When he announced his policy expanding federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, President Barack Obama was not timid about proclaiming its benefits. It would, he announced, hasten "a day when words like 'terminal' and 'incurable' are finally retired from our vocabulary."

You thought Obama wanted to establish death panels? Actually, he seems to think he can confer immortality.

That announcement, made in March of last year, dismantled the limits imposed by the Bush administration. The change, in Obama's view, was a triumph over ignorance and ideology.

His executive order was, the president claimed, "about protecting free and open inquiry" and letting scientists "do their jobs, free from manipulation and coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient." When science wins, he led us to believe, we all win.

Conspicuously absent from those declarations were facts that Obama would prefer to omit because they are—well, inconvenient. But those facts did not elude U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who on Monday said the revised policy violates federal law.

What facts? A restriction approved by Congress in 1996, and repeatedly renewed, says federal money may not be used for "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed." But the point of Obama's new policy was to pay for experiments using stem cells harvested from embryos that are killed in the process.

The administration evaded the ban by stipulating that Washington could fund such research as long as it didn't fund the part where the fetus is terminated. Judge Lamberth was not buying.

Embryonic stem cell research, he noted, requires the destruction of embryos. The federal prohibition, he said, "encompasses all 'research in which' an embryo is destroyed, not just the 'piece of research' in which the embryo is destroyed." So any funding of experiments using such stem cells is forbidden.

Obama imagines that this research may make the word "terminal" obsolete—except, of course, when applied to the embryos that perish when their stem cells are taken for scientific inquiry.

President George W. Bush's policy allowed research only on stem cell lines that had already been established. The idea was to facilitate studies without creating incentives to destroy additional embryos. Obama, by contrast, took the view that the destruction of additional embryos (those "left over" at fertility clinics) is essential to the march of science.

What's wrong with destroying a 5-day-old embryo that would be discarded anyway? Nothing, unless you think there is something wrong with killing a human embryo ostensibly for some greater good.

If there is nothing wrong with that, though, it's hard to see what's wrong with destroying an embryo that is 5 weeks old or 5 months old, if its tissue could be used to help people who are seriously ill. In that case, why limit research to leftover embryos? It would make more sense to let scientists create embryos and let them gestate for months, for the sole purpose of destroying them for their stem cells.

Americans might bridle at that prospect, but proponents of expanded embryonic stem cell research have spared them from the contemplation of such unpleasantness. Their campaign focuses on ends, not means -- alleviating suffering, conquering disease, letting the blind see and the lame walk.

Such advances are only speculative at this point. But their allure is such as to discourage us from looking too closely at the methods needed to bring them about. It's easier to think in terms of excising tissue from blastocysts than in terms of killing human embryos. In reality, they are the same thing.

The problem with embryonic stem cell research is that the goals are so desirable that they override our usual moral impulses. Yuval Levin, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, wrote in 2006 in The New Atlantis, "It is very hard for us to describe something higher than health, or more important than the relief of suffering, so when relief comes at a cost, even the cost of cherished principles or self-evident truths, we all too often pay up."

The court decision against Obama's policy on stem cell research is a rare exception, which may induce us to reconsider the wisdom of what we have sanctioned. "Our problem is not that we are lacking in ethical principles," says Levin, "but rather that we are forgetful of them."

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Last week, a federal district court judge in northern California issued an injunction against planting biotech sugar beets next year. Why? He accepted the activist argument that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must issue a full environmental impact statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act before permitting the improved sugar beets to be grown. An EIS is required when a federal government agency engages in actions that might be "significantly affecting the quality of the human environment."

So how are biotech sugar beets (already approved by the USDA, mind you) significantly affecting the human environment? Activists at the Center for Food Safety and the Sierra Club argued in federal court that sugar beets improved to resist the herbicide glyphosate might result in the development of superweeds or might interbreed with organic chard and regular beets.

Let’s consider a few background facts. Sugar beets are the source of half the sugar produced in the U.S. Biotech sugar beets were approved as safe for growing by the USDA five years ago. The frankenbeets at issue in this case are now so popular with farmers that they constitute 95 percent of the current crop. In fact, there may not be enough conventional seeds to replace biotech seeds for next year’s planting. 

Meanwhile, weeds treated with any herbicide tend to become resistant to those that are applied to them, this is not something peculiar to biotech plants. And most sugar beets are grown nowhere near organic chard or red beets and so will have no chance to interbreed with them. (Even if they did, sugar beets are typically harvested before they flower and so don’t get a chance to produce pollen in the first place.)

In the bigger picture, it might be fair to ask why regular farmers who are growing biotech crops are forced to worry about meeting unscientific process standards that organic farmers have imposed on themselves. If organic farmers insist on no cross pollination from biotech crops, they can pay local beet farmers to grow something else or look into other options besides an across the board ban. The U.S. government has also subsidized the production of sugar from beets and limits the import of sugar from cheaper foreign producers, so if anti-biotech activists really want to substantially cut the growing of biotech beets, opposition to sugar subsidies and sugar import tariffs might be a better place to start.

More worryingly, these unscientific attacks on agricultural biotechnology are producing another consequence that the same anti-biotech activists often decry—the increasing consolidation of the seed industry over the past two decades.

I regularly cover activist gatherings at which the biotech agriculture company Monsanto is denounced as the devil incarnate. Why? Because the St. Louis company is allegedly monopolizing seeds. Last year Dupont, which owns Pioneer Hybrid Seeds, a big competitor of Monsanto, claimed in filings with the U.S. Justice Department that 95 percent of all the soybeans and 60 percent of all the corn planted in the U.S. contained genes licensed from Monsanto. Monsanto responded that it actually sold a much lower percentage of seeds on the market, although the company admitted that most independent seed companies licensed and sold seeds using its herbicide and insect resistant traits. In fact, biotech crop varieties are so popular with American farmers that seeds for non-biotech corn, cotton, and soybeans constituted only about 13 percent of the varieties offered last year. 

Decades ago there were hundreds of seed companies competing for farmers’ business. Now the U.S. seed market is dominated by Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta, which sell more than 40 percent of seeds for all major crops in the U.S. In the 1990s, agricultural chemical companies began to integrate with seed companies, offering farmers very attractive packages of high quality seeds and the chemicals that would protect them from weeds. How attractive? As one California cotton farmer explained recently to Forbes magazine, his organic fields cost $500 per acre to weed by hand while killing weeds by spraying Monsanto’s glyphosate on his biotech herbicide resistant cotton fields costs only $30 an acre.

This process of consolidation is being substantially abetted by the growing web of regulations and litigation pushed by anti-biotech activists. Already biotech crops must pass muster through the USDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration for health and environmental safety. The system is becoming almost as complicated and onerous as the gauntlet that pharmaceutical companies must run in order to get their products to patients. By treating crops like drugs, the government and activists make sure that getting them approved costs ever more. “The result is that only large firms, pursuing high-value commodity crops are willing to front the money to get a transgenic crop approved for commercial cultivation,” notes Gregory Conko, a Competitive Enterprise Institute policy analyst and co-author of The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution. Conko adds, “The EIS requirement will, of course, add considerably to the time and expense of getting a crop through the regulatory apparatus.” Monsanto's shareholders will be the biggest beneficiaries.

