The

NBAC recommended no restrictions on the cloning
of embryos for stem cell research and therapy,
and a five year moratorium on human reproductive
cloning. This infuriated the Christian
Right, and when George W. Bush was appointed
president by the US Supreme Court, religious
conservatives had an opening for payback in the
form of conservative thinker

Leon Kass and the
President's
Council on Bioethics (PCB) that he chaired.

Stacked with conservative intellectuals, and
even replacing two of the few liberals with
conservatives in 2003, the PCB recommended a
moratorium on embryonic stem cell research and a
permanent ban on human reproductive cloning.
Then Kass led the PCB in consideration of the
dangers of human enhancement medicine, leading
to the bioconservative tome

Beyond Therapy. This year they are
deliberating "neuroethics" and cognitive
enhancement.

American bioethicists were not amused by
Kass's appointment, the PCB's partisanship or
its preoccupations, and they have grown
increasingly angry about the exclusion of the
bioethics community from the PCB's
deliberations. But Kass is the Bioethics Czar,
and Beyond Therapy the major bioethics
document of the last year. So Kass and his
neoconservative aide de camp on the PCB,

Francis Fukuyama, were invited to give the
keynote address at this year's meeting of the
American Society of
Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) in
Philadelphia.

The resulting Kass panel brouhaha had the
assembled abuzz for the rest of the weekend.
Talking to the bioethicists in Philadelphia in
its wake, after having spent the previous
weekend with angry, divided nanotechnologists in
Washington, I had a growing realization that
both communities are being forced to choose
sides in the increasing biopolitical
polarization between transhumanists and
bioconservatives.

Bioethics brouhaha

At the ASBH, Kass vigorously defended the PCB
and insisted that precisely because he had
stacked the PCB with conservative intellectuals
it was the most balanced presidential bioethics
advisory committee ever. His defense of his
ethical concerns were, as usual, the iron fist
of bio-Luddite bans veiled behind a thick velvet
fog of "important questions" and hand-wringing
about "human dignity." Delivered by any other
bioethics leader at any other time, the audience
would have politely applauded. But Kass is not
your typical bioethicist, and five days before
this apocalyptic election in the US, tensions
were high.

The invitation to Kass had roiled the
bioethics community since it was announced.
Leading the charge was

Rosamond Rhodes, a bioethicist from that
veteran breeding ground of radicals, the City
University of New York City. Just elected to the
ASBH's executive, Rhodes insisted that Kass's
partisan approach to his job and his campaigning
against embryonic stem cell research made him an
inappropriate keynoter. After the ASBH board
refused to rescind the invitation, Rhodes and
allies held up protest signs at the event.

Although most of the audience was too
cautious to join Rhodes' protest, they gave a
rousing response to

Laurie Zoloth, who followed Kass. Zoloth
said the PCB's work was flawed because it
mourned a lost, romanticized and fictional
"nature," and yearned for a sentimental past.
Gruesomely, noted Zoloth, Beyond Therapy
argues that death defines us. But since we've
already eaten the forbidden apple, we can't go
back to the garden of pastoral simplicity.
Instead of debating the evils of immortality the
bioethics commission should have confronted the
crushing needs for health care of the sick,
aging and poor. The poor, she thundered, were
the ones truly "beyond therapy." The crowd gave
her a standing ovation. (The next day when Kass
spoke at the Christian Right "Technosapiens"
confab in Washington, DC he was reportedly still
shaken by the encounter.)

Eric Juengst then pointed out two key
problems with Kassism: The illusory boundary
that Kass, Fukuyama and their PCB tried to draw
between therapy and enhancement and their
attempt to quash the use of technology that
might facilitate human variety. We need to allow
different human ideals to flourish and encourage
people to respect difference and equality across
them. Technology isn't the problem, said
Juengst, but human desires and intolerance.

A return to brandy and cigars

The rancor of the Kass appearance was
addressed again when

Tom Beauchamp and James Childress received a
joint lifetime achievement award for their work
in having founded the dominant "principleist"
approach to bioethics.

Principleism, or the "Georgetown mantra,"
tries to analyze dilemmas in terms of the three
or four principles of autonomy, justice and
beneficence/nonmalfeasance. It's ironic that
bioethicists ever thought they were above
politics when these core principles were simply
a translation of the French revolutionary
slogans of libert�, egalit�, fraternit�. But
Beauchamp nostalgically called for a return to
friendly debates over brandy and cigars, and
decried the new liberal-conservative
factionalism among bioethicists.

James Childress, who had served on Clinton's
NBAC, also addressed the breakdown of
parlor-room civility in bioethics, but singled
out the effort to force religious rationales
back into debates as one of the causes. He noted
that the NBAC had gathered religious
perspectives as part of its deliberations, but
that policy advice in a liberal democratic,
religiously pluralistic society has to be
grounded in secular democratic principles, not
"my God don't like it."

