maintained as the introduced life from this Titanic ark takes hold? Well, it's just a movie, I tell myself, not likely to reinforce anyone's belief that if we eventually lose (read "ruin") this planet, we can just viola! fabricate another one ("AE, clone home?")

At least I hope not. Last week, two teams of genetic engineers announced that they have deciphered the 3.1 billion biochemical letters of the human DNA, the instructions for building and operating a human being. Now they are poised to identify the causes and cures of human diseases. While this has obvious benefits, it comes with horrid host of tough questions, such as: How can we prevent the big insurance corporations, who are steadily gaining power over our society and the health of its members, from discovering and discriminating against the "defectives" (as they did in the spooky sci-fi thriller Gattaca?) As we find cures for pollution-induced human cancers (e.g. melanoma from ozone layer depletion), will we start ignoring the disease of all the plants and animals who can't stand the pollution or take the cure?

Now that we've mapped the human genome, we're step closer to the world of yet another dark science fiction film. In "Blade Runner", Harrison Ford tackles the problems of lab-dish human "replicants" who have broken away from the controls set by their designers. It makes me wonder, how will today's society, which can't seem to curb it's appetite for new weaponry or keep dictatorships from abusing their people, control the potential military and police abuses of genetic engineering?

There's an important concept that we'd better learn fast: the creation of this unimaginably complex biosphere did not happen in a few generations. It's not as if we can get the requirements from Marketing, write our spec, build and test the modules, and release Gaia version 2.0a in time for the next Galactic Trade Show. Humans are part of a global organism that has been painstakingly crafted over several billion years. Every change has been thoroughly tested in the field, and only changes that benefited the whole organism were kept.

As the nun-ecologist Sister Miriam McGillis says, the earth since the Big Bang has been on auto-pilot, following an internal program that is coded for ever-greater complexity, diversity and beauty. Now we humans are preparing to flip the switch to "manual", and take over control. She asks, have we anywhere near the level of maturity and wisdom, as a species, to safely take on this responsibility? What happens when the novitiate takes on God-like powers, when the sorcerer's apprentice starts Mickey Mousing with the magic wand? I say that today, the odds are we will not end up with Eden, but the world of Gattaca and Blade Runner, or worse.

Unless, of course, we use the threat of a genetically engineered hell on earth to awaken ourselves from the lurid dream that the earth was created for us to control. When we learn to live in humility and awe, and with respect for the world which gives us birth and succor, we might then be worthy to wield this powerful tool.

The risks (and rewards) of breaking and remaking the code of life are too big to leave policy decisions with our current crop of public and private sector leaders. It will take an informed and activist citizenry-- you and me-- to make sure our institutions aren't caught with their "genes" down.

Pullquote in bold (last sentence)