Unlike drugs which can sell for beaucoup bucks, crops are commodities that sell for dollars per bushel. So only big companies can marshal the financial and legal resources required to get approval for crops that sell by millions of bushels and bales, corn, soybean, canola, and cotton. Meanwhile the biotech improvement of smaller niche crops, say tomatoes and green beans, that might benefit even backyard gardeners remains stymied.

Conko also points out, “The EIS requirement long ago ceased being just about a look at likely ecological impacts, and now must include any and all potential effects on the ‘human environment’. Courts interpret that to include economic effects, social effects, what have you.” Of course, new crop varieties will have economic and social effects—they’re supposed have economic and social effects, e.g., lower production and food costs. Clearly, the National Environmental Policy Act must be reined in, but in the meantime the USDA should pursue a comprehensive environmental impact statement that can scientifically demonstrate to meddlesome judges that new biotech crop plants do not significantly affect the human environment and therefore an individual impact statement is not required for each new variety.

Ultimately, biotech crops should not be subject to any more regulatory scrutiny than any other crop varieties. Making those changes would go a long way toward breaking up the nascent seed monopolies that the overregulation favored by anti-biotech activists has produced.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: I think I am still some kind of adjunct fellow at CEI. Many years ago I owned some Monsanto stock. I probably should have held on to it.

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Berkeley, California—The Open Science Summit, which wrapped up on Saturday evening, seesawed between egalitarian and libertarian impulses. The more egalitarian faction of open science advocates want free intellectual property andfree subscriptions to scientific journals. The more libertarian bloc focused on the freedom to research and plans for alternative ways to finance that research. Despite their disparate views, the summiteers do have in common a brewing rebellion against the strictures imposed by the reigning academic-government-corporate research complex. The summit covered a wide range of topics, so I will take brief looks at various aspects that particularly struck me. Let’s start with more libertarian-leaning proposals, specifically, the freedom to research and microfinancing of research.

Freedom to Research

Jason Bobe, the co-founder of the DIYBio.org, described it as a “community that wants to turn biotechnology into a hobby.” Bobe is also the director of community for the Personal Genome Project founded by Harvard biologist George Church, which aims to boost genomic research by recruiting thousands of volunteers who will make their genetic and medical information available to researchers. (Disclosure: I have applied.) Bobe illustrated what he called the “emergence of bio-natives” by citing cases such as the 2005 instance where a 15-year-old boy used genetic testing to trace his sperm donor dad. More recently, two New York City high school students found that 25 percent of the sushi whose genes they tested wasn’t as advertised. Trailing behind these sushi citizen scientists, academic researchers later confirmed their results. Bobe also pointed to the advent of biohacker community labs in Boston, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Regarding the BioCurious community lab (slogan: “Experiment with friends”) near San Francisco, biohacker Tito Jankowski argued that such labs are the future of science, the future of creativity, and the future of curiosity. Jankowski and colleagues founded Pearl Biotech which makes and sells relatively inexpensive open hardware scientific equipment such as an electrophoresis gel box and a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) thermocycler. The thermocycler amplifies DNA samples and the gel box separates out DNA molecules for identification. Jankowski showcased a short video in which an experimenter in the garage lab was figuring out compounds to kill metastatic ovarian cancer cells.

Computer technologist and dining room biohacker Meredith Patterson clad in a full length black leather coat recited a rousing rendition of the Biopunk Manifesto (explicitly modeled on the Cypherpunk Manifesto). Favorite lines include: “The lawmakers who wish to curtail individual freedom of inquiry do so out of ignorance and its evil twin, fear—the natural prey and the natural predator of scientific investigation, respectively. If we can prevail against the former, we will dispel the latter.” The manifesto further declares: “We assert that the right of freedom of inquiry, to do research and pursue understanding under one's own direction, is as fundamental a right as that of free speech or freedom of religion.” And another is: “We reject outright the admonishments of the precautionary principle, which is nothing more than a paternalistic attempt to silence researchers by inspiring fear of the unknown.”

Bioinformatics guru Raymond McCauley described a citizen scientist DIYGenomics project that he and some friends are putting together. Their question: Do vitamins work for me? In this case, his fellow DIY bio enthusiasts are using their genotype scanning test results from 23andMe to focus on the effects of variants in the MTHFR gene that are associated with higher levels of the amino acid homocysteine in blood plasma. Higher homocysteine levels correlate with greater risk of cardiovascular disease, among other conditions. The question McCauley and friends want to explore is how do homocysteine levels respond to various vitamin regimens? A trial run of five participants found that the activated version of folic acid (vitamin B9) reduced the homocysteine levels of subject #2. Subject #2 is McCauley. McCauley sees what he is doing as a kind of crowd-sourced clinical trial. (Disclosure: I have volunteered to participate in the follow-on DIY research.)

Microfinancing Research

The summit devoted one panel to three non-profit groups that are trying to provide private funding to early career researchers: Fund Science, Sciflies, and the Eureka Fund. The federal government dispenses billions every year for research, but very little trickles down to projects originated by younger scientists. The average age for receiving a first National Institutes of Health grant is 42. Inspired by the popular Kiva microlending site, these funds offer researchers grants in the thousands of dollars. The Sciflies project will enable researchers to post their proposals online with the goal of attracting contributions from individual donors. Although the Sciflies site is at the “pre-Beta” stage, eventually donors will be able to choose a category of research and then scan through a list of projects that might interest them. Sciflies has hired a journalist to turn proposals into readable prose. No money will be disbursed until a project has been fully funded. All three funds are about a year old, so it is far from proven that this kind of microfinancing of research will be successful.

Patent Trolling

On the more egalitarian side, the summit featured a panel of scholars who really, really hate gene patents. The panel included Australian National University law professor Luigi Palombi, University of Delft (Netherlands) philosopher David Koepsell, and New York University law professor Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss. Their main objection is that patents are supposed to be granted only to novel inventions whereas genes are natural substances. The mere purification of a natural substance is not patentable, they argue.

The anti-gene patent narrative features a villain, Myriad Genetics. Myriad developed and has been peddling a test for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast cancer genes. Women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene variants have a 60 percent risk of breast cancer during their lifetimes (normal risk is about 12 percent). Myriad reportedly charges more than $4,000 for the test. In March, a federal district court accepted the argument made by the American Civil Liberties Union that genes are natural substances that are not patentable and ruled that Myriad’s patent was invalid. Myriad is appealing this verdict.

Whatever one may think about the patentability of genes, the crucial question is, do such patents hurt or help innovation? ”My theory is that intellectual property is interfering significantly in the innovation process,” asserted Palombi. But is he right? Numerous studies have so far failed to find that gene patents are a big impediment to either research or innovation.

