New life forms from Synthetic DNA - Washington Post

The Washington Post today deals with "Synthetic DNA on the brink of Creating New Life Forms." Talk about children playing with matches... Rick Weiss begins " It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube..." I'd add - it has also been 50 years since Jay Forrester's classic piece on "unintended consequences."

Here was my reply:

wade2 wrote:

Bio-error indeed. Maybe error-gance is the bigger threat, and very real. Our social approach to low-odds of very-high-risk accidents, as Carl Sagan pointed out re return of samples from Mars, is completely overwhelmed by our normal intuition. At Los Alamos, the first atomic bomb was tested when only a minority of the scientists on the project (something like 6 of 14) thought it would detonate the earth's crust and explode the entire planet. No one was sure, so they tested it. Hmm.

Good books like "Lethal Arrogance" by Dumas and "Normal Accidents" by Perrow detail hundreds of examples of our tendency to run it till it breaks, and then, only then, stop to think.
The tools to even begin to think about the way coupled feedback-loops get their job done, such as System Dynamics, have languished for 50 years. MIT's John Sterman, in "Business Dynamics - Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World" , details the lack of correct intuition, even for the MIT community, brighter than most. PhD's don't generally help, and most of us have less to work with.

So, at best we can model and simulate, which has been done at the Santa Fe Institute for the last few decades, with "artificial life" - virtual life and virtual DNA, genetic algorithms breeding and evolving, to see what happens. http://www.santafe.edu/ describes the work of many Nobel Prize winners.

In short (1) the little buggers are far smarter than we are and (2) parasitism evolves almost instantly in every case. The lesson of the movie Jurassic Park is a mild taste of the tenet "Life will find a way."

If the rest of our human affairs were measured and mature and stable, this would be a risky business. Having unstable tyrants convinced they must "master" this technology and use it to attack others, or defend from attack (exact same research), leads to the Russian model of stockpiling hundreds of tons of Anthrax or worse, in delusions that bio-warfare would be controllable or could be "won".

There are good odds the viruses and fungi and insects will win, not so good for humans.

Life is built with interactions with emergent properties on multiple levels, and we tend to think of "machines" at one level with only one function. But genes don't work like machines, they work like cooperative swarms.

Bio-warfare research has a "life of its own" that should already put us on alert that it is way easier to create things that "might as well be alive" than we think. Since we cannot stop it, we are committed to trying to get ahead of it and get the reins back, which means we should pour billions into understanding the world that the Santa Fe Institute has pioneered - massive interactions, how they go good, and how they go bad.

It becomes clear very quickly that, with complex systems, by the time you realize you "shouldn't have done that" it's too late. Experience is something that comes just after we need it.
For very high-stakes mistakes, that's too late. If we keep gambling with the whole planet on the table, sooner or later we'll lose one turn.

One is all it takes.

12/17/2007 6:07:22 AM
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Actually, all the research on high-reliability systems like nuclear power plant control rooms show that the maturity of the social system is what makes or breaks the technology-based system. Psychologically safe environments are needed for people to raise their hand, without fear of reprisal, and question what the heck is going on.

What we have instead is a whole culture used to using fear as a workplace and political context to "get things done", as described by Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson.

The Shuttle Columbia (picture at left) exploded because of an "o-ring" problem, that all the project engineers knew about, and had in fact gone in that day to tell the boss to tell the White House that it was too cold to launch safely. They all lost their nerve under workplace pressure to "deliver" so the Pres could talk to an orbiting teacher during the State of the Union address. She did, in fact, leave a message for us (picture at left) of what happens when we don't listen -- but, I guess we're still not learning that lesson.

Further reading

The classic paper in this field is Jay Forrester's congressional testimony:
"The Counterintutive Behavior of Social Systems",
https://mail.jhsph.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://web.mit.edu/sdg/www/D-4468-2.Counterintuitive.pdf

Quoting the abstract:

Society becomes frustrated as repeated attacks on deficiencies in social systems lead only to worse symptoms. Legislation is debated and passed with great hope, but many programs prove to be ineffective. Results are often far short of expectations Because dynamic behavior of social systems is not understood, government programs often cause exactly the reverse of desired results.

