Pig Hearts for Humans: What the Public Needs to Know About Biotech Risks

By Heather Gehlert, AlterNet. Posted January 3, 2007.

Turn on the TV, open your Internet browser, or click on your inbox and chances are you’ll find an alarming story alerting you to the possibility some new hazard: cancer-causing toxins in your deodorant, mold spores in your kitchen sponge, radiation from your cell phone -- the list goes on.

In an age of information overload, it’s tempting to tune risks out entirely, especially when even the scientific community can’t seem to come to a consensus on some things: One day eggs are good; the next, they’re bad. One day hormone replacement therapy is healthy; the next, it causes cancer.

But, what if you knew that, instead of one product putting you at risk, an entire field of technology was? That’s what former NY Times technology columnist Denise Caruso tackles in her new book, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet.

Caruso doesn’t use scare tactics -- she doesn’t need to. Instead, she merely points out the risks of living in an age when scientists are recombining DNA from multiple species, experimenting with tissue regeneration by growing human ears on the backs of mice, and looking seriously at pigs for human heart transplants. Even more eye-opening, these innovations are occurring in the near-absence of oversight and with little attempt from government regulators or scientists to educate the public.

So what is life like on a biotech planet? AlterNet interviewed Caruso to find out.

AlterNet: Why did you write the book?

Denise Caruso: Mostly I wrote it because I was shocked by this ongoing schism between the people who were against biotechnology and the people who were in favor of biotechnology. I thought, well, this is supposed to be science, right? It should be neutral. But these sides weren't neutral. They were so different and antagonistic that I wondered, What were they looking at? Then I realized they must looking at different factors -- or, rather, looking at the same thing in different ways. So, that's when I started to dig into the whole idea of risk.

By risk you mean --

Denise: The probability that a hazard will come to pass. Risk isn't a hard concept, but it's hard to measure, and that is where communication breaks down. For example, one day about five years ago I was talking with Roger Brent, who is one of the most macho molecular biologists on the face of the planet, and we got into this conversation about genetically modified food, which I refuse to eat. And Roger said, 'Why won't you eat it? Don't you know that you could eat 10 kilos of genetically modified potatoes and nothing would ever happen to you?" And I said, 'You don't actually know that. You guys don't know anything about the long-term effects of these things. You don't know what happens after it passes through my gut and goes back into the water -- you don't know any of this stuff. And I was actually really surprised that he said, 'OK, you're right, we don't. But how can we protect people and not stop progress at the same time?' And that's one of the core questions I try to address in Intervention.

So how do we walk that tightrope? How do we protect people without inhibiting progress?

We have to redefine risk and rethink how we evaluate it. Calculating risk is tricky with biotech. You have all of these new and very complex systems that we've created that are all coming into contact with each other, trying to interact, and you don't have any historical data to tell you what will happen when they do. What ends up happening is that we are asking scientists to provide a statement of safety or risk about biotech products, but they don't have any data to back up those statements.

In your book you discuss other models of risk analysis -- models that assess chemical or toxic risks. Why can't those models be applied here? What is it about biotech and genetic engineering that calls for special attention and a new method?

Actually, I limit the risks I talk about in the book to transgenic organisms, living things that have been engineered to contain genes from another species. And there are a lot of different ways to parse that. So, I'll take the easiest example: If you look at why the EPA got started and the work it does today, it's looking at chemical toxins -- lab tasks where you keep adding one more drop of something into a tube, and figure out that at three parts per billion of this or that chemical, someone's going to get sick or they're going to get cancer or they're going to die. It's sort of a threshold thing: You find out how much of the substance will create some kind of effect -- some kind of negative effect. But that doesn't apply to transgenic organisms. There's a big difference between manipulating chemicals and manipulating living organisms.

See more stories tagged with: risk, genetic engineering, transgenes, transgenic species, biotechnology

Heather Gehlert is a managing editor at AlterNet.

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