Keith Bergelt, the CEO of the Open Invention Network, argued that the increase in “patent trolls” is becoming a big problem for innovators. Bergelt described the Open Invention Network as an intellectual property company that defends against patent trolls by acquiring and sharing patents related to the open source Linux computer operating system. The pejorative term “patent troll” refers to groups that acquire potentially useful patents, wait for someone to independently develop and create a market for the patented technology, then emerge to claim infringement and demand payment. One of the more recent high profile cases involved Research In Motion, the maker of Blackberry wireless devices, which paid more than $600 million for infringing wireless communication patents owned by NTP, Inc., the privately-held intellectual property firm based in Richmond, Virginia. In July, NTP announced new infringement suits against Apple, Google, HTC, Microsoft, and Motorola over email patents. Bergelt asserted that patent trolls have invested more than $6 billion to aggregate patents for which they lie in wait for the unwary to develop into successful products.

Open Access to Research Journals

The Right to Research Coalition, a student lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., wants Congress to mandate that access to research funded by taxpayers be free to everyone. The ebullient Nick Shockey, who manages the student group under the aegis of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, detailed a hearing last week about mandating access before the House Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives.

Two years ago, the National Institutes of Health required that all its grantees make their research publicly available 12 months after it appears in a scientific journal. In one of the more clueless comments made at the hearing, one member of Congress worried that providing free access to journals would amount to giving away our country’s intellectual property to foreign competitors. A lobbyist for journal publishers apparently argued that mandating open access would destroy American jobs. The coalition favors the passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act which would extend the NIH policy to 11 other government agencies that fund research and shorten the embargo time from 12 to 6 months. “You can’t build on cutting edge science if you don’t know where the cutting edge is,” quipped Shockey.

Cheap Drugs for Poor People

Nobody, egalitarians and libertarians alike, showed much love for Big Pharma. One of the concerns is that the current model of drug development means that drug companies must focus on developing pharmaceuticals that they can later sell for high prices. High prices mean that poor people can’t get access to life saving treatments. To overcome this problem Aiden Hollis described the Health Impact Fund (HIF) proposal [pdf]. The proposal would offer drug companies a choice between seeking to recoup their investments using high prices as usual or registering their drugs with the HIF, which would require the firm to sell its product worldwide at an administered price near the average cost of production and distribution. The company would be compensated by a stream of payments based on the assessed global health impact of its drug. The HIF would be funded by governments to the tune of about $6 billion annually. James Love of Knowledge Ecology International wants to accomplish much the same thing by offering big prizes to the developers of medicines that aim to treat diseases rife in developing countries such as malaria, TB, and HIV. He would fund his prizes through a one percent tax on pharmaceutical sales which would raise about $4 billion annually in the U.S.

Many of the summiteers are oddly unaware of the role that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation plays in creating high drug prices. For example, a PR consultant for the summit argued that the chief problem is that Big Pharma and Big Finance want to protect their unconscionable profits by crushing the nascent biotech open science movement. Perhaps so, but what summiteers miss is why this particular dysfunctional business ecosystem exists. Three letters: FDA. As annoying as the FDA regulators are to Big Pharma, the truth is that FDA regulation creates a huge barrier to entry for any new competing firm. This means that start-up biotechs have no chance of getting any therapeutic product approved since it takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get it past the hypercautious FDA.

A contrast with the IT industry is instructive. With information technology, a company develops a cool product, runs it out the door, and makes billions (or flops quickly). In biotech and pharmaceuticals, a company can’t do that. Developers of new treatments have to run an expensive and time consuming regulatory gauntlet before they can sell a single pill or shot. I suspect that if the information technology industry was regulated by the FDA we would still be using 50-lb. IBM 5100 “portable” computers costing over $80,000 in today’s dollars.

The foregoing is a taste of the smorgasbord of topics offered at the summit. Others included how do academic researchers get credit for open source contributions, how cure entrepreneurs are reshaping the research enterprise to focus on the development of new treatments, how open source biotechnology can enhance biosecurity, and how open source drug discovery can advance innovation. The summit wrapped up this weekend, having made a slight bit of progress toward its stated goal of organizing the various sub-communities of the Open Science Movement into an effective global force for rapid change in science and innovation policy. It’s a start.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

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Berkeley, California—The inaugural Open Science Summit kicked off Thursday afternoon at the University of California, Berkeley’s International House. Some 200 participants have gathered to “update the social contract for science.” The summit’s chief organizer, a young intellectual entrepreneur named Joseph P. Jackson III, says his aim is to jumpstart Enlightenment 2.0. Let’s hope he succeeds, because the first panel of presenters made it clear that Enlightenment 1.0 is mired in a bureaucracy run by careerist professionals.  

Before the formal presentations began, the summit opened with a kind of free-forum forum where participants stood up to ask panel members questions. The first question from the floor was: What is “open science” anyway? My personal favorite definition was enunciated at the outset by quirky Cambridge University chemist Peter Murray-Rust: “The ‘open’ bit means that it is available to anyone in the world to do whatever they like without any restrictions.” Statistician and Yale Law postdoctoral asssociate Victoria Stodden described the open science movement as an amalgam of folks who want open access to the peer-reviewed scientific literature; open access to all scientific data; and to improve the efficiency of how science is done, largely by enhancing cooperation between researchers. Surprisingly, none of the initial answers addressed one the more interesting motivating themes behind the conference: how the falling costs of enabling technologies are empowering citizen scientists to participate fully in the scientific enterprise, liberating science from the stifling bonds of the government-academic-corporate research complex.

The negative effect of those bonds was highlighted when University of Manchester computer scientist and research social networking guru Carole Goble noted that openness is being stymied in part because many young pre-tenure researchers are afraid to share their results before publication. They fear that sharing will allow their rivals to “steal” their results and that scientific journal editors will refuse to publish anything that has already been aired in public. Murray-Rust admitted that this is a problem which he hoped would be solved in the next 10 years.

From the floor, a young mathematician (unidentified) then ridiculed the fields of biology and chemistry for being backward fuddy-duddies with regard to publication and scientific priority. She pointed out that the norm among mathematicians and physicists is that as soon as they produce something reasonable, they put it up on the arXive preprint server. Everyone can then see that you’ve published it and that you got there first. Peer review, such as it is, happens when you get around to sending your results to the journals. One life scientist from the floor pointed out that genomic research has already fostered a similar culture where researchers make their data public.

Another issue raised was sharing negative and inconclusive results. Among other things, the failure to publish negative and inconclusive results skews statistical analyses that aim to determine the effectiveness of drugs or the alleged toxicity of chemicals. In addition, making negative or inconclusive results public would considerably speed up scientific research by sparing researchers from traveling down previously explored dead ends. Some panelists noted that several journals have tried this in the past and failed, due in part to the fact that researchers barely have enough time to put together and publish their successful results. Australian National University chemist Cameron Neylon responded that software developments will soon make these excuses untenable because it will be possible to standardize and upload the results of failed experiments onto the Internet where others can find them. Neylon also argued that researchers should want both more positive results and more rubbish published because then someone can build a Google for science. So instead of filtering information on a pre-publication basis, filter it once it’s out there.

