Meeting notice: The 9/07 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. Suggested topic(s): The growth dynamics of science-limited technologies The scale of intensity of the campaign against biotech has grown most impressively over the last quarter. All around the world national bureaucracies are announcing new regulations on testing and labelling; distributors up to and including US firms like Archer Daniels Midland are insisting on product segregation, and buyers are in full retreat from the market for genetically modified foods. The success of this campaign is of special interest since many of the arguments made against biotech -- the dilution of the national patrimony, the erosion of traditional mores, the displacement of local production modes, the acceleration of change, the stimulation of uncontrolled and inequitable wealth transfers, the exposure to unknown secondary effects, and the concoction and release of artificial entities -- can and probably will be made against nanotech as well. If people are so upset about the transfer of purely natural genes across species lines, think how they will feel when people start writing DNA sequences with no analogue in nature at all. The parallel the critics most often cite is with commercial nuclear power. This analogy plays to their hopes and intentions, since many (i.e., the Union for Concerned Scientists) participated in that campaign directly and brought it to a generally successful conclusion (from their pov). However, there are many differences between biotech and that sector. Biotech is market-driven, characterized by access costs that are low and falling, organized in and over dozens of jurisdictions, and adaptable to a very wide range of markets. None of that was true of commercial nuclear power. Another difference, perhaps the most important of all, is expressed by a chart on my desk: a plot of the number of permits and notifications issued by the US Dept. of Agriculture relative to biotech field releases: 30 in 1989; 160 in 1992; 707 in 95; 1073 in 98. There are 1200 biotech engineered drugs in patient trials today and possibly 10,000 ongoing plant biotech projects (most of which do not require field trials). A reasonably knowledgeable person I know expects to see 20,000 plant biotech projects by the end of next year. No matter where you look in this field (research, food, drugs, materials processing) you see curves that are, if not classic 'J's, then clearly running under a real head of steam. The reason might be this: Biotech's primary constraints, unlike many other productive processes, including commercial nuclear power, lie in information, in the state of the science. Neither its inputs nor its processing equipment are expensive. (Last year the Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American ran a series on how to build your own biotech lab bench.) Such processes are inherently autocatalytic, since the more people work in them, the more is known; the more that is known, the lower the entry barriers (in that it becomes easier to imagine completing more kinds of projects for less investment); the lower the barriers, the more people enter the field; the more people enter the field, the more is known, etc., etc. This effect is especially powerful in plant biotech, since most of the plants of interest (food plants) are pretty closely related, so that a genetic effect that works in potatoes is likely to be spread quickly through onions or apples. (Furthermore, new features appearing in one plant variety can be spread via classical breeding techniques to all the varieties in that species.) So we are now watching two mutually antagonistic waves of cultural change, each growing rapidly, each bristling with political energy, mounting up and rolling toward each other. In the long run it seems hard to see how the critics can prevail: biotech seems too cheap, flexible, and useful to be locked up for long. However, at least for the moment, when the opposition is drawing strength from the very pace at which biotech is developing, the wrong incident at the wrong moment (the equivalent of a biotech Three Mile Island) would do a lot of damage and do it world wide. This interaction will attract the attention of anyone interested in the dance between technology and society, and especially those of us who think it might be just a warmup for an even bigger and scarier wrestling match ten or so years down the road. Fred Hapgood <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> David Swosy hosts a chat session on nanotech every Monday at 7pm EST. Tune your IP dial to www.nanorevolution.com <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Announcement Archive: http://world.std.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com. Note: you must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and you must post from the address from which you subscribed. (An anti- spam thing.) Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com