Salon.com MobileWhat about the notion of genetically engineering ourselves or designing people? Does that concern you?
The genetic engineering of humans concerns me greatly. I did not talk about it in my latest book because I have talked about it before. It raises many fundamental problems of ethics and equity that do not arise when you are engineering wheat and soybeans. I am not advocating a take-home, do-it-yourself tool kit for designing human babies.
You write that cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. What do you mean?
This is an idea that I borrowed from Carl Woese, who is a very famous biologist. The idea is that you can divide the history of life into three periods. First, the early period where all genes were freely exchanged between different cells, so that the living world consisted of primitive cells and genes, which are really the same thing as viruses, traveling around exchanged from cell to cell. That's what we call horizontal gene transfer. Evolution was then collective. Anything useful that was invented by one cell could be shared with all the others, so evolution went very fast.
Sometime about half a billion years later, things changed because the creatures started to become selfish and refused to share their genes with their neighbors. They kept the genes for themselves, and that's what we call the invention of species. A species is a collection of creatures that does not breed outside the species. As soon as life became divided up into species, evolution became Darwinian. It was then competition between species. Each invention only benefited the species that invented it. Everybody else had to compete separately. Evolution then went much slower for a couple of billion years. That's what I call the Darwinian interlude.
Now, since humans came along, that has changed again. Now we're back in an epoch when genes can be horizontally transferred. We learned how to move genes around from one creature to another. That's what we call gene splicing. So humans can easily take genes from one animal, put them into a virus or a bacterium and multiply them into a large population, and then put them back into another creature. You can very easily spread desirable qualities from one species to another. That's now the new era of what I call open-source genetics, an analogy to open-source software in the computer business. It means that genes are shared between species. Species in the end will fade out. They will become merged. I think that's a hopeful future, but it's also going to be dangerous, of course. And all sorts of unintended consequences will no doubt come to plague us. But it seems to be happening anyway.
Do scientists have a sense of what caused the initial shift from the more open-source evolution to Darwinian evolution?
No. That's something that we don't know about at all in detail. But I like to use the analogy of Bill Gates. Some bacterium got slightly ahead of the others and decided to establish a monopoly. They were just anticipating Bill Gates by a couple of billion years.
Part of your vision of biotech for the future is what you call "green technology." And your green technology is quite different from the conventional sense of "green." Can you explain?
I simply mean technology based on biology rather than on physics. So green technology is milking cows, or growing grapes and making wine. It also means moving genes around from one plant to another. Green technology, among other things, is growing soybeans that are pesticide resistant and then using pesticides to kill the weeds. That is something that is now taken for granted. It works quite effectively. I'm just extending that to using that kind of technology to produce new chemicals -- in particular, to produce liquid fuels.
My idea is that in 50 years, this whole problem of fossil fuels will evaporate because we'll learn how to grow trees that produce liquid fuels much more efficiently than existing trees. So we'll have an ample supply of fuel without having to dig it out of the ground. I think that's very likely to happen. Fifty years is long enough for that kind of technology to take over the world, and 50 years is short enough so that the climate won't have changed very much in the meantime.
Explain how you envision this happening through trees.
At the moment, trees are less than 1 percent efficient in turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into wood. And wood is also not a convenient fuel. It has to be harvested. You have to chop down the tree to get the wood. That's destructive and ugly. So, first, you could program a tree to be 10 times as efficient, and so you'd need 10 times less land to produce the fuel. Secondly, you could produce the fuel in the form of a liquid that would go into an underground pipeline, so that you wouldn't need to chop down the trees to get the fuel. It seems to me a very practical solution. It's just a question of learning how to do it.
What about genetically modified foods? Are you concerned with the potentially destructive ecological effects of gene splicing?
The ecological effects of G.M. food crops may be bad, just as the ecological effects of old-fashioned farming may be bad. But the opponents of G.M. food crops have grossly exaggerated the harm that they could do. In most situations, the advantages of G.M. food crops greatly outweigh the disadvantages.
Why do you believe green technology can empower those in poor, rural areas?
It has the great advantage that it uses sunlight as the source of energy, and sunlight is distributed very evenly over the globe. It's especially abundant in the tropics, where most people live. The fuel will be produced much more evenly over the globe than fossil fuels.
There are plenty of resource-rich areas that are poor. Historically, richer countries control the resources. So how could this empower rural communities more than in the past?
Well, it's up to them. You've got to educate your population to handle the technology. Some countries have done it very well. Asian countries have been remarkably good at it. Countries like Japan, Taiwan and Korea are the examples everybody looks at. In one generation, they changed from being poor to being rich, essentially by spending lots of money educating people. One thing the Japanese did that was very wise was to translate all the scientific books of the world into Japanese, so that children learned science in their own language from the beginning. That's the main reason why Japan jumped ahead compared with other Asian countries.
So the corollary to the advance of green technology will be education, likely through the Internet?
Oh yes. The Internet is a wonderful development. It means that people all over the world can learn quickly, and it's been enormously helpful. It will be even more so in the future. We want to see everybody in Africa hooked up to the Internet. It's not so far away. I think it's getting cheaper all the time. Now they talk about $100 personal computers, not to mention cellphones. These are spreading very fast in places like Africa. Chances are that a lot of these countries will manage quite well.