Another quote from the Washington Post article is this:

"We're heading into an era where people will be writing DNA programs like the early days of computer programming, but who will own these programs?" asked Drew Endy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

How true that is. I've been programming computers for over 40 years, and agree that the programs they write will be exactly like the "single-threaded" programs that mess up our airline reservations and everything else. In fact, a look inside some place like a hospital reveals the workings of the multiple legacy computer systems cobbled together in absence of any fundamental theory at all of how many interacting things should be structured in order to be reliable. Thirty years of research in computer science on "distributed operating systems" and how to build reliability in has had close to zero impact on the quick and dirty, cut-corners-now-and-we'll-debug-it-later model that vendors find locally profitable, but that always breaks down, producing, ta da!, more profitable rework. As a business model it's very popular; as a way of getting reliability, we all have seen the results. This is the culture we expect to "program" our genes? I'm not rushing to sign up.

The article quotes someone on the "unprecedented degree of control of creation" that the DNA technology gives us. Right. This is about the degree of "control" that a Labrador Retriever on your lap in the car at rush-hour has -- yes, it can turn the steering-wheel, but I wouldn't use the term "control" for what happens next. If you think our economy and business development and health care system are "under control", then maybe you would think genes could be "controlled" the same way - and they can, with about the same results.

Sadly, control requires maturity and depth of understanding, instead of simply strong muscles and a short attention span. I wish it were our strong suit as a nation, but see little evidence that it is, or even that it is valued or desired as a long-term goal.

We have instead young children playing with the cool gun they found in daddy's nightstand.

Oops.

======= Some after-thoughts:

Unlike the video games and computers this generation grew up with, life does not always have an "undo" button.

The core task of a civilization is to capture the wisdom we finally learn too late, and get it into a form that modifies the behavior of the next generation so those same lessons don't have to be learned all over again.

The hardest part of that task is that the next generation typically doesn't want to take advice from old people about situations the village elders seem way too concerned about - like, not going into debt over your head, you know, crazy stuff like that.

George Santayana said "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I'd modify that slightly and add "Those who cannot learn from near-misses will someday not miss."

Each time we don't learn this, as a society, the costs go up. The biggest unknown in "the Drake Equation" about odds of there being other intelligent life in the galaxy that we could detect with radio is how long a civilization survives after it has gotten to the point where it has that much technology. The complete absence of any detectable signals from 100 trillion worlds "out there" suggests this is a pretty small number of years -- maybe under 200 years.

At the rate we're going, we're heading towards adding one more point to that data set.

Learning how to learn from our mistakes and our own past seems to be as important a problem as global warming, but actually more urgent, because time is running out a little faster on the 400,000 ways, besides global warming, that we can end human life on the planet.

Humans are remarkably inventive, and if every weapon and sharp object on the planet vanished, they'd find ways to attack each other with stones. Instead of tackling each symptom like global warming or genocide or terrorism, it would seem wiser to track further upstream and find the root-cause problem for why people are driven to fight, and fix that.

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More further reading:

On High Reliablity organizations, which are sobering. They try really really hard to not have accidents, and still don't succeed from time to time:

http://www.highreliability.org/

I'm sure the US military tries very hard to keep nuclear weapons under control. Even that intense level of attention isn't enough to do the job 100% of the time, illustrating John Gall's law that "complex systems simply find complex ways of failing."

"Honey, I lost the nuclear weapons"

The US National Institutes of Medicine on how much the social relations of the front-line teams matter when your job is to get reliability in hospital care:

Crossing the Quality Chasm and other links

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Photo credits :
Oops (car) by estherase
US Space Shuttle by Andrew Coulter Enright

The ladder of kindness

(Above - Photo of World War II poster from diggerhistory.)


There's been a lot in the press in the last few days about immigration and new census findings of where immigrants are living in the US, which is increasingly outside the big cities, not in them.

Robert Putnam discussed some findings related to "diversity", or, more likely, related to recent changes in diversity.

By themselves, ethnic diversity and remixing are generally good things for a species, making the ecology more stable and the species more able to deal with change without breaking.

But, in today's human society, this process is overlaid with another set of processes related to bias, discrimination, fear, and hatred. What's up with that? Where'd that come from? That seems more "man-made" than "natural."

I was struck by a comment in the newspaper USA Today on August 9th, in a headline story "Hispanic growth extends eastward -- Areas unfamiliar with diversity" by Haya El Nasser and Brad Heath.

The lead was this:

Rapidly growing numbers of Hispanics are fanning out across the eastern half of the USA and settling in rural and suburban counties far from traditional immigrant strongholds, according to Census numbers released Thursday.