The free-form forum was followed by a number of brief, formal, TED-like presentations. To give readers an idea of what is on offer at the Open Science Summit, let’s look at a selection from Thursday night's presentations. One of the fiercer presenters was statistician Victoria Stodden. She argues for framing the open science movement in terms of two principles: reproducibility and knowledge sharing. She actually views this as a return to the traditional scientific method of complete disclosure. According to Stodden, computation in research is now pervasive and many scientists fail or even refuse to release the computer code they use to determine their reported results. Without this code, outside investigators cannot reproduce the reported results. Although she didn’t say it, this means that outsiders are being forced to take reported results on faith. Stodden noted that the “Climategate” scandal erupted, in part, because a clique of researchers refused to share their data and computer models with skeptical outsiders. This very week, three cancer treatment trials were halted because outside statisticians could not reproduce the results of Duke University scientists. Fortunately, as Stodden pointed out, this situation may be changing since funders like the National Science Foundation are requiring grantees to enact data release plans and journals are also setting up requirements that researchers share their code and data at the time of publication.  

Morgan Langille, a young University of California, Davis genomics researcher, unveiled his BioTorrents file sharing service which enables researchers to find and speedily download vast data files. It was a bit surprising that it has taken biologists this long to figure out how to leverage this technology. Kudos to Langille. Next up was Jason Hoyt, a geneticist and research director at Mendeley, which offers a software system that aims to break through the scientific silos that confine and often obscure relevant results from researchers. Ultimately, Mendely wants to build the world’s largest academic database. In the 18 months since it went online, Mendeley has 450,000 users and has aggregated the metadata from 29 million papers. Hoyt noted that Thomson Reuters took 50 years to aggregate 50 million scientific papers.

Neuroscientist Martha Bagnall noted that a lot of valuable criticism of new published work takes place among colleagues in laboratories that never gets aired in public. She observed that lots of journals now allow commenting, but there is a big ironic problem—while peer review is anonymous, commenting at journals is not. Anonymity is important because researchers fear reprisal from criticized colleagues when their own papers or grant proposals come up for review. So to capture the lab's informal criticism and make it publicly available, she and her colleagues have created The Third Reviewer website. The site lists journal research by discipline, complete with abstracts, and lets anonymous commenters have at it without fear of reprisal. It also gives authors an opportunity to defend their research. Third Reviewer is now expanding to other disciplines.

In one of the more exciting presentations, young scientists D.J. Strouse and Casey Stark unveiled their Colab open source science site at the summit. They argue that open science is more than open publishing. Strouse and Stark complained that the state of scientific publication is static and keeping up with the latest results is much like “playing ping pong under a strobe light.” In Colab, researchers can dynamically collaborate by describing a problem, figuring it out together, and publishing their results on the site, where those results can be continuously improved in public. Since the entire process is open, a researcher’s idea is time-stamped so that everyone knows who gets credit for scientific priority. However, if a researcher still fears being scooped, she can make her research problem private and invite specific collaborators to work on it, only publishing once they are done.

On the subject of empowering citizen scientists, a number of young entrepreneurs discussed their efforts to build cheap biotech research equipment. Josh Perfetto talked about the Open PCR (polymerase chain reaction) project which aims to build a PCR thermocycler that will cost under $400. PCR thermocyclers are used to amplify DNA samples for analysis. Using the Kickstarter microfinance platform, Perfetto and his colleagues raised more than $12,000 for their project and have now completed a desktop prototype they plan to offer later this year. Similarly, University of Michigan stem cell biology Ph.D. student James Peyser and colleagues have created the Otyp project, which aims to get real biotech experiments—e.g., putting genes for green fluorescence into E. coli bacteria—into high school classrooms. Also using the Kickstarter financing platform, Otyp is developing affordable open source hardware, wetware, and software to achieve this goal.

The final presenter of the evening was Todd Kuiken from the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Kuiken heads up the Center’s DIYBiosafety project. Its aim is to create a culture of research safety among DIY biotechnologists. Apparently, some people are nervous about do-it-yourselfers genetically manipulating bacteria, plants, and animals in their garages and kitchens. Go figure.

Further dispatches from the conference will detail presentations on open peer review, distributed decentralized amateur science, alternative research funding methods, and more.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

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• BP aims to install a better well cap.
• Hospital guards beat and tase the nephew of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
• The FDA is expected to approve the sale of transgenic salmon.
• The British government drops some stop-and-search powers it adopted in the name of fighting terrorism.
• Japan's ruling party does poorly in the national elections.
• Those Census jobs start disappearing.

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Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Contributing Editor Kerry Howley reports on cryonics and marriage:

It has not escaped the members of the often sappily life-affirming cryonics community that their practice, so often thought to be the province of either misfit loners or rugged individualists, involves great faith in the competent benevolence of other people. Nor is Robin Hanson blind to the extent to which he depends on his tribe. Marriage, despite its lack of clean edges and predictable outcomes, is one of the few institutions he seems to have no interest in reforming. Peggy describes their conflict as akin to a deep religious difference, bridgeable by some core shared belief. “Robin and I have been together for 28 years,” Peggy says. “We’ve always loved spending time together. He is an excellent father. He devotes an enormous amount of time and energy to family life. And that has to be there.”

Robin and Peggy remain silent on the issue of how, exactly, death will part them, but earlier this year a stray bit of chatter glanced past the conversational barricade. Sitting at their kitchen table, Peggy told Robin about a funeral tradition she’d heard about: after a cremation, the ashes of the dead are separated among family members. The children and surviving spouse each get a handful, to save or dispose of as they see fit.

“You’re not getting any part of me,” Robin said. “I’m being frozen.”

“No.” Peggy said. “Your head is being frozen. I get the rest of you.”

Read the whole thing here.

Howley's Reason archive.

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In a ruling that favors free trade and rejects certain harsh controls over biotechnology patents, a European court has dismissed Monsanto's lawsuit that attempted to block the import of genetically modified (GM) soybeans from Argentina, where the company doesn't enjoy a government-protected monopoly over its product. The court said that patent protections do not apply to seeds once they have been harvested. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The European Court of Justice Tuesday ruled that European Union patent law can't be used to bar imports of products made from biotech ingredients that are patented in the EU but not in the exporting country.

The decision could open the door for increased exports to the EU by producers of biotech products in emerging-market countries that have weaker patent protection.…

Monsanto Co., the St. Louis-based company that is the world's biggest seed maker, owns the patent for the DNA sequence incorporated into this type of soybean seeds, called Roundup Ready. This genetic modification allows farmers to protect soybean crops from weeds by spraying glyphosate without destroying the crop itself.

