The latest (Spring 2008) issue of Strategy+Business magazine is on the newsstand and on the web — and in it, my piece whacking cost-benefit analysis, the bane of innovation and sane regulatory policy. I’m already getting letters …

(Free) registration is required to read the article online.

A friend just sent me a story from Monday’s Guardian U.K., on control of the net by corporations, a.k.a. “net neutrality.” I’ve been writing about this issue since the early ’90s, back when I was writing Inside Technology at the San Francisco Examiner. And then again at Digital Media. And again at Technology & Media. And then at NYT. And again, now, still, same as it ever d**m was.

Back before the days of AT&T deregulation, it wasn’t called Net Neutrality. It was called “conduit v content,” and AT&T — kind of the King God of conduit owners — had long been banned from controlling what traversed it.

You know, that pesky First Amendment and all that.

But deregulation shifted those sands as Judge Greene’s Modified Final Judgment that ruled who could do what after the breakup was slowly but surely modified to death in the courts.

Nicholas Johnson, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission from 1966 to 1973, was the only commish who was raising a ruckus about the importance of the issue back then. He called it “the No. 1 public policy issue confronting our nation,” critical for providing the “channels of communication for a democratic society.”

It makes me very cranky that we are still dealing with this fracking issue.

I’m on the advisory board of Public Knowledge, a tremendous organization run by the irrepressible Gigi Sohn, which does killer work in this area. Fight it. Hard. We won’t know what we’ve lost until it’s gone.

The U.K.’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) functions something like the late lamented U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, killed off by Newt Gingrich back in the ’90s. They regularly publish brief but fairly comprehensive, interdisciplinary reports with cross-sector relevance on trends in science and technology.

POST recently published three POSTnotes entitled “Ecological Networks“, “Smart Metering of Electricity and Gas” and “Autism“. The first two POSTnotes for 2008 were on “smart” materials and systems, and synthetic biology.

You can subscribe to the POST reports yourself, by sending an email to: mailto:post@parliament.uk.

“Ecological Networks” considers the possible conservation benefits of ecological network implementation in the UK. Ecological networks are intended to maintain environmental processes and to help to conserve biodiversity where remnants of semi-natural habitat have become fragmented and isolated. Continue reading »

The WELL, one of the oldest online communities still in existence, is hosting me as guest author for a two-week conversation in its ‘Inkwell’ book discussion topic about Intervention — and whatever topics come up as a result of talking about technology, innovation and risk. It’s been underway for several days now, and will continue until October 31st.

So far much of the conversation has been focused on deliberative processes for assessing risk, and we are just starting to wade into deeper waters with talk of the precautionary principle and whether or not Hillary could manage to re-start the Office of Technology Assessment without wrecking it with politics.

You don’t have to be a WELL member to read the conversation, but if you aren’t a member and want to start prodding me with some questions, just send an email to <inkwell@well.com> to have them added to the thread.

The host of the conversation is the redoubtable Jon Lebkowsky, a Texan who I’ve known for many years from the technology world who now writes a regular column for Worldchanging.com.

Today, my ‘Re:framing’ column in The New York Times was on the scientific evidence that has been used by industry and the U.S. Agriculture Department to support safety claims about biopharma crops. These are the next generation of plants that have been genetically engineered to grow drugs and industrial chemicals in open fields in the U.S. and around the world.

The column is basically my entire book, Intervention, crammed into 1300 words. As a result I had to leave out some important stuff, so I decided to post some of it here.

One of the things I would have liked to dig into a bit was the USDA’s statement about the amount of scientific input the agency uses to develop its regulations.

As evidence, the person I spoke with mentioned that in 2002, the agency had commissioned a peer-reviewed National Academies study on the subject, called Environmental Effects of Transgenic Plants.

It was a curious example to choose. Because I read that report when I was writing Intervention, and it sure sounded to me like the USDA got handed its head on a plate.

Continue reading »

This just in from Environment News Service:

Doomsday Arctic Seed Vault Designed to Withstand All Perils

OSLO, Norway, February 9, 2007 (ENS) - A fail-safe vault designed to protect the agricultural heritage of humankind - the seeds essential to agriculture of every nation - will be constructed this year on the Arctic island of Svalbard not far from the North Pole. (You can see the impressively spooky, actual design if you go to the story.)

Today the Norwegian government revealed the architectural design for the Svalbard International Seed Vault, to be carved deep into frozen rock.