The increases in areas that experienced little diversity until this decade intensify the uproar over immigration. Forty-one states have enacted 171 laws this year aimed at illegal immigrants. About 100 communities have proposed similar ordinances; 40 have been enacted.

Again, we see a transition in those two paragraphs from changes in migration in the US, yawn, not the sort of news most people read about in a subscription to American Demographics. But then the article turns a corner and moves on to "uproar over immigration" as opposed to, say, delight in having new blood, new faces, new stories and music and food and dance s instead of the same old stuff "your parents had." Americans think of themselves as being innovative and discarding the past and seeking a new modern future - so, again, what's with the "uproar." This is surprising and demands further explanation.

Then the second paragraph changes the tone a third time and moves on to "laws aimed at illegal immigrants." Now suddenly we're no longer talking about boring internal migrations, or arrival of new neighbors, but we're talking about some sort of criminal activity associated with that. Again, "what up?"

The third paragraph drives in the spike deeper and goes for the jugular:

"We're seeing new immigrant minorities coming in to areas that haven't had very much minority populations or immigrant populations," says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. "It put immigration on the front burner politically. It scared a lot of people."

Now we have the term "Hispanic" associated with "illegal" and "scary", and the further implication that "everyone shares those views" and "it's time to panic! Hide the children and the silver! Man the barricades! Lock and load!"

So, if I said "there are some new Canadians moving in next door", that wouldn't have the same ring at all, would it? So why is the term "Hispanic" being emotionally charged up and poisoned this way? I know some people who are "Hispanic" and they seemed, you know, pretty much like you and me, and pretty human -- more like Catherine Zeta-Jones than something else.

So, I wheel out the multi-level model I've been working on in this weblog, and see what that "macroscope" reveals. It's interesting.

First, the anger and hostility and fear seem to be coming top-down, not bottom-up. In fact, at lower levels of the great hierarchy of life on Earth, we see higher levels of cooperative behavior taking place, amid the noise. The cells in our bodies work together, mostly, and we even get along stunningly well with other species who inhabit our gut and even our cells (thinking of mitachondria.) We get along fine with most bacteria who protect us from the few bad apples, and risk or health when we kill off our normal intestinal population of other species or the normal species that live on our skin, blocking bad guys like fungus from getting a foothold.

And, at the human level, we get along pretty well. Despite what is shown on Television, I don't actually see people around me at work murder each other on a daily basis. Violence is the exception, not the rule. Individual doctors are really nice people.

But as we get to higher levels of meta-life's players, things get increasingly dark. Corporations are very often not nice to each other. Although they do seek stability and permanent working relationships, inter-corporate violence and even cannibalism (disassembly for the parts) are common. While the individuals who make up a health system are really nice, caring people, the overall thing, the "system" often behaves in a cold, uncaring, even predatory fashion as seen by patients.

And Nations and Cultures, it seems, are often even nastier to each other, with random violence, murder, and conquest often dominating their lives on their scale. Cooperation between nations is possible, but rather fragile and volatile.

I'm continuing my approach of viewing each of these levels of organization of Life as having a "life of its own" -- which is a crucial element in this story. So, it is possible, even likely, that individuals in a larger organization have one agenda and view, while the entire organization, taken as whole, has a completely different agenda and view.

Further, the agenda of the larger structure is often completely invisible to those who are part of it. Doctors and nurses may have a hard time realizing how cold and uncaring the whole "system" level is as viewed and experienced by patients, for example. They experience it a different way from inside it.

Similarly, the whole of the USA is populated, mostly, by decent, caring people who love their children, enjoy sports and socializing, and mostly do not (despite TV) spend all day being either total jerks or killing each other.

Despite that, the larger entity, the USA, as a whole, as viewed and experienced by outsiders, is just like the health system -- it is far colder, more hostile, and more predatory than those inside it can directly perceive.

So, for that matter, are all the other "country" level organizations and Meta-life-forms - I don't mean to single out the USA.

So, some of the events going on around us are things that our cells are doing; some are things that people are doing; some are things that corporations are doing; some are things that nations and cultures are doing; and some are things that the planet as a whole is doing, etc. The time scales get successively longer as you move up -- cells live a world where life is measured in milliseconds, people in a world of hours and days, corporations in a world of "quarters", and nations and cultures in a world of years, decades, centuries, or millenia for many of them, aside from new kids on the block like the USA that are recent arrivals.

