I’ve just finished reading Denise Caruso’s book, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet. I absolutely love it! As the book’s subtitle suggests, Denise recounts the tragedy of how hubris in the biotech industry — compounded by sub-standard risk assessment methods used by government regulators — has blinded us to potentially catastrophic consequences of releasing billions of living, reproducing, evolving man-made organisms the environment, the long-term effects of which are completely unknown.

But Intervention delivers a much broader message, about how the human propensity for hamartia isn’t miraculously expunged by mathematics, statistics, or the scientific method.

In proving her point about assessing the risks of genetic engineering, Denise calls into question the seemingly unassailable position of science in our culture. The book suggests we desperately need “a new kind of science” (to borrow Steven Wolfram’s phrase) — one that accounts for the nature of the beings (i.e., us) who are wielding its increasingly powerful tools. Try as we might, whatever model we create to try and describe reality, our scientific models inescapably say much more about human beings than they do about some objective reality. In the book, Denise exposes our lapses in rationality due to cognitive, social, and technological realities. Such lapses are everywhere in the areas I cover (technology, social trust, and privacy).

So while reading the book, I decided present my views on these issues in a blog post. Admittedly, going into some depth on Denise’s book on the Hybrid Vigor blog (which is Denise’s creation) seems almost self-congratulatory. But I think the larger themes in Intervention are relevant to most of the really difficult problems we’re trying to solve globally today, and understanding these issues will help focus our discussion at Hybrid Vigor. 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.

I’m very happy to report that my book, Intervention, has won a Silver Medal in the Science category, in the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Awards competition.

IPPY winners in 65 categories were selected from a total of 2,690 national entries came from “all 50 U.S. states, eight Canadian provinces, and 17 countries overseas.”

In the Science category, I’m flanked by books published by Harvard University Press and Yale University Press. I’m proud that li’l ol’ Hybrid Vigor Press has found itself in such good company. Very proud indeed.

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 »

Scott Rosenberg, a former colleague of mine from the former golden days of the San Francisco Examiner, interviewed me for the Book section of today’s Salon. (He also blogged the interview.)

In the piece, Scott asked me some questions — about how some journalists have overlooked the risk story, and about why I had to publish the book through Hybrid Vigor, rather than through a traditional publishing house — that I hadn’t talked about before.

If you’re in the Washington DC area, you are invited to the event that the Wilson Center is hosting for Intervention on Tuesday, March 6. Apparently it will be webcast live, as well.

I will be interviewed — although more likely there will be questions flying in both directions — by Joel Garreau, author of Radical Evolution, staff writer for the Washington Post, and fellow Big Thinker.

Dave Rejeski, who runs Wilson Center’s Foresight and Governance program and isdirector of the Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, will introduce me. And Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon, with whom I’ve been working on various risk projects for the past few years, is expected to chime in by teleconference.

I can’t believe it took me so long to get this posted. Goes to show what happens when people start reading your stuff and liking it, I guess … I have been busy, busy, busy. Off to Washington DC tomorrow at the crack of dawn, in fact. More on that anon.

To cut to the chase: Worldchanging reviewed Intervention last month. And all I can say, still, 2+ weeks later, is wow.

We normally don’t cover problems here on Worldchanging. Indeed, our manifesto says “We don’t generally offer links to resources which are about problems and not solutions, unless the resource is so insightful that its very existence is a step towards a solution.” This book does offer some solutions (about which, more later), but mostly it offers a fervent, well-reasoned call to action. When such an “alarm bell” book offers such clear thinking (I learned more about biotechnology from this book than any other I’ve read), it becomes a step towards solutions. And when the person ringing the alarm bell is no luddite, but one of our brightest technology writers, the alarm demands our attention.

What terrific acknowledgment, from such a terrific source. Quick anecdote about how Alex Steffan heard about the book: In early February I was checking out how Intervention looked on Amazon, as I am occasionally wont to do, and noticed that the Worldchanging book was then (as it is now) offered as a “Better Together” deal with Intervention.

I wrote Steffan a note and he said, “It looks interesting — send it to me.” And the rest, as they say …

I had a blast last Sunday during my interview with Ken Goffman, a.k.a. RU Sirius.

RU was a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the legendary, visionary and often delightfully mad cyber/counterculture magazine Mondo 2000, and when he heard that I’d published Intervention, he invited me onto the eclectic podcast show that he hosts, called Neofiles, to talk about it. The resulting Show #65: Fear of a Transgenic Planet is the first of a two-part interview.

Even though I’ve known RU for a looong time (I’ve decided to declare a moratorium on explicit shout-outs of how long I’ve known someone or done something), I was a little nervous about going on Neofiles, which bills itself as exploring “the experimental edge of human endeavors.” This tends to include lots of nanotech, life-enhancement, we-made-it-to-be-good-thus-it-is-good, nouvelle Ray Kurzweil kind of stuff. As he warned me before I showed up, “most of our guests would tend to be very pro-biotech.”