“By investing in a global permafrost safety facility for seeds, the Norwegian government hopes to contribute to combating the loss of biological diversity, to reduce our vulnerability to climatic changes, and to enhance our ability to secure future food production,” said Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food Terje Riis-Johansen.

The vault is being dug into a mountainside near the village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Construction is scheduled to begin in March 2007 and to be completed in September 2007. The vault will officially open in late winter 2008.

The number of seeds stored will depend on the number of countries participating in the project. The project aims to prevent needed plants from going extinct or becoming rare if a nuclear war were to break out, because of gene pollution from genetically engineered plants, or due to disease or global warming.

Continue reading »

Whoops, I forgot to post this … the San Jose Mercury News asked me to write a Perspectives piece for the Sunday paper a couple of weeks ago (specifically, January 21st) about the F.D.A.’s decision about cloned meat. The issue isn’t going away, so I figured better late than never …

Here’s the first few paragraphs, to inspire you to click …

Cloned meat: What are the risks?
DESPITE WHAT THE FDA SAYS, NO ONE REALLY KNOWS
By Denise Caruso
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared unequivocally last month that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat. But the assessment process used to make that declaration could in no way reliably conclude that cloned food is safe — and they knew it. The FDA’s own science and risk advisers had long ago told the agency so, but it ignored the warnings.

As recently as 2004, the U.S. National Academies, official science advisers to the government, published a report concluding that the FDA’s and other regulators’ decision-making processes for assessing food safety were flawed and outdated. The report said the methods and techniques used to make these assessments are not sophisticated enough to predict and identify unintended effects from genetically engineered food. The report included cloned food in that assessment.

What’s more, the report strongly recommended that the agencies “enhance [their] capacity for post-market surveillance'’ of genetically engineered and cloned food. In other words, they ought to start monitoring the release of those foods, labeling products derived from them in the marketplace, and deploying far better animal-identification and tracking systems, so that any unexpected health problems could be traced to the source.

Yet regulators, including the FDA, have followed few if any of the study’s sensible recommendations. The FDA’s public statement on the safety of cloned animals certainly didn’t mention these noteworthy and significant shortcomings in its assessment methods.

UPDATE: I also forgot to note that Baruch Fischhoff at Carnegie Mellon sent me a related link, with this note attached:

A few hundred BBC readers comment on eating cloned food. Not so stupid — or at least smarter than those who call them stupid.

My first monthly column ran today in the Sunday Business section of the New York Times. It’s in a new section called ‘Bright Ideas,’ which explores creativity and innovation. I’m one of several columnists who will rotate through the space on a weekly basis.

The column is about the idea of ‘acceptable intellectual property’, in the same spirit as acceptable risk; i.e., how much intellectual property protection are we willing to tolerate as a culture? How relevant is the historical justification — that economic incentives via patenting are the only way to drive technical solutions to problems into the market?

I called my column ‘Re:Framing’ because I think it’s critical, at this juncture in history, to cast a fresh eye on this idea. As my work for the past years has proven to me, market-driven innovation can be an equally powerful driver of really dumb ideas — like patenting genetic resources — that threaten the fabric of global society.

There is just as much wonderful innovation taking place that is not driven by the market, but instead is driven by the desire to solve problems in a way that benefits the most people. I’m really looking forward to bringing those creative innovations to the attention of the readers of the Times.

While I was finishing up Intervention this year, I also participated in a fascinating survey about globalization, sponsored by the U.K.-based consultancy SustainAbility, on whose extraordinary (and extraordinarily diverse) faculty I humbly serve.

In April 2006, I gave a talk on emerging risks at Global Business Network’s annual Forum; this year’s theme was “Managing the New Realities of Risk.” (If you’d like a copy of the meeting report, leave a comment and I’ll get a copy to you.

And I became an affiliated researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Risk Perception and Communication.

Today was the tele-press conference for the launch of Intervention. I invited four of my best sources to do a mini-panel discussion with me via conference call about some of the themes in the book. (This was a very cool way to introduce a big-thinky product, btw; idea props to Venture Communications. You can listen to the teleconference here.)

One of the panelists, Dave Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Wilson Center in Washington DC, cracked wise about the need for a new government department — one that dealt with the aftermath of its bad decisions. He told us he’d already created the logo for it, in honor of a talk he gave at the Harvard School of Public Health, and here it is. We’re taking t-shirt orders.