After Monsanto failed to earn patent protection in Argentina for its genetically modified Roundup Ready soybean, it ceased selling the seeds there. However, farmers continued to use the seeds produced every year from their crops, without paying the royalties Monsanto says it is due.

Monsanto went on the offensive by taking its complaint to the EU. In 2005, Monsanto attempted to stop imports of soy meal made with its soybeans by suing importers in a court in the Netherlands. The Dutch court referred the case to the ECJ.

Meanwhile, the BBC is running an op-ed calling for deregulation of the GM foods industry:

But monopoly is bad for everyone. Here's a part solution; deregulate GM.

If it costs more than $20m (£13m) to get regulatory approval for one transgene, lots of little GM-based solutions to lots of problems will be too expensive and therefore not deployed, and the public sector and small start-up companies will not make the contribution they could.

Never before has such excessive regulation been created in response to (still) purely hypothetical risks.

The cost of this regulation—demanded by green campaigners—has bolstered the monopoly of the multinationals. This is a massive own-goal and has postponed the benefits to the environment and to us all.

The EU parliament also rejected a proposal to require labels on products made from animals that were given GM feed. While this might all sound like good news, Europeans still seem to have a thing for banning foods that they see as being produced using too much human intervention. The EU recently upheld a ban on foods produced from cloned animals.

You can read more on GM foods from Reason's Ronald Bailey.

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Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, by Bill McKibben, Times Books, 272 pages, $24

“Here’s all I’m trying to say: The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists,” BillMcKibben declares in Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. “The earth that we knew—the only earth we ever knew—is gone.” The climate is about to get really freaky due to man-made global warming, and we’re also about to run out of oil: peak temperature and peak oil combined. The result, McKibben says, is that we’re about to find ourselves living on a much less friendly planet he calls “Eaarth.”

McKibben is no stranger to environmentalist jeremiads, having declared The End of Nature due to global warming and the rise of biotechnology back in 1989.Twenty years later he’s declaring the end of civilization as we know it.

Eaarth follows the time-honored structure of environmentalist tracts, opening with a quick rehearsal of the science that allegedly seals our terrible fate, followed by a much longer disquisition outlining theauthor’s elaborate plan for salvation. Give McKibben some credit: Unlike many prior doomsters, such as Paul Ehrlich and Stephen Schneider, he doesn’t argue for a top-down solution. He sees a situation so dire that centralized strategies will fail and we’ll have to return to living in villagesand farms, becoming 21st-century peasants.

McKibben’s evidence of the impending apocalypse includes melting Arctic ice, melting mountain glaciers, expanding tropics, acidifying oceans, worsening hurricanes, and rising seas. All these things except the hurricanes are happening. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, for example, the Arctic ice cap has been shrinking at a rate of about 3 percent a decade since 1978. New research suggests a lot of this melting can be attributed to wind shifts rather than directly to global warming, and the Arctic sea ice recovered last March to almost normal levels. But McKibben is right that global temperatures have been rising. One set of satellite data shows global average temperatures increasing at a rate of 0.13 degree Celsius per decade since 1979. Overall, surface records suggest that average temperature has increased by about 0.7 degree Celsius during the last 100 years.

McKibben is so eager to make his case for doom, though, that he can’t resist pushing the data farther than they go. Consider his comments about hurricanes. McKibben asserts that “one hundred eleven hurricanes formed in the tropical Atlantic between 1995 and 2008, a rise of 75 percent over the previous thirteen years.” Fair enough. But according to hurricane researchers at Florida State University, the global number of major tropical cyclones was 149 in the 1980s, 179 in the 1990s, and 165 in the 2000s. The overall trend is not significant during the last 30 years. The overall numbers for tropical storms are 324 in the 1980s, 367 in the 1990s, and 317 in the 2000s. Moreover, the total energy of tropical cyclones has been declining for the last 30 years. In McKibben’s favor, new research by climate modelers suggests global warming will result in fewer but stronger hurricanes.

To prove that things are getting worse, McKibben cites a 2008 New York Times op-ed that claims the last 30 years have yielded as many weather-related disasters as the first three-quarters of the 20th century. The article also notes that the U.S. has suffered the most. Sounds bad, but a closer look reveals that annual global mortality from weather disasters has declined from nearly 500,000 per year in the 1920s to 22,000 annually in the early 21st century. The annual mortality rate has dropped from 242 per million in the 1920s to 3 per million today. In the U.S., the amount of property damaged by weather events is indeed up, but that’s almost entirely because there is more property to damage and because more people live in coastal areas subject to hurricanes.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that sea levels will rise between seven and 23 inches by 2100. In general, the sea level has been rising by about eight inches per century. How might humanity cope with that? Well, consider the case of Boston. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the sea has been rising at Boston at a rate of about 10 inches per century. Yet the city has not been inundated. In fact, since 1775 the city has dramatically expanded into areas that were once covered by the ocean. In other words, people don’t just stand there and drown as the rising waves break over their heads. They adapt and thrive.

McKibben dives into resource depletion as well, looking back nostalgically at The Limits to Growth, a 1972 report from the Club of Rome that describes just what the name suggests. To show the limits we’ve reached, McKibben cites declining fish catches since the 1990s and peaking per capita grain production in the 1980s.

McKibben is right that per capita grain supplies peaked in the 1980s, but he neglects to mention that overall global grain production has been steadily increasing since the 1970s. Consequently, per capita production has been steady. Even, as even the alarmists at the Worldwatch Institute acknowledge: “In recent decades, as growth in grain production has matched population growth, per capita production has hovered around 350 kilograms per person.” And while wild-caught fish production has been falling, aquaculture has been boosting overall supplies. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, per capita fish consumption, about 11 kilograms per person in 1970, had risen to about 17 kilograms per person by 2006, almost entirely due to aquaculture. The more important point to be made here is one that McKibben misses: Wild-caught fisheries are declining not because their limits were reached but because they have been plundered as open-access commons.

So what should we do in the face of all this doom and gloom? “We’ll need, chief among all things, to get smaller and less centralized, to focus not on growth but on maintenance, on a controlled decline from the perilous heights to which we’ve climbed,” McKibben writes. Why? Because climate change will make it more difficult to raise food using modern agriculture and, more important, because we’re about to run out of oil to drive our tractors and supply our fertilizers. Thus McKibben concludes that we will have to retreat to small towns and begin to raise food using more labor. He envisions the future on Eaarth as a kind of communitarian back-to-the-land agrarian utopia.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume McKibben is right about peak oil. Does that mean the era of expansive global civilization and economic growth is over? Not necessarily. Transportation might become increasingly electrified, perhaps using new-fangled traveling wave nuclear reactors. This would reduce the demand for oil, keeping its price relatively lower for farming uses. In addition, biotechnologists have developed crop varieties that use two-thirds less nitrogen fertilizer than conventional varieties do, which also would reduce the demand for oil in farming. Civilization could well save itself by means of technological fixes and economic growth.

