An Interview with Brian Alexander, author of Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion
In Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion, science journalist Brian Alexander provides a fascinating and funny travel guide through the cutting-edge world of genetic engineering. Alexander focuses on the scientists who are trying to radically extend the human life span and the people who hope and think such advances—even immortality—are coming soon. Here is the first half of a recent E-mail chat I had with him.
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Next News: Is the science progressing much faster than most people realize? Francis Fukuyama, the author of Our Posthuman Future, seemed to think so in a recent chat I had with him. And there’s the recent news that controversial geneticist Pavos Zanos has cloned a human embryo and implanted it in some unnamed woman
Alexander: [As for Zavos,] it's no accident that he held his little press conference announcing his clone embryo implantation in London. In the United States he would have gotten almost no coverage. No serious press here believes him. (I certainly don't.) You know, I have a lot of respect for somebody like Frank Fukuyama. He is a very smart guy. But he told me once that the United States could lead a worldwide effort to ban technology he and other bio-Luddites find scary. Yet already Singapore has a major embryonic stem cells initiative. It's built a city within the city called Biopolis and attracted leading researchers there. Japan, too. Where have some of the best cloners gone? Japan. Even the United Kingdom is setting up a human embryonic stem cells bank. It has authorized the creation of embryo clones for research. The reason they are doing all this is that they see that the next revolution in technology will be a biological revolution and that economies will be changed by it. If a company did come up with a pill you could take to improve your memory, how valuable would that company be. Imagine a company that makes a life extension drug! The market would be every living human being. And if it were banned in the United States, people would happily fly to Singapore. The thinking of some in Congress that it can ban Americans from going overseas to use embryonic stem cell therapies is a joke. Just ask any American smoking Cuban cigars.
Next News: What common threads, if any, run through the various "bio-utopians" you met in writing and researching your book?
Alexander: The most common thread, the uniting thread, was a deep-seated belief in the power of science and technology to change lives for the better. All bio-utopians, and many who I would not necessarily classify as bio-utopians, like some of the scientists in Rapture, truly believe that answers to some, if not most, human problems can be found through science. They are optimists, mostly.
They also have serious doubts, if not outright antipathy, toward standard, god-based religions of all kinds. They see old-style religion as superstition. They don't believe in heaven or life after death and so, looking into the void which currently awaits us all, they say "Hey! Let's do something about that!"
I have to say one of the joys of reporting the book was meeting so many interesting people. Like Miller Quarles. Miller is an octogenarian oil geologist from Houston who founded the Cure Old Age Disease Society. Through his connections in the life extension subculture, he ran across Mike West, a young scientist and medical student who had made it his life's mission to cure death. One thing led to another, and Miller wound up providing West with some seed money to help create what became Geron, the California biotech that financed the culture of the first sustainable human embryonic stem cells.
Or John Sperling, the billionaire founder of the University of Phoenix who created an antiaging (now he uses the phrase "optimal health") clinic called Kronos. Sperling is a fascinating guy who has become a biotech entrepreneur.
Deeper into the bio-utopian subculture, you get transhumanists, those who believe in a transformative era in which human beings will cease to be completely human and will become a new species, some mix of biotech and machine enhancements that will deliver super brain power, immortality, and perfect health.
On the other side are the top scientists I feature. Cynthia Kenyon, for example, is a serious, critical, skeptical scientist and yet she carries an enthusiastic amazement for her own work in extending the lives of lab animals. That work has helped lead to a new company that will try to create drugs, and she's optimistic it will all pan out.
Of course, for me, the most fascinating of all the characters is William Haseltine, CEO of the biotech Human Genome Sciences. I would not classify him as a bio-utopian necessarily. He's a mainstream guy from an elite academic background. But he does foresee greatly extended life spans and has declared that "the goal is to keep people alive forever." He thinks the path will be "regenerative medicine." He can be a prickly character, but I grew to like him and to admire his fearless willingness to say what others only think.
Next News: There seems to have been a lot of important research in the stem cell/germ-line area in 2003. Is the science progressing much faster than most people realize?
Alexander: I have a contradictory answer for that. I think the science is progressing much slower than most people realize in some areas, and faster in others. The whole stem cell/germ-line arena is very confusing for most people. Embryonic stem cells? Adult stem cells? What kind of adult stem cells? Germ-line engineering (creating a heritable change that's passed on to the next generation)? They are all somewhat related yet very different and in very different states of progress. You have to sift them into their little piles.
Embryonic stem cell work in the United States is moving very slowly. This is partly because of Bush's restrictions, partly because science oversold the near-term potential during the debate leading up to those restrictions. People are still figuring out how to tell when you've actually got embryonic stem cells. A standard way to characterize them is being developed. Private money is financing some new colonies, and some work has been done to see if, for example, they can be made into islet cells for the pancreas as a cure for diabetes. So far there's been little success.
Adult stem cells suffer from some of the same issues. How do you tell when you've got an adult stem cell? Are adult stem cells actually created by the fusion of two different kinds of cells? How powerful is an adult stem cell? Science is coming to the conclusion that cells in the body can be much more powerful and much more flexible than anybody ever thought, that they can be literally transformed into an earlier, more flexible, state of being. This opens up the possibility of using the body as its own Play-Doh. This appears to have happened in the lab of Denise Faustmann at Harvard where diabetes was apparently cured in mice by switching cell fates. Islets simply regenerated. I think this sort of thing is the real future of therapy. I don't think it will take embryonic stem cells or cloning to get those cells.
[But] there has been some big work done in 2003 regarding germ-line engineering or science that could lead to germ-line engineering. Scientists were able to take the cells that make sperm and genetically alter them so that all sperm made after that would have the genetic change. The work was done mainly as a means to produce mice for experiments. But that and other work means that it is possible now to make germ-line changes in people. It would be possible to eliminate a disease, say Tay-Sachs, from a family line. But again, there's that valley. How safe is it? What are the surprises? The translation of science into technology useful for people is often a tortuous path. People should not be afraid that tomorrow mad scientists for the L.A. Lakers are going to start engineering a fleet of Shaqs.
