In defense of nature, human and non-human.

• Author: Fukuyama, Francis
• Position: In Defense of Nature - Unintended consequences of genetic engineering

If the problem of unintended consequences is severe in the case of non-human ecosystems, it will be far worse in the realm of human genetics. GMOs are ultimately only an opening shot in a larger revolution.

People who have not been paying close attention to the debate on human biotechnology might think that the chief issue in this debate is about abortion, since the most outspoken opponents of cloning to date have been right-to-lifers who oppose the destruction of embryos. But there are important reasons why cloning and the genetic technologies that will follow upon it should be of concern to all people, religious or secular, and above all to those who are concerned with protecting the natural environment. For the attempt to master human nature through biotechnology will be even more dangerous and consequential than the efforts of industrial societies to master non-human nature through earlier generations of technology.

If there is one thing that the environmental movement has taught us in the past couple of generations, it is that nature is a complex whole. The different parts of an ecosystem are mutually interdependent in ways that we often fail to understand; human efforts to manipulate certain parts of it will produce a host of unintended consequences that will come back to haunt us.

Watching one of the movies made in the 1930s about the construction of Hoover Dam or the Tennessee Valley Authority is today a strange experience: the films are at the same time naive and vaguely Stalinist, celebrating the human conquest of nature and boasting of the replacement of natural spaces with steel, concrete, and electricity. This victory over nature was short-lived: in the past generation, no developed country has undertaken a new large hydroelectric project, precisely because we now understand the devastating ecological and social consequences that such undertakings produce. Indeed, the environmental movement has been active in trying to persuade China to desist from pursuing the enormously destructive Three Gorges Dam.

If the problem of unintended consequences is severe in the case of non-human ecosystems, it will be far worse in the realm of human genetics. The human genome has in fact been likened to an ecosystem in the complex way that genes interact and influence one another. It is now estimated that there are only about 30,000 genes in the human genome, far fewer than the 100,000 believed to exist until recently. This is not terribly many...