And, let me emphasize that the things larger systems do are only partly the actions of their executive level. We are seeing a lot of news lately that as humans, our "lower brains" and bodies and gut actually have a life of their own and make a lot of decisions for "us" that we, at best, run around after trying to make sense of and "take credit for". We are post-hoc rationalizing creatures, not rational ones, in terms of "our" actions.

Ditto for corporations. The CEO's may get paid big bucks, huge bucks in the USA, but in reality often their company has "a mind of its own" and is "damned nearly unmanageable."

Ditto for nations. The President and Congress may appear, to mere mortals, to "be in charge" but if you ask the Presidents if they "run things" they'd laugh hysterically at how little control of events they actually have. Again, events run on their own, "almost" with a "mind of their own" and our "leaders" are largely observers who run around trying to take credit for what seems to be coming out right and finding someone to blame for what seems to be coming out wrong.

That said, let's get back to this puzzle of discrimination and fear about "immigrants."

What seems to happen is that, on a national level, "the nation" (versus people) decides that it wants to take something from some other "nation". It could be land, natural resources, or slave labor. This activity is not "cool", and humans are, mostly, not cruel and violent people, and don't see themselves as such. So, to get the desired action from the people a new perception has to get created, that the nation, and people, who are "in the way", are actually bad people. In fact, they are terrible people. Monsters. Worse than monsters. Sub-human. Dangerously sub-human predators like spiders or poisonous snakes who are a threat to our children and, who, oh look, have no "human" rights because they are no longer "human."

So, myths are developed, often with the encouragement and assistance of a government, and generally along the path of least resistance - emotions that humans already have that can be mobilized to this end.

In wartime, this activity is extremely systematic and we pay big bucks to people to develop "propaganda" to deliver this message. Here's an example from diggerhistory.


(above picture from www.teacheroz.com - from World War II.)

Curiously, some of these images fade out from view, and some persist. Lately, most people don't think of the Japanese, or Germans, or American Indians (Native Americans) as brutal savage flesh-eating sub-life monsters.

On the other hand, some images do persist or grow. The USA was very active at enslaving and exploiting the people of Africa, not a pretty image to have in the mind, and for many it has been softened by debasing that continent as a whole, and those people in particular. They have been demonized, dehumanized, and blamed for their victimization which is seen as "deserved."

The USA also wanted a large chunk of land west of the Mississippi that was controlled by Spain and/or Mexico. This needed to be taken at gunpoint since Mexico didn't want to give up its land any more than the USA would be willing today to sell California back to Mexico.

(click on map to zoom. The whole southwest needed to be "taken" to meet the USA's goal of reaching both oceans.
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/united_states/us_terr_1820.jpg )

As well, large sections of Central and South American "needed" by be exploited by the USA, goods taken, and opposition forces jailed or killed. That wasn't a very pretty picture, and, again, the population was demonized, dehumanized, and a new image painted for Americans of Hispanics and Mexicans as backwards, deservedly poor, lazy, illegal, criminal, interested in mooching, etc.

While people participated in creating that myth, to a large extent it was a system action that used this myth to justify what it wanted to do anyway -- take the land and exploit the people.

So, getting normative here, I think it's our job to recognize when groups are becoming targets of such increasing myths, and dispel them before they grow so strong that violent action results. It's important to realize that these thoughts are not our own thoughts or experience, but are being selectively reverberated by "systems effects."

As with the poverty ghetto, these thoughts can be caught up in a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop, that begins to "pile on" confirming evidence to justify that view, while conveniently and increasingly ignoring contrary evidence, until even our own personal entire experience becomes doubted. At that point, we fall into enslaving populations (as with African Americans) or exterminating them wholesale (as the Germans were doing to the Jews.)

And, again, as with ghetto formation, this effect appears to be a self-constructing web that requires no "spider". Certainly, some politicos will "ride this" and pour gasoline on the flames if they think it will bring them personal success, but that is more a reinforcing symptom than a "cause." Politicians couldn't amplify this effect if it wasn't already in motion.

Our job is to debunk such myths, recognize that these are someone else's thoughts, not our own, and return to sanity and common sense and trusting our own experience in the period prior to the call going out to rally the troops against the menacing advancing horde of Hispanics who plan to eat our children. It's too bad the broad-brush category even exists to justify a "them" versus "us" lumping -- without it we'd say - Oh, Mary and Rafael and their kids? What a nice family! Let's have them over for a barbecue on Saturday and maybe we can play some soccer or baseball or something.

























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