Meeting notice: The 99.10.19 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: Dealing with the activists One road to NT -- the "microbial engineering" road -- runs through three stages: leveraging natural genes, coding sequences directly, and reconstructing the cell to embrace more kinds, and longer and more complicated sequences, of reactions. Once any development distance into the last phase, you start to have something that looks very like a general purpose, self- replicating, assembler. The first phase is now an everyday fact, and perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the scale and effectiveness of the social resistance it has attracted. This resistance rests on the threat of the technology to local mores, its association with large corporations, and the lack of a guarantee that local ecologies will not be disturbed, nor, in the case of food, the health of consumers affected. All these arguments seem likely to be reasserted with even greater emotional power against the products of the next two stages. A technology as powerful as direct gene coding will almost certainly disrupt some local activity and give a serious first- mover advantage to whomever is the first to launch it. Perhaps more to the point, if people are upset about the consequences of perfectly natural genes being moved around, their reaction to seeing completely novel genes injected into the environment needn't be guessed at. (It is of course not remotely possible to guarantee that such organisms will not escape, or have their distribution safeguards, if any, modified by biohackers, or end up disturbing the ecology in any other way. One would be on firmer ground guaranteeing that they will do or be subject to all those outcomes.) Stage 3 seems likely to inflame these arguments even further. So, how will they react to NT, or on this scale, stage 4? If the technology is a tenth as powerful as we think it is, they will totally freak. It will be their worst nightmare. (Think what Greenpeace will do with the archives of the discussion over grey goo.) And by then the sceptics might have had three separate if overlapping anti-technology campaigns under their belt. (Four, if you count the campaign against nuclear power, which is where many of the leaders of the anti-biotech movement evolved their tactics and rhetoric.) They will be seasoned warriors with decades of experience in scaring off markets and investment, recruiting and organizing, manipulating the media, staging events, and agitating for the most onerous and expensive regime of regulation possible. They may well be powerful enough to drive whole categories of NT research underground, which will probably end up poorly, even on their terms. So the question is: what can be done, if anything, to give the society a stake in the technology as a whole (as apart from specific applications)? Is there anything to be learned from the current travails of the biotech industry? Fred Hapgood <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Stark Design is offering a free statistical mechanics simulator at www.starkdesign.com/sciam. Very impressive and improbably fast. Contains modules that demo diffusion, osmotic pressure, etc. Supports electrostatic interactions, which means you can model annealling. To repeat: free. For yet more information, check out http://earth.thesphere.com/SAS. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> 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, which must be subscribed to separately. 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