Are we playing dice with the biosphere?

Veteran tech writer Denise Caruso warns us how little we really know about genetic engineering -- and says there's a smarter way to place bets on new technology.

By Scott Rosenberg

Read more: Books, Scott Rosenberg, Book Publishing, Genetics, Interviews, Biotechnology, Authors, Books Interviews

March 12, 2007 | Donald Rumsfeld once befuddled a press conference with a brief lecture on epistemology, explaining the difference between "known knowns," "known unknowns," and "unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." The remark earned the former secretary of defense a "Foot in Mouth" prize. But the distinction has its uses.

"Intervention," Denise Caruso's new book about biotechnology, is all about unknown unknowns. It's a stark survey of how little we know about the risks of genetic engineering -- and, further, of how ignorant we are about how little we know.

"Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet" offers a profoundly persuasive and endlessly disquieting portrait of the risks our species is blindly taking with biotechnology. Could the introduction of genetically modified products into our environment be responsible for seemingly disconnected problems -- like, say, the strange disappearance of much of the honeybee population? Is meat from cloned animals really as safe as the Food and Drug Administration maintains?

Caruso doesn't claim to have answers; rather, she credibly argues that we should distrust anybody (including, or especially, regulators) making such a claim. And we ought to face that uncertainty head on, not deny it until some irreversible catastrophe forces our eyes open.

"We are actually a giant biology experiment, this planet, right now," Caruso says. "There's no control."

Caruso, a veteran technology writer (full disclosure: I've known her as a media colleague for years) who now runs the Hybrid Vigor Institute, is no know-nothing, nor does her knee jerk. Her quarrel with the processes that have swept transgenic foods and products into our farm fields and onto our dinner tables rests not on anecdotes or emotional appeals but rather on solid scientific research.

"Intervention's" scrupulous refusal to sensationalize only makes the alarms it raises more harrowing. But the book also offer readers a lifeline. Drawing on the work of the National Academies (like the 1994 "Understanding Risk" report), "Intervention" outlines a better approach to assessing the risks of new technologies. Under this "analytical deliberative process," interested experts from different fields assess risks from a broad perspective, asking questions rather than deliberately ignoring blank spots in our knowledge for want of data.

These groups can cast a more probing light on the choices our government and industry are currently making in the dark. In essence, they aim to drag "unknown unknowns" into the light. So does "Intervention."

I talked with Caruso recently at Salon's San Francisco office.

You spent years writing about the technology industry. How did this book come about?

It was sheerly out of reaction to meeting [molecular biologist] Roger Brent. He laughs when I say this, and I say it with all the love in my heart, but he's one of the most macho scientists I've ever met in my life. His lineage -- in academics, that means who your Ph.D. advisor was -- is a guy named Mark Ptashne, whose Ph.D. advisor was James Watson. When I met Roger, his attitude was: What's a nice girl like you doing being afraid of eating genetically modified food? Don't you know that you could eat 10 kilos of Bt potatoes [Bacillus thuringiensis is used to modify crops transgenically for insect resistance], and nothing would happen to you?

I didn't know that much about biology. But when he said that, I said, "I don't think you actually know that to be true. I don't know how you could know that to be true." And we went back and forth on it, and he finally conceded -- which I was really surprised about. He said, "So how do we protect the public, but not stop science from progressing at the same time?"

Next page: "We have to redefine risk"