McKibben sees a retreat from modernity as our only option because he believes humans have reached the limits of our creativity. But there’s every sign that our capacity to innovate around problems remains limitless. 

Ronald Bailey (rbailey@reason.com) is reason's science correspondent.

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Better medicines, carbon neutral fuels, cheaper food, and a cleaner environment—who could be against that? Well, quite a few people, as it turns out.

Last week, a research team led by private human genome sequencer J. Craig Venter announced that they had created the world’s first synthetic self-replicating bacteria. Among other things, synthetic biologists are aiming to create a set of standardized biological parts that can be mixed and matched the way off-the-shelf microchips, hard drives, and screens can be combined to create a computer. The goal is to produce novel organisms that excrete biofuels, clean up toxic spills, strip clogged arteries of cholesterol, rapidly produce vaccines, grow more photosynthetically efficient crops, and manufacture eco-friendly plastics. In an early success, UC Berkeley biologist Jay Keasling used synthetic biology techniques to engineer micro-organisms to produce at much lower cost the anti-malaria drug artemisinin in 2004.

Eventually, bioengineers will no longer be limited to just moving around and tweaking genes discovered in nature, but instead would develop never-before-seen genes. “With the tools of synthetic biology, we don’t have to just accept what Nature has given us,” Keasling often says.

But nowadays, every technological breakthrough is accompanied with ethical handwringing and dire warnings about unintended consequences, and synthetic biology is no exception. A Canadian anti-technology outfit, the ETC Group, is calling for a global moratorium on synthetic biology. “This is the quintessential Pandora's box moment—like the splitting of the atom or the cloning of Dolly the sheep," ETC Group's Jim Thomas warns. "We will all have to deal with the fall-out from this alarming experiment.” The Daily Telegraph quotes an even more hyperbolic response from David King, head of the Human Genetics Alert group in the United Kingdom, who said, “What is really dangerous is these scientists’ ambitions for total and unrestrained control over nature, which many people describe as ‘playing God.’”

In addition, a subcommittee of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has forwarded language to the next conference of the parties meeting in October urging that the world’s governments apply “the precautionary approach on field releases of synthetic life, cells or genomes into the environment.” (Happily, the United States has never ratified the convention.) The precautionary approach basically means no new activity can go forward until it’s proven to be safe. The problem is that determining whether something is safe usually involves a process of trial and error, and there are no trials without errors.

So what fears motivate the call for a global moratorium? There are basically three: bioterrorism, lab accidents, and environmental release of synthetic organisms.

Bioterrorists might create and release pathogenic organisms to cause diseases in humans, animals, or crops. While the creation of some kind of super-pathogen using synthetic biology might be possible in the future, there are plenty of frightening pathogens available right now without going to the trouble of building new ones. And researchers have already proven their facility at resurrecting scourges from the past, such as smallpox, polio, and the Spanish flu. In fact, legitimate researchers have already reconstructed polio and flu viruses in a lab setting.

Leaving aside bioterror, there's still the threat posed by biohacking. Do-it-yourself researchers working out of their garages might create—either intentionally or inadvertently—the biological equivalent of malign computer viruses. Or what about governments eager to manufacture new biological weapons? After all, the Venter team used digitized genome sequence information and off-the-shelf chemicals to design, synthesize, and assemble a genome from one bacterial species stretching more than 1 million DNA base-pairs encoding about 850 genes. They inserted this man-made genome into the hollowed out cell of another species whose original genome had been completely removed. The synthesized genome jumpstarted the cored-out cell, turning it into a different species of bacteria. Anyone could do it, right? Keeping governments out of the business of building new biological weapons will be difficult, but strengthening the verification provisions of the Biological Weapons Convention would greatly reduce this anxiety.

Lab accidents do occur. Last year, a researcher at a German lab pricked herself with a needle contaminated with the deadly Ebola virus and an Austrian lab mixed up samples of bird flu virus with seasonal flu samples. Picking the appropriate level of lab containment and rigorously training lab personnel is essential, but if preventing all accidents were mandatory, all research would come to a halt.

No one is talking about releasing synthetic organisms into the environment at this stage. The Venter team “watermarked” the synthetic cells with unique genetic sequences to distinguish them from natural cells so that they could keep track of them. And before getting too worked up over the potential dangers of escaped synthetic microbes, keep in mind that humans have been moving thousands of exotic microbial species across continents and oceans for centuries. Surely, some have had deleterious effects, but the world has not come to an end.

In any case, many lab-crafted creatures would likely be obliterated by competing organisms honed by billions of years of evolution in the wild. In the future, synthetic organisms could be equipped with suicide genes where their survival is dependent on some chemical that is only available in the lab. For example, if synthetic microbes are created to treat some kind of pollution, they would be supplied with the chemical onsite and once their work was done, they would be starved of it. In addition, future synthetic lifeforms should be “watermarked” like Venter’s new microbe so that their creators can be held accountable for them.

The good news is that a robust and expansive commercial and nonprofit biotech research establishment will enable the growth of a resilient and responsive public health infrastructure. It will give us the capability to quickly detect and contain outbreaks by rapidly devising and deploying new diagnostics, drugs, vaccines, and other treatments. Thus will a dynamic biotech industry protect us against bioterrorism, biohacking, accidents, and the unintended consequences of deliberate releases of both natural and synthetic microbes.

The German Ebola virus incident gives us a glimpse of this rapid response future. The researcher who pricked her finger with the contaminated needle was likely saved by being injected with an experimental vaccine 40 hours after she was exposed to the virus. Contrary to the claims of the anti-technology alarmists, the surest way to greater safety in the dawning era of synthetic biology is not prohibition, but proliferation.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is available from Prometheus Books.

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From the consistently awesome TED talks:

In a bang-up roundup talk, says New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter and author of a book called Denialism, tears into vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze. "All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress."

Specter also opens the talk with the right answer to the question: If you could go back to any time in history, or forward to the future, what would you do?

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Using your own stem cells—extracted from your fat or bone marrow—a San Diego company called Organovo is offering a $200,000 bioprinter that prints human tissue in 3D. While the current model, which ships this year, can only handle simple stuff like blood vessels, printing up whole organs is very close. From the always fascinating and jauntily written H+ magazine, notification that custom organ printing is upon us:

Yes, artificial organs… kidneys, esophagi, bladders, muscles, cartilage, ureters, glands, trachea, bone, breast lung, uterus, testes, nerves, livers, and even hearts. Need a new retina? Print one. Technovelgy points out that artificial organs have appeared in SF since Philip K. Dick wrote about artiforgs in his 1964 novel Cantata 140 (a.k.a. The Crack in Space) and Larry Niven described artificially-grown organs in his 1968 novel A Gift From Earth. Once again, science fiction is rapidly becoming science fact.

Ronald Bailey mentioned Organov's organ printing tech is his dispatch from the future earlier this week, but it's so cool that I thought it deserved a post of its own right here in the present.

