Biology Is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life Book

Carlson's book is at once an assessment of current policy regarding biotech governance, a futurist assessment of the likely direction of development for biotechnology, and an evangelical call for enabling certain forms of that development. These three modalities in the text fluctuate and in some ways are in tension, since it is not always entirely clear when Carlson is being positive or normative in his assessments, particularly when he speaks of the future. With that said, his assessment of the likely future risks associated with the 'democratization' of biotechnology (that is, the proliferation of the tools and skills for manipulating biological matter) are absolutely worth a read, and stand up well more than a half decade after their publication. In a nutshell, he believes that attempts to put the genie back in the bottle through regulatory and criminal sanctions is not only doomed to failure, but is likely to make the proliferation risks worse by eliminating upsides and eliminating sources of sunlight into what he almost certainly is right is the greatest short-to-medium-term risk -- namely not bio-malice, but bio-incompetence, that is, accidents resulting from poor biotech hygiene, as opposed to the production of garage bioweapons. In the long run, however, Carlson's sanguinity about the forces of light prevailing over the forces of darkness in the realm of biotechnology seems more a matter of faith than analysis: it is not at all clear that even if we embrace openness, allowing for distributed production of biosensors and biomonitoring, so that detection of biothreats can come much faster than at present, that this will necessarily allow us to mitigate the risks associated with new pathogens. It seems that in this the evangelists of open source biology fall into the same trap that Freudian therapists used to make about the value of casting light onto neuroses: namely the (patently false) idea that if we can know and see the thing we fear, then that in itself will allow us to overcome it. In fact, in Carlson's brave new world, there may be thousands of homemade biosensors that see the sudden new engineered pathogen as it emerges, but that won't make mitigating its effects an easier, either biomedically or politically.