Oliver Morton: Why Biologists Need to Study History

Oliver Morton is a co-author of "Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World" and a contributing editor at Wired.

... The ability to design genomes and their components holds great practical promise. Late last year the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $42.6 million to a project at the University of California, Berkeley, that is rewriting bacterial genomes in an effort to produce the malaria drug artemisinin at a small fraction of today's costs. Companies that synthesize genes to order - send them a sequence and a credit card number and they'll mail you a gene - look to have a rosy future. To keep things safe, they check the sequences requested against databases of pathogenic genes, to make sure nobody is building anything nasty. But as the technology drops in price and spreads in availability, the possibility that someone, somewhere, will synthesize something like smallpox will grow ever greater. The genome sequences of pathogens, as of all sorts of other organisms, are piling up on the Internet....

At this stage, the most important thing to do is to widen that discussion. The best basis for oversight is a concerned citizenry that wants to keep up with what is possible and discuss what is desirable. But to spur such debates in the wider public, biologists themselves will have to become more willing to think and talk about the ever more powerful technologies that they increasingly take for granted in the lab.

Biologists tend to assume that their studies are inherently, if indirectly, beneficial; they think that knowing how life works is the foundation of all medical progress, and thus a pursuit that deserves more or less unquestioning support from society at large. The dark side of their force - the potential for interrupting and subverting life that flows from biological research - rarely receives their attention. Tara O'Toole, who runs the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, remembers seeing a room full of Harvard biologists asked whether they could design a weapon that would kill people in their thousands. Their looks of bemusement - few had ever thought of such a thing - turned to looks of calculation, then to understanding, appreciation and even a touch of shock. That awareness has to be spread as wide as possible if biologists are to assume the crucial role they need to take in discussions about the future.

Suggested ways of spreading this awareness range from a Hippocratic oath for researchers to more and better courses in ethics and history. As in so much education about danger, though, the best results will come from intense conversations with peers. These concerns need to be the drivers of late-night bull sessions as much as they need to be on the syllabus.

After Hiroshima, Robert Oppenheimer told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that "in some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin." Biologists have yet to taste that knowledge, and it is not a foregone conclusion that they will. But before the trees of knowledge in their synthetic garden bear their strange fruit, the gardeners should heed the lessons of history. They should start talking to one another, and to the rest of us, about what to do when the serpent turns up.