Are We Playing Dice With The Biosphere? (Salon)

Scott Rosenberg (whose book Dreaming In Code I'm currently reading and enjoying) has an excellent interview in Salon with Denise Caruso about her book, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet.  From the intro:

"Intervention," Denise Caruso's new book about biotechnology, is all about unknown unknowns. It's a stark survey of how little we know about the risks of genetic engineering -- and, further, of how ignorant we are about how little we know.

"Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet" offers a profoundly persuasive and endlessly disquieting portrait of the risks our species is blindly taking with biotechnology. Could the introduction of genetically modified products into our environment be responsible for seemingly disconnected problems -- like, say, the strange disappearance of much of the honeybee population? Is meat from cloned animals really as safe as the Food and Drug Administration maintains?

Caruso doesn't claim to have answers; rather, she credibly argues that we should distrust anybody (including, or especially, regulators) making such a claim. And we ought to face that uncertainty head on, not deny it until some irreversible catastrophe forces our eyes open.

"We are actually a giant biology experiment, this planet, right now," Caruso says. "There's no control."

Caruso, a veteran technology writer (full disclosure: I've known her as a media colleague for years) who now runs the Hybrid Vigor Institute, is no know-nothing, nor does her knee jerk. Her quarrel with the processes that have swept transgenic foods and products into our farm fields and onto our dinner tables rests not on anecdotes or emotional appeals but rather on solid scientific research.

"Intervention's" scrupulous refusal to sensationalize only makes the alarms it raises more harrowing. But the book also offer readers a lifeline. Drawing on the work of the National Academies (like the 1994 "Understanding Risk" report), "Intervention" outlines a better approach to assessing the risks of new technologies. Under this "analytical deliberative process," interested experts from different fields assess risks from a broad perspective, asking questions rather than deliberately ignoring blank spots in our knowledge for want of data.

Link: Are we playing dice with the biosphere? | Salon Books.

The whole interview is well worth reading.  I've mentioned Intervention before and hopefully will get around to posting a review here one of these days.  I'm quite behind on my reading...