THE MEANING OF IT ALL:
Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist
By Richard Feynman
Addison-Wesley, 133 pages, $22
THE BIOTECH CENTURY:
Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World
By Jeremy Rifkin
Tarcher/Putnam, 271 pages, $24.95
The shadowy edges where science, the law and society meet are becoming ever more dangerous. As newspaper front pages fill with the stories of breakthroughs in cloning, fertility and genetic engineering, not to mention ecology and the sciences of the mind, we feel more and more the urgency of the question: How much should the citizenry regulate researchers in an age when the probable, the precarious and the profitable are interchanging so rapidly?
This challenge is addressed in two new books, each by a familiar author working his traditional ground, yet each converging on the same pressing issues of science and ethics. Readers familiar with Jeremy Rifkin’s work on the dangers of modern industry will not be surprised that “The Biotech Century” sounds a widely researched and deeply hyped alarm about science’s growing ability to manipulate genes and perhaps create new life forms. On the other side, fans of the late Richard Feynman will correctly expect this collection of three of his lectures, titled “The Meaning of It All,” to synthesize in wonderful simplicity the reasons why we need science’s virtues to remain unfettered. What’s surprising, though, is that Feynman at times sounds so critical of science and Rifkin so laudatory, and that each book deepens and detracts from what could be a more mature debate.
Rifkin argues that a combination of computers and genetics is fueling a new biotechnology that will fundamentally transform our lives in the next decades, more so than all the discoveries of the past millennium. This triumph of the Enlightenment quest for a rational code underlying the universe is enabling scientists to grow simulated foods, engineer human tissue replacements and ultimately engineer humans themselves. Rifkin correctly criticizes the companies now “mining” and patenting the genes of plants, animals and obscure human populations in a quest to harness genetic qualities like eternal youth, disease resistance or a propensity against baldness without giving full proprietary rights to the owners of the genes themselves.
Such unchecked, wholesale experiments with life-altering skills are driven by profit or, occasionally, altruism. Much of “The Biotech Century” is given to examining the potential risks of such research. New disease strains or harmful gene mutations, Rifkin warns us, may well escape from the labs of genetics researchers seeking a more durable breed of corn or a frost-resistant tomato. It’s an argument older than Frankenstein or Faust, and it’s a good one: Man tampering with nature poses enormous unseen problems.
The flaw with the argument is old, too: overstatement. Despite the many scares Rifkin pulls from other reporters’ work in magazines, advocacy groups’ fund-raising literature and ethics conferences, we never see a single serious, long-lasting danger to society. That does not mean scares will not happen, but so far no mutant viruses or bacteria have wreaked permanent havoc on the environment. From the start, Rifkin puts the careful reader on edge, attacking the science “establishment that views every question, query and reservation as a direct and immediate assault. . . .” Never mind the redundancy, readers are going to be turned off by this Chicken Little stance. This is too bad because the questions Rifkin raises are real.
What to do about them? Thirty-five years ago, physicist and later Nobel Prize-winner Feynman maintained in a lecture series at the University of Washington that most attempts to direct science are wrongheaded. Feynman shows how Soviet attempts to make its agronomy and biology conform to ideology resulted in disaster. Suggesting that American democracy is a flawed but at least scientific system, he argues with sweeping idealism that no government should “prescribe in any way the character of the questions” taken up by science. Few researchers today could get away with a statement like that, especially when funding agencies help set research agendas, but Feynman is correct in arguing that the attempt to prescribe the future has a Soviet five-year-plan futility to it, as Chicagoan Richard Seed’s defiant claim to his quest for human cloning makes clear.
We love Feynman for his power to synthesize science abstractions like quantum theory, but it’s a welcome surprise that he sounds many alarms against science bureaucracy and wrongheadedness. Years later his anger against scientists breaking their own rules would climax in his Rifkinesque evisceration of NASA for the mistakes that led to the Challenger disaster. In this famous public performance with a rubber O-ring, Feynman showed the powers of a great lecturer whose decades-old utterances have been collected and published to wide praise in such anthologies as “Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher” (Addison Wesley, 1989). This is the impetus behind this new book of his lectures.
We read Rifkin, on the other hand, as we listen to a liability attorney, for his fervent pessimism. (Rifkin claims the attorneys are the only ones who can get the scientists’ attention on issues of ethics.) But it’s also a welcome surprise when in the breadth of his research into hidden dangers of how things can go wrong, he cites the many potential benefits of biotechnology, such as the coming potential breakthroughs in the genetics of cystic fibrosis, leukemia and the enormous progress on AIDS.
Both books gain from their willingness to look at both sides, and both suffer from slapdash effort. Science is moving so fast on so many fronts it’s hard to answer big ethics questions. It takes wisdom, and synthesis. It requires a combination of sweeping abstraction and concrete detail, and a large dose of self-questioning. The broad outlines of Rifkin’s argument are correct, and some of his stretches across history are thought-provoking. For instance, he likens the 16th Century English enclosure movement to the genomics quest for dominion over life. But his book compiles in hasty fashion his own 15-year-old articles, unrelenting hyperbole and secondary sources, undermining its main argument. We do not turn to Jeremy Rifkin for good writing.
We do turn to Richard Feynman for beautifully expressed ideas, the reason for his science genius. But these three lectures, delivered in April 1963, sound a little dated and folksy; they do not add up to a book in the way his earlier, better lecture collections do. For the questions he raises, however, Feynman makes important reading in an ongoing debate that will have to incorporate the efforts of Rifkin, many other researchers and ethicists, and you and me.