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Genetic tests are ridiculously cheap these days: Last week, The New York Times ran a story about pre-conception genetic tests from a company called Counsyl. You send them $349, they send you a cup to spit in, and two or three weeks later they send you results for more than 100 genetic conditions. The price is right and the process is painless, but getting genetic info about hypothetical future spawn is a one-shot deal for most people, not something they're going to integrate into their health routine.

But after years of chatter about personalized medicine, two important companies have finally put their money where Ronald Bailey's mouth is.

About 100 million American have their prescription benefits managed by one of two companies, Medco or CVS Caremark. And both companies have recently invested in firms that aim to make genetic testing more accessible and easier for doctors and patients to interpret.

"Physicians understand the concept of pharmacogenomics, but they don't really feel comfortable interpreting the results," says Pat Deverka, a physician and researcher at the Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill. A recent survey by Medco found that while almost all physicians polled recognized that genetic profiles may influence a reaction to a drug, only 10 percent believed they were adequately informed about pharmacogenetic testing.

And once they're invested in the world of personalized medicine, it only makes sense that these pharmacists would start investing in research:

Medco is also funding studies to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of specific pharmacogenomics tests, including those for the blood thinner warfarin and the breast cancer drug tamoxifen.

Get your genes ready!

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"How dare you do this research? The earth is already being raped by too many people, there is so much garbage, so much pollution."

Ten years ago, an anti-aging researcher described this hostile reaction to her work in the pages of The New York Times. Not much has changed since then. The first objection one hears when one advocates radical life extension is that it will produce a Malthusian Hell of overpopulation and resource depletion. Objectors clearly believe it would be immoral to make it possible for lots ofpeople to live to be, say, 150 years old. But is that so? Two newish papers from two controversial philosophers take on that reasoning, and tear it apart—with the help of their pocket calculators.

Philosopher John Davis from the University of Tennessee takes a direct approach, arguing that pursuing life extension—even if it results in a Malthusian Hell—is the moral thing to do. In his article, “Life-Extension and the Malthusian Objection,” Davis accepts for purposes of argument that the moral goal is to maximize total human welfare over time. To illustrate how one might decide whether or not a society should permit research and deployment of life extension technologies, Davis assumes a population of two types of people: Lees and Seans. Lees who want to live a long time are 17 percent of the population and Seans who prefer shorter lives are 83 percent. Seans live an average of 100 years, while Lees using life extension treatments live an average of 600 years. Then you add up the life years of a population of 100Lees and Seans, and find that 17 Lees would enjoy a total of 8,500 life years while 83 Seans enjoy only 8,300 life years. Treatment prohibition would result in the loss of 200 life-years, thus reducing the total human welfare possible. So Davis concludes that counting aggregate life-years rather than individual lives is the way to decide whether or not to go with life extension treatments.

Davis then considers what might happen in situations where people are forced to choose between life extension and reproduction, as opposed to a world where they can opt for both. Davis divides a hypothetical population of 100 people into three policy categories: Free Choice; Forced Choice/Treatment; Forced Choice/Reproduce. Free Choice allows everyone to choose life extension no matter how many children they have. Under a Forced Choice policy, people must choose between having children and receiving the treatments. Davis assumes a population of 100 will contain 31 Free Choicers, who take both the treatments and reproduce, 19 Forced Choicers who take the treatments and do not reproduce, and 50 Forced Choicers who refuse the treatments and choose to reproduce. The numbers reflect his own rough intuitions about how human preferences would play out. Adding up the life-years at stake:

Free Choicers 31 x 500 years = 15,500 life-years

Forced Choice/Treatment 19 x 500 years = 9,500 life-years

Forced Choice/Reproduce 50 x 100 = 5,000 life-years

In this scenario, the Free Choicers' preferences that would result in a Malthusian world trump the combined preferences of those who choose long lives over reproduction and short lives in favor of reproduction.

What drives Davis’ calculations is the concept of total utilitarianism which aims to maximize utility across a population based on adding all the separate utilities of each individual together. “So far as the total net good for humans is concerned, the most justified social policy is the one that satisfies preferences over the greatest number of life-years, all else being equal,” argues Davis. One implication of total utilitarianism is that “we should create as many people as possible in order to maximize the total amount of desirable experiences.” Total utilitarianism might result in Malthusian consequences because a large, relatively miserable population might well have a greater total amount of utility than a smaller, happier population.

Davis’ allocation of preferences among Free and Forced Choicers is based on his own guesswork, and tweaking the numbers could produce different outcomes. But no matter how you slice the numbers, it would be immoral to stop research on life extension technologies simply because of fears that they would result in a Malthusian Hell. As Davis notes, people who choose the treatments would obviously not consider living in an increasingly Malthusian world a fate worse than death, and “therefore they would probably not consider it a fate worse than non-existence for their children either.” And Malthusian Hells may be self-limiting. “Will there come a time when the Malthusian conditions reach a level of such crisis that people are better off not extending their lives?,” asks Davis. “Perhaps so; if they see it that way, they will stop choosing life-extension.”

Is there any way to break out of this dismal total utilitarian calculation? Bioethicist Russell Blackford argues yes.

In the second new paper, Russell Blackford from Monash University in Australia specifically addresses Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer's claim that it is immoral to want to live longer, say by doubling one’s life expectancy to 150 years. Why does Singer think this? Singer begins by setting up a thought experiment in which researchers develop a pill that will double life expectancy to 150 years. He assumes that people have an average happiness level of 5 out of a possible 10 during the first 75 years. The life extension pill maintains its users at about the same level of health and mental acuity as a healthy 60-year-old for the next 75 years, reducing their happiness level to 4 for that period. This yields an average happiness level of 4.5 over the course of their 150 year life spans. Imagine Singer's pill as a kind of Fountain of Prolonged Middle Age.

Singer also assumes population control measures stabilizing population at replacement levels. As we shall see, the population stabilization assumption is a bit of a contradiction for Singer. Ultimately in the Singer scenario, the total number of people who would be born will be half of what they otherwise would have been during any specific time period without the age-retarding drug. So a long lived society might constitute 1 billion individuals and a normal life expectancy society would number 2 billion at any one time.

To illustrate Singer’s calculus, Blackford does a little happiness math in his recent article “Moral Pluralism Versus the Total View: Why Singer is wrong about radical life extension.” The hedonic calculation for long lifers would be:

4.5 units of happiness x 150 years of life x 1 billion individuals = 675 billion happiness years.

The computation of pleasure for short lifers:

5 units of happiness x 75 years of life x 2 billion = 750 billion happiness years.

Singer acknowledges that individual long lifers would have better lives (4.5 hedonic units x 150 years = 675 total units) than individual short lifers (5 hedonic units x 75 year = 375 units). But the total sum of happiness over any specific period of time is higher in the society without the life extension treatment. So Singer concludes that the moral thing to do is to stop research on life prolonging drugs.

