Risk and Revolution

Roger Brent is a geneticist and head of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley. Roger is one of a growing number of researchers who believe that a bioterrorist wouldn’t need a team of virologists and state funding. He says “advances in DNA-hacking technology have reached the point where an evil lab assistant with the right resources could do the job.”

From Pop!Tech wiki...

Public Panic Attack

Roger Brent must be tired. During the course of his too-brief time on the Pop!Tech stage he tried to remain optimistic about the future of cellular manipulation by sandwiching truly dangerous news between what he called "a short history of life" and an optimistic plea for the future. But try as he might, he simply couldn't stifle the panic lurking behind most of what he knows about the way science and technology works and the more devious nature of the dark side of the human soul. In the span of 20 minutes, he managed to whip himself into a lather that looked familiar to any Pop!Tech participant who has spent a long night contemplating the moral and ethical implications of a learned technological society faced with globalization.

If anything, Brent's presentation serves as a painful reminder that genetic manipulation isn't new, nor is it isolated. Throwing up slide after slide (with consistent, alarming alacrity) concerning the widespread implications of such scenerios as bad guys replicating the flu virus of 1918, it became difficult to follow his optimisitic turn when he shouted, "There is hope! Since this is Pop!Tech, I'll tell you it took tens of thousands of years to get here!"

From there, Roger asked the audience to use their best minds to support initiatives such as MIT's openwetware.org that, in his words, "Offers the parts people need to make constructive things." He also touched lightly upon the ethical dilemmas the knowledge of artificial chromosome manipulation have when he asked "If we could kill off a mosquito species, should we build that?" Don't get him wrong. Roger truly believes it's absolutely immoral to design and release something that could be used to harm people. But his knowledge of the inadequate countermeasures the United States thinks it has in place to sustain something of that nature speaks to a very tangible fear. We need to be thinking, Roger said. We need new institutions, Roger said. We need new people! Roger exclaimed.

Roger began with a 1936 Magriette painting called Clairvoyance, depicting a painter contemplating an egg, yet painting an intricate, beautiful bird. When Roger was finished, it made one ponder what wonders (or horrors) we would behold, were Roger to take up painting.