<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.3354" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV class=timestamp><A
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12ethics.html?_r=2&8dpc&oref=slogi&oref=slogin">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12ethics.html?_r=2&8dpc&oref=slogi&oref=slogin</A></DIV>
<DIV class=timestamp> </DIV>
<DIV class=timestamp>August 12, 2008</DIV>
<DIV class=kicker></DIV>
<H1><NYT_HEADLINE version="1.0" type=" ">Handle With Care
</NYT_HEADLINE></H1><NYT_BYLINE version="1.0" type=" ">
<DIV class=byline>By <A title="More Articles by Cornelia Dean"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/cornelia_dean/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><FONT
color=#000066>CORNELIA DEAN</FONT></A></DIV></NYT_BYLINE><NYT_TEXT>
<DIV id=articleBody>
<P>Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with
iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile,
researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere,
launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking
other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet. </P>
<P>This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably
produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a
growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom
it should be used, or if it should be tried at all. </P>
<P>Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other
powerful emerging technologies. There are even those who suggest humanity should
collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently
dangerous.</P>
<P>“The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential
impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that
engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer
scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one
of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics,
and Society there.</P>
<P>Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new
technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect
things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced <A
title="Recent and archival news about global warming."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><FONT
color=#000066>climate change</FONT></A> is demonstrating. </P>
<P>Engineers, scientists, philosophers, ethicists and lawyers are taking up the
issue in scholarly journals, online discussions and conferences in the United
States and abroad. “It’s a hot topic,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer
scientist at <A title="More articles about Georgia Institute of Technology"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/georgia_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><FONT
color=#000066>Georgia Tech</FONT></A> who advises the Army on robot weapons. “We
need at least to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to be
aware of the consequences of our research.”</P>
<P>So far, though, most scholarly conversation about these issues has been
“piecemeal,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser for the Project on
Emerging Nanotechnologies at the <A title="More articles about Woodrow Wilson."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/woodrow_wilson/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><FONT
color=#000066>Woodrow Wilson</FONT></A> Center in Washington. “It leaves the
door open for people to do something that is going to cause long-term
problems.”</P>
<P>That’s what some environmentalists said they feared when Planktos, a
California-based concern, announced it would embark on a private effort to
fertilize part of the South Atlantic with iron, in hopes of producing
carbon-absorbing plankton blooms that the company could market as carbon
offsets. Countries bound by the London Convention, an international treaty
governing dumping at sea, issued a “statement of concern” about the work and a
<A title="More articles about the United Nations."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><FONT
color=#000066>United Nations</FONT></A> group called for a moratorium, but it is
not clear what would have happened had Planktos not abandoned the effort for
lack of money. </P>
<P>“There is no one to say ‘thou shalt not,’ ” said Jane Lubchenco, an
environmental scientist at <A
title="More articles about Oregon State University"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/oregon_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><FONT
color=#000066>Oregon State University</FONT></A> and a former president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. </P>
<P>When scientists and engineers discuss geoengineering, it is obvious they are
talking about technologies with the potential to change the planet. But the
issue of engineering ethics applies as well to technologies whose
planet-altering potential may not emerge until it is too late.</P>
<P>Dr. Arkin said robotics researchers should consider not just how to make
robots more capable, but also who must bear responsibility for their actions and
how much human operators should remain “in the loop,” particularly with machines
to aid soldiers on the battlefield or the disabled in their homes. </P>
<P>But he added that progress in robotics was so “insidious” that people might
not realize they had ventured into ethically challenging territory until too
late. </P>
<P>Ethical and philosophical issues have long occupied biotechnology, where
institutional review boards commonly rule on proposed experiments and advisory
committees must approve the use of gene-splicing and related techniques. When
the federal government initiated its effort to decipher the human genome, a
percentage of the budget went to consideration of ethics issues like genetic
discrimination. </P>
<P>But such questions are relatively new for scientists and engineers in other
fields. Some are calling for the same kind of discussion that microbiologists
organized in 1975 when the immense power of their emerging knowledge of
gene-splicing or recombinant DNA began to dawn on them. The meeting, at the
Asilomar conference center in California, gave rise to an ethical framework that
still prevails in biotechnology.</P>
<P>“Something like Asilomar might be very important,” said Andrew Light,
director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University, one of the
organizers of a conference in Charlotte, N.C., in April on the ethics of
emerging technologies. “The question now is how best to begin that discussion
among the scientists, to encourage them to do something like this, then figure
out what would be the right mechanism, who would fund it, what form would
recommendations take, all those details.”</P>
<P>But an engineering Asilomar might be hard to bring off. “So many people have
their nose to the bench,” Dr. Arkin said, “historically a pitfall of many
scientists.” Anyway, said Paul Thompson, a philosopher at Michigan State and
former secretary of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, many
scientists were trained to limit themselves to questions answerable in the real
world, in the belief that “scientists and engineers should not be involved in
these kinds of ethical questions.”</P>
<P>And researchers working in geoengineering say they worry that if people
realize there are possible technical fixes for global warming, they will feel
less urgency about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Even beginning the
discussion, putting geoengineering on the table and beginning the scientific
work could in itself make us less concerned about all the things that we need to
start doing now,” Dr. Light said. On the other hand, some climate scientists
argue that if people realized such drastic measures were on the horizon, they
would be frightened enough to reduce their collective carbon footprint. Still
others say that, given the threat global warming poses to the planet, it would
be unethical not to embark on the work needed to engineer possible remedies —
and to let policy makers know of its potential.</P>
<P>But when to begin this kind of discussion? “It’s a really hard question,” Dr.