But as it turned out, I was nervous for no reason. He totally got the message of the book. Intervention is not anti-biotech. It’s very pro-science — science in the context of reality, that is, of how technologies work and operate in the real world, not just in the controlled conditions of the lab or as viewed through the rose-colored lens of traditional risk assessments.

Update: Here’s Part 2 of the RU interview … enjoy!

… a.k.a. “what else I was doing while I wrote Intervention.”

Based on some ideas that I started exploring with Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon shortly after I wrote my first paper on risk and genomics, in early 2004 we got funding from the National Science Foundation to see if we could get started on designing a new methodology for assessing emerging bio-risks.

The project was called “Understanding Genomics Risks: An Integrated Scenario and Analytic Approach,” and it was funded through NSF’s Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences program.

Our primary focus was on the risks that might result from growing and harvesting transgenic pig organs for transplants, a.k.a. xenotransplantation. (The pigs in question have been genetically altered so their biochemistry doesn’t trigger a rejection reaction in humans. This isn’t theoretical.)

The centerpiece of the xeno project was a day-long meeting at UC Berkeley, hosted by Steve Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies. We brought together a panel of experts that included an agricultural ecologist, an economist, an MBA/MD, a medical anthropologist, a political scientist, and a zoologist and vet who’d been a senior executive at USDA, and got them talking about the problem.

What they came up with is at the core of Chapter 11 in Intervention, “Putting Pigs to the Test.” Most people who’ve read it — as well as the panelists who attended the meeting — have said that it makes a pretty compelling case for why we need to change how we conduct risk assessments for new biotechnologies.

The entire story of how we got to that meeting in Berkeley didn’t make it into the book, but I wish it had. It’s a terrific object lesson in collaborative problem-solving and decision making. I’ll either post it here at some point when it makes sense, or maybe I’ll see if I can publish it in a magazine or a journal somewhere.

In any case, the project was quite successful. As a result, we got:
a) a tremendously promising start on this new methodology for emerging risks;
b) a paper in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty; and
c) a chance to use the work in a different and even more critical setting: evaluating the risks of avian flu.

In regards to (c), and to make a long story short, in the fall of 2005, one of the xeno panelists recommended me to a group of people (specifically, Global Business Network and Larry Brilliant) who were designing a meeting on avian flu called Pandefense 1.0.

Pandefense 1.0 was an interdisciplinary “think tank” and exercise in emergency preparedness for a possible avian flu pandemic. It brought the world’s top flu and vaccine experts, epidemiologists, bird specialists, animal pathologists, and public health professionals together with leading thinkers from philanthropy, academia, business, scenario planning, decision theory, risk communication, and the investment community.

Its goal was to explore the wide range of consequences — public health, economic, political and cultural — of an avian flu pandemic, and most importantly, to identify and alert decision makers and the public to the interventions that could be taken immediately to avoid or mitigate a disaster.

Hybrid Vigor’s participation in Pandefense led to an invitation to co-edit a special Forethought section, called ‘Preparing for a Pandemic,’ in the May 1, 2006, edition of Harvard Business Review. Here’s the editor’s letter introducing the section.

Of course, I dragged Baruch Fischhoff into participating as well, and this led to the publication of yet another paper, in a new journal called Global Public Health.

The upshot of all of this activity for me, personally, was a growing belief that the risk assessment methods I’d been studying and working on with Baruch had the potential to have a tremendous positive impact on getting out in front of emerging infectious diseases, in addition to the benefit it could bring to the assessment of commercial biotech products.

I’m now working on raising the money to fund a couple of new projects in this area with several of the people I met at, and through, my involvement with Pandefense.

Wish us luck: this kind of work is of critical importance, and it is ludicrous how difficult it is to get funding for prevention and preparedness, unless it directly provides cash to a specific industry.

It was nice to see that a few colleagues from my former life as a technology analyst/etc. took note of the release of Intervention.

One was John Battelle’s Searchblog:

Denise was pretty much Searchblog, Techcrunch, Web 2.0, Wired, and the Industry Standard all rolled up into one person back when no one else was paying attention. … She since has focused her considerable talents on the study of risk and science, and I can’t be happier for her that this book is out.

Ditto that last part; I couldn’t be happier myself.

Another was Chris Nolan’s Spot-on, which took note that Intervention was part of a trend toward self-published books. (Nolan’s right; I’ll have lots more to say about that anon.) Renee Blodgett’s Down the Avenue called out the book’s conclusion, which outlines some field-tested methods that citizens and regulators can use to start improving the assessment of risky innovations now.

And Italian technology journalist Carola Frediana, of FreddyBlog, has posted what appears to be the first international notice about Intervention.

I was particularly happy to see Carola’s post, since it indicates that the book may get picked up in Europe, where they are willing to have actual, civil conversations about the risks of innovations instead of shooting the messenger first, asking questions never.