Are we playing dice with the biosphere?

And I thought: We have to redefine risk. That was the original, boring title of the book -- "Redefining Risk." For me, we couldn't even have a conversation about this unless we had the same definition of risk. So I started on this subject as a way to prove my point.

My first reaction to "Intervention" was, it's a book about how much we don't know.

When I started Hybrid Vigor, one of the first things I got invited to was at Columbia, a Sloan Foundation meeting. They do one every so many years, called "The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable." It's really interdisciplinary: They bring together 20 or 25 researchers from a bunch of different fields. And they all presented what in their field is known, is unknown and what so far is unknowable.

I think that this is one of the most important ideas to keep in mind when you're assessing the risks of innovations in particular. Because, by definition, almost everything is unknown about them. It's new -- ergo, no history. You can't necessarily apply the same models.

With biotech products, the regulatory attitude seems to be "innocent until proven guilty." Unless someone has somehow been able to accumulate enough data to prove some kind of harm, the assumption is that everything is just fine. Is that a fair generalization?

It's actually a little worse than that. The way it works is that the government and industry decide together what the risk model is going to be for something new. And then they gather evidence that fits within that risk model. And that's the only conversation you get to have, unless there's some overwhelmingly obvious piece of evidence. As for example happened with transgenic bentgrass, which the government just slapped the USDA's hand for, for being so cavalier about -- this noxious weed that they just managed to spread.

So we don't get to come into the conversation. And when I say "we," I don't even mean the public -- I mean other experts from other fields, people who have relevant technical information. They don't even get to be a part of the conversation until the decision has already been made. Two or three things that have happened in the last month or so like that drive me nuts -- like the cloned meat and milk thing. The FDA decides, based on this very narrow bit of data that they've got about nutritional equivalence, that cloned meat and milk is safe. And then they put it out for public comment for four weeks. They've been considering this for five years! And people who have an issue with it have a month.

You're very careful never to go beyond the evidence, but you're basically saying that our current scientific establishment's way of handling this huge field, biotech, has been a disaster.

Yes. I think if I could have modified it every time I wrote it, I would limit it to a subset, even, of molecular biology. There's a very macho group of people who really believe that this is it. This is the way it is. Full steam ahead.

The other fields have been locked out of the decision-making process?

I think most of them have given up. Unless you're doing molecular biology, genomics, nowadays, it's really hard to get funding. So if you're an organismal biologist, and you study butterflies or you study cows or you study anything that's a whole organism operating in the universe, you can't get money.

Is that because of the investment boom in biotech?

It's not that simple -- that would be more heinous, and I could be more condemning of it. The lines get very blurry. The truth is that, always in science, from the beginning, from the Medicis, you gotta get the money to do the work, right? So we had a movement in the culture, 30 or so years ago, toward finding ways to monetize taxpayer-funded research. The idea was sound: Get this good stuff out of the universities and into the society.

They called it "technology transfer" when I was in college in the '70s and early '80s. The concern was that we'd end up undermining the entire public basis for scientific progress. Once you start locking up research, you're in trouble.

It started out to be an honest move of the scientific community toward where they could get the money to support their work. But now you see this very tight, laser-beam focus on molecular genetics. How molecular genetics interacts with the environment in the rest of the world is obviously really important, but that gets not much attention at all.

In the book you talk about the drawbacks of agricultural monocultures. This sounds almost like an intellectual monoculture.

Absolutely, a monoculture in science. And it's really disheartening for the people who are good scientists who are not in that mode. It's tragic. One of the people I talked to, Kim Waddell, who was the study director for the National Academies, said we're going to wake up one day, and we're going to find that all of this amazing knowledge that these people had about how organisms operate and interact with each other in the universe, it's going to be gone. And we'll have to relearn it again.

That's a shame, and from the perspective of risk, it hurts -- it keeps us from being able to do effective risk assessments of these things, early on in the process. Because these people know what happens in the world.

Next page: From nuclear energy to biotech, "you're an idiot if you disagree"