Thompson said. “I don’t think anyone has an answer to it.”</P>
<P>Many scientists don’t like talking about their research before it has taken
shape, for fear of losing control over it, according to David Goldston, former
chief of staff at the House Science Committee and a columnist for the journal
Nature. This mind-set is “generally healthy,” he wrote in a recent column, but
it is “maladapted for situations that call for focused research to resolve
societal issues that need to be faced with some urgency.”</P>
<P>And then there is the longstanding scientific fear that if they engage with
the public for any reason, their work will be misunderstood or portrayed in
inaccurate or sensationalized terms. </P>
<P>Francis S. Collins, who is stepping down as head of the government human
genome project, said he had often heard researchers say “it’s better if people
don’t know about it.” But he said he was proud that the National Human Genome
Research Institute had from the beginning devoted substantial financing to
research on privacy, discrimination and other ethical issues raised by progress
in <A title="In-depth reference and news articles about Genetics."
href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/genetics/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><FONT
color=#000066>genetics</FONT></A>. If scientific research has serious potential
implications in the real world, “the sooner there is an opportunity for public
discussion the better,” he said in a recent interview.</P>
<P>In part, that is because some emerging technologies will require political
adjustments. For example, if the planet came to depend on chemicals in space or
orbiting mirrors or regular oceanic infusions of iron, system failure could mean
catastrophic — and immediate — climate change. But maintaining the systems
requires a political establishment with guaranteed indefinite stability. </P>
<P>As Dr. Collins put it, the political process these days is “not well designed
to handle issues that are not already in a crisis.” Or as Mr. Goldston put it,
“with no grand debate over first principles and no accusations of acting in bad
faith, nanotechnology has received only fitful attention.”</P>
<P>Meanwhile, there is growing recognition that climate engineering,
nanotechnology and other emerging technologies are full of “unknown unknowns,”
factors that will not become obvious until they are put into widespread use at a
scale impossible to turn back, as happened, in a sense, with the atomic bomb. At
its first test, some of its developers worried — needlessly — that the blast
might set the atmosphere on fire. They did not anticipate the bombs would
generate electromagnetic pulses intense enough to paralyze electrical systems
across a continent. </P>
<P>Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, cited the bomb in a famous 2000
article in the magazine Wired on the dangers of robots in which he argued that
some technologies were so dangerous they should be “relinquished.” He said it
was common for scientists and engineers to fail “to understand the consequences
of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery” and, as a result, he
said, “we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling
21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology —
pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. They are so
powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”</P>
<P>He called it “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.”</P>
<P>But in an essay in the journal Nature last year, Mary Warnock, a philosopher
who led a committee formed to advise the British government after the world’s
first test-tube baby was born there in 1978, said when people fear “dedicated
scientists and doctors may pursue research that some members of society find
repugnant” the answer is not to allow ignorance and fear to dictate which
technologies are allowed to go forward, but rather to educate people “to have a
broad understanding of science and an appreciation of its potential for good.”
</P>
<P>In another Nature essay, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and
technology studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said a first
step was for scientists and engineers to realize that in complex issues,
“uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacy are always present.”</P>
<P>In what she described as “a call for humility,” she urged researchers to
cultivate and teach “modes of knowing that are often pushed aside in expanding
scientific understanding and technological capacity” including history, moral
philosophy, political theory and social studies of science — what people value
and why they value it.</P>
<P>Dr. Hollander said the new ethics center would take up issues like these. “Do
we recognize when we might be putting ourselves on a negative technological
treadmill by moving in one direction rather than another?” she said. “There are
social questions we should be paying attention to, that we should see as
important.</P>
<P>“I mean we as citizens, and that includes people in the academy and
engineers. It includes
everybody.”</P><NYT_UPDATE_BOTTOM></NYT_UPDATE_BOTTOM></DIV></NYT_TEXT></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>