But imposing population control measures should be morally suspect to someone who advocates maximizing total utility over time. Why? As Blackford points out, Singer’s utility logic leads to the irresistible “conclusion that a sufficiently large population with people whose lives are barely worth living would be a better outcome than a much smaller population of people who are very happy.” This is what philosopher Derek Parfit called the “repugnant conclusion.” Parfit never believed that he had resolved the paradox at the heart of a total utilitarian calculus that leads to the repugnant conclusion. One consequence of this line of argument is that people should have as many children as possible in order to maximize the total amount of happiness just so long as they could eke out some minimal amount of pleasure. In fact, it would be immoral for people to restrict the number of children they bear because they would be reducing the overall amount of possible happiness in the world.

To counter the total utility logic, Blackford offers another thought experiment in which a benevolent, but not omnipotent deity has the choice between creating a world with 1 billion happy people (6 hedonic units on average out of 10 possible) versus another world with 6 billion fairly miserable inhabitants (1.5 hedonic units on average). Total average happiness on the second miserable planet would exceed that of the first by a ratio of 3 to 2 over time (9 billion units versus 6 billion units in any given year). Singer, if he followed the logic of his argument, would advise the deity to create the second world rather than the first. Blackford counters, “We expect a benevolent god to be concerned about how well lives go, rather than about the sheer number of them.” The upshot of this analysis, according to Blackford, is that “what we value…is that whatever actual lives come into existence should go well.”

Blackford’s benevolence scenario, like Singer’s original set-up, implies that the maximization of utility under Malthusian conditions will be avoided because population growth will be kept in check. However, Blackford, unlike Singer, is morally consistent, because advocating benevolence does not require maximizing total utility, but rather the goal is to attempt to maximize the utilities of individuals. As Blackford concludes, “Since I see no doubt that the lives in the pro-drug scenario would be better—something that Singer also thinks—then we should develop the drug.” Of course, if one accepts Blackford’s conclusions, the question of how will population be controlled comes to the fore. Will some “benevolent decision-maker” impose something like a replacement fertility requirement in order to make sure that the Methuselahs are not overcrowded thus enabling their lives to go well? Perhaps such “benevolent decision-makers” are unnecessary.

Turning from philosophy to the empirical, it is noteworthy that the societies with the longest life expectancies now are already experiencing below replacement fertility largely without the interference of “benevolent decision-makers.” In addition, human ingenuity can avoid producing a Malthusian Hell by expanding available resources to more comfortably support a larger, more prosperous, and happier human population.

At one point Davis acknowledges, “Of course, if the Malthusian consequences of total utilitarianism are a reason to reject total utilitarianism, then one can argue that Malthusian consequences are a reason to reject Free Choice.” Blackford implicitly accepts this analysis and rejects Free Choice. In any case, the conclusion from either analysis—Davis’ dismal total utility calculus and Blackford’s benevolence argument—is that pursuing radical life extension is the moral thing to do.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is available from Prometheus Books.

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Futurist John Smart is wrapping up the Humanity + Summit by noting that human enhancement believers are too focused on pie-in-the sky visions. Instead of making weird flying-car predictions about the far future, transhumanoids should be pointing to contemporary advances. He may be right, but if anything, this conference was low on mind-blowing visions and outrageous body modifications. And it was entirely devoid of people in borg-style wearables.

The reason for this more plain look for the transhumanists may be strategic. Ken "R.U. Sirius" Goffman pointed out yesterday that metaverse residents are going for more vanilla personal styles generally, and there have been many references to the mainstreaming of out-there human enhancement ideas. There isn't a lot of pressure to rock a science fiction style because we're already in a science fiction age.

The downside of kinder, gentler transhumanism is that it's less conducive to bold new personal looks. To be sure, the Rasputin beard remains ascendent:

Experienced transhumanists will recognize mad monks Aubrey de Gray at left and Todd Huffman at right. By the way, Huffman has at least one magnet implanted in one of his fingertips. Three out of three women I polled found that hot.

Another much needed enhancement that went suspiciously undiscussed at the conference: Leg enhancers that will prevent people from doing the Elaine Baenaes dance:

Strangely, at this collection of bleeding age pioneers, one of the big attractions at the party was a game that looks like something for people who can't handle Ms. Pac-Man:

In fact the most daring statement at the summit was the Vibram toe shoes, which were very popular:

I don't know enough about transhumanism to say whether the movement is at any kind of crossroads, but I was struck by how modest the claims were at this event -- in addition to all the calls for empathy, which I referred to yesterday. Toe shoes seem useful and ergonomic, but don't these things just beg for a new breed of humans with opposable big toes? If there are transhumanists out there calling for human antennae, wings, pineal gland enhancers and the like, they don't seem to have been in Irvine this weekend.

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The 2009 "Humanity+ Summit" kicked off this morning to a sellout crowd and an overflowing conference room.

Empathy is in the air this year, with tachyons of fellow feeling racing across the conference space -- the graciously provided offices of Eon Reality in sunny Irvine, California -- and embedded nanobots of the milk of human kindness busily recalibrating the hedonic processing centers of seemingly all the transhumanists.

Negative utilitarian philosopher David Pearce, for example, seen at right with Galactus the devourer of worlds, calls for empathy as the building block of a future in which suffering has been abolished.

Yesterday, this correspondent stank up the joint during a Q&A session at the "Biopolitics and Popular Culture Seminar" by asserting that empathy for a robot that gets kicked is wasted empathy, no matter how much pathos the robot's reaction evokes. Annalee Newitz, unflappable imperatrix of the great Io9 blog, put me in my place by pointing out that empathy is not a zero-sum emotion: You can apparently feel sorry for the steel and the hand that wields it. So go ahead and weep for that discarded lamp.

All the empathy talk may seem surprising. This is a crowd that inclines more toward family-outliving extreme life spans; long, lonely cryofreezes; and at best a sort of hive-mind feeling for their fellow meat packages. (In fact, the transhumanists' confidence in a collaboratively filtered fourth wave of collective intellect makes them a refreshing break from libertarians. Several speakers have already called for an end to selfishness, if not self-consiousness, on the path toward a better life under a post-mammalian queen bee. Where do I plug in?) I don't know whether we're talking about a general quality of mercy that droppeth down to the third ventricle of every post-human heart, or if "empathy" is just code for giving equal rights to the scientifically augmented or differently socialized.  

For my money, the best show of the day has been University of California, Santa Barbara's Joann Kuchera-Morin's CG-powered presentation "Using the Creative Process to Map N-Dimensions: Quantum Information at your Fingertips," during which stunned audience members were able to see giant carbon atoms and hear the actual sound of electrons. You too may be able to hear the sound of electrons by turning to the "Soundscapes" Music Choice channel, available in the 900s with most cable packages. You can watch live webcast of the conference here.

We can all agree that Ron Bailey defecates better transhumanism coverage than I can ever hope to produce, and I appreciate your patience with my humble efforts. If all goes well, I hope to bring you an extended-lifetime achievement award, Fashion Catastrophes®, and a Miss Congeniality prize later this weekend.

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