[Infowarrior] - Technology's Future: A Look at the Dark Side

[Richard Forno]

Technology's Future: A Look at the Dark Side
By BARNABY J. FEDER
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17tech.html?ei=5
090&en=39fd7c89e66d9184&ex=1305518400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted
=print

AS far as anyone knows, the plight of civilization is nowhere near as dire
as in the opening pages of Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy," where alien spaceships are poised to destroy Earth to make way for
an interstellar highway.

Still, with resource consumption and environmental destruction rising at
unsustainable rates, plenty of people view the future with alarm. That
spotlights technologies like nuclear power, genetic engineering and
nanotechnology, which are often cited as crucial to heading off economic and
environmental disaster.

The catch is that any technology powerful enough to improve life radically
is also capable of abuse and prone to serious, unanticipated side effects.
It's a great time to be a Hollywood screenwriter, but rough on policy makers
and business strategists. Mix new technologies with the wide variations in
how organizations and individuals behave, and you often have "a recipe for
explosion," said Edward Tenner, author of "Why Things Bite Back: Technology
and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences."

The table setter for fears about potentially useful technology was nuclear
power, which emerged as an energy source while images of the waste laid to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs in 1945 were still fresh.

"It's not the probability of a nuclear accident that matters in people's
attitudes," said Charles B. Perrow, a risk analysis expert whose newest
book, "Disaster Evermore? U.S. Vulnerability to Natural, Industrial and
Terrorist Disasters," will be published this summer. "It's the possibility,
which is very much there."

Despite several close calls, the deadly explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 is
the utility industry's sole catastrophic failure. But the costs imposed on
power companies to manage risks had already halted expansion of the nuclear
power industry in the United States and elsewhere in the 70's.

Now, even though the risks of accidents are presumed to be growing as the
first generation of plants age, orders are picking up for new plants in
Asia. And some American utilities like Exelon, Entergy and Dominion are
saying they want to build nuclear plants in the United States alongside
existing ones. Those plants currently supply just over 20 percent of the
nation's electricity with operating costs far below fossil fuel plants.

Advocates for renewed investment in nuclear power say that new plant designs
could reduce or eliminate many of the meltdown and contamination risks
associated with current plants. Critics say the industry is still too
riddled with bad management and lax regulation to allow new plants to be
built.

"The driver of a car has a much bigger impact on safety than whether it's a
Volvo or a Yugo," said David Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety
project for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But some nuclear critics are reconsidering their positions based on the
conclusion that of all the proven power-generating technologies, only
nuclear power is ready to deliver large amounts of electricity without
creating greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

"I see climate change as being so disastrous that increased nuclear energy
may be the way to go," Mr. Perrow said.

The new designs still do not address concerns about the accumulation of
nuclear waste that will be radioactive for centuries unless a new way of
dealing with it is devised. And nuclear plants ‹ and the technology to
support them ‹ strike some critics as inviting targets for terrorists.
Still, many energy experts see nuclear power as the best bridge to an energy
future based on renewable sources like solar power.

The ambivalence in green policy debates about nuclear energy also runs
through talk about biotechnology, especially when it comes to genetic
engineering. Arguments that humankind is foolishly "playing God" have been
common ever since research breakthroughs in the late 1970's laid the
groundwork for innovations like transferring to crops the genes that tell
bacteria how to make insect-killing proteins.

Pioneering biotechnology researchers sought to prevent accidents and
minimize regulation by voluntarily adopting good practice codes for
experiments that produced genetically engineered animals and plants. But if
confidence has grown as the years pass without any biological Chernobyls,
doubts have persisted about the long-term health effects from engineered
plants and animals.

Some critics also say the technology makes farmers too beholden to giant
agribusinesses.

More recently, security experts have begun to fret that terrorists could
engineer and release novel viruses, bacteria or fungi.

Still, the potential environmental benefits of greater use of genetic
engineering have excited researchers from the technology's earliest days.
The Supreme Court's 1980 decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which upheld
the right of businesses to patent engineered organisms, involved a bacterium
that General Electric hoped would become a green "product" to clean up oil
spills.

In the end, G.E.'s oil-consuming microbe proved ineffective when transferred
from a flask to slicks on the seas. But bioremediation ‹ using naturally
occurring microbes to clean up a wide variety of air, water and soil
pollutants ‹ is growing.

Backers of the technology argue that accelerated use of genetic engineering
offers the only hope of feeding, clothing and housing the growing global
population. Skeptics say the financial incentives driving agribusiness
leaders like Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer and Cargill ‹ and the political
incentives for governments to keep food costs low ‹ continually push all
types of biotechnology toward an industrial model of agriculture that is too
energy intensive, wasteful of water and dependent on chemicals.

The scientific questions underlying debates about biotechnology's risks can
be bewildering for nonscientists, but nanotechnology may be even harder to
comprehend. The term is derived from the nanometer, or a billionth of a
meter.

Nanotechnology is often described as dealing in dimensions tens of thousands
of times smaller than the width of a single hair. But what really matters is
that by operating at the nanoscale, researchers can create new materials and
extract novel behaviors from familiar ones because they are working with
small numbers of molecules, the building blocks of all biology and
chemistry.

After watching how alarmed activists stopped the nuclear industry in its
tracks and slowed the introduction of biotechnology, many nanotechnology
advocates propose engaging the public and investing heavily in toxicology
research.

It is already documented in animal research that some man-made nanoparticles
can move easily into the brain and deep into the lungs. "But we don't know
how to find these things in the body or how to measure them in the air,"
said John M. Balbus, a nanotechnology expert at Environmental Defense, an
advocacy group that has argued that investment in safety research should be
more than doubled and restrictions be imposed on the use of some
nanoproducts. "There's a lot of basic gaps in information."

Surveys show that most people pay little attention to nanotechnology, which
is used in products that make sunscreens invisible, skis lighter and pants
stain resistant. Advocates and critics alike thought that might change when
Kleinmann, a German subsidiary of Illinois Tool Works, recalled a bathroom
cleanser, Magic Nano, on March 28 after nearly 100 customers had trouble
breathing.

But the brouhaha surrounding the first health-related recall of a
"nanotechnology product" subsided rapidly, partly because the later
investigation raised doubts whether there were indeed any nanoscale
ingredients in the product. If the biotechnology experience is a guide,
getting governments more involved in nanotechnology risk management and
educating consumers may generate profits in the long term.

"Companies need to embrace government oversight that makes consumers
comfortable, and they need to offer people choices," said Rebecca J.
Goldburg, a senior scientist at Environmental Defense. "Once people are
empowered to make choices, they will often take what appears to be riskier
options."