Of fetuses and fish, brains and the future

One ASBH workshop in the crosshairs of these
issues addressed the moral status of the embryo.
Philosopher Jeff McMahon reviewed the
personhood-ensoulment-yuck-factor debate that is
also central to the debate about posthuman
possibilities. McMahon set aside arguments for
the ensoulment of embryos, pointing out in
passing the enormous ontological problems the
idea has, such as what to do with conjoined
twins with two heads on one body? What is
important in life, he argued, is our conscious
experience. We are embodied minds, not bodies
that happen to have minds. As a consequence,
fetuses develop moral status at some point in
the fifth month of gestation when they grow
enough neurons to have conscious experience.

The problem here is Peter Singer's
nonanthropocentric challenge: Why does a human
fetus get more moral status for having a flicker
of consciousness than a dog who understands a
vocabulary of a hundred commands? Maggie Little,
a bioethicist at Georgetown, rejoindered that we
should value the fetus not because it is a
rights-bearer in its own right, but because
people have warm and fuzzy feelings for them, a
version of the yuck factor approach. This is
also part of the commonsense argument for why
humans are morally different from apesbecause
we feel like it. Which is just as
philosophically meaningful as the old emotive
rationales for racism. If enough people feel
warm and fuzzy about their teddy bears do we
call them "human beings" too?

But the really special thing about this
year's ASBH was the visibility of the new field
of "neuroethics." There were panels on lie
detection, the ethics of brain imaging, changes
in identity in dementia, and one on the future
of neuroethics.

Martha Farah and

Geoffrey Aguirre, from
the new
neuroethics project at the University of
Pennsylvania, reviewed the various brain
imaging techniques and their myriad imaging
problems. As usual, as people in the midst of
their field, they were pessimistic about the
possibility that we would ever reach the more
"science fictional" possibilities of complete
mental state mapping. Aguirre suggested it would
take 900 gigabytes data storage a second to
record every state of every neuron in a brain.
Combined with the difficulties of achieving
neuron-state resolution, they were even
pessimistic about contemporaneous research on
brain fingerprinting.

Zack Lynch, the rising star in
neuro-consulting, predicted a "neurosociety,"
fueled by emoticeuticals and cogniceuticals,
driving economic and political change. Lynch
argued that neurotechnologies will have a more
immediate effect on society than gene therapy
and will face less resistance as a pathway of
radical human enhancement. He also argued that
the concept of "neuro-enablement" needed to be
added to the debate over "therapy" versus
"enhancement."

George Khushf, director of the University of
South Carolina's bioethics program, and a
rising star
in the field of nanotechnology ethics,
argued that bioethicists have made themselves
boring and irrelevant by trying to find the
middle ground in the debate between
bioconservatives and transhumanists. By
excluding these voices from the bioethical
debate they have excluded the big questions
about values and the future of humanity.

Millennial nanopolicy

Those big questions had not been excluded,
however, in Washington, DC the previous weekend
at the

Foresight Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology.
The Foresight
Institute, founded and directed by
nano-visionary Eric Drexler, has been laboring
in the wilderness for a long time trying to
create a buzz about molecular manufacturing and
nanorobotics. Now Foresighters are pretty
frustrated that the buzz is finally here, but
the nanomaterials people have run off with all
the money from the National Nanotechnology
Initiative, locking out any research into
Foresight's vision of molecular manufacturing.
So they decided to bring the gospel to the
Beltway, to a Marriott one subway stop beyond
the Pentagon.

Despite their setbacks, Washington still
appeared quite anxious to listen. More than 360
people showed up when Foresight had expected
only 200.

The first day of the Foresight meeting was
devoted to progress on the technical steps
toward molecular manufacturing, the second day
to applications, and the third day to politics
and policy. Woven throughout, however, was an
attempt to show that nano-innovation, and
eventual molecular manufacturing, would help
with sustainable development problems in the
developing world.

For instance,

Gayle Pergamit, working on developing and
marketing a nanotech-based artificial kidney,
pointed out how the nanomaterial research for
biofilters will also be applicable to water
filtration and desalination.
Bryan Bruns,
a development sociologist who has championed the

open sourcing of nanotechnology, argued that
nanotechnology would provide improved and
cheaper water purification, solar energy
production, communication and medicine.

Chris Phoenix, director of research for the
Center for
Responsible Nanotechnology, talked about how
the planet could easily sustain 100 billion
people once molecular manufacturing is applied
to sustainable development. Unfortunately, he
noted, there would be some concentration of
wealth, the economy may collapse, and the owners
of the patents on the nanofactories will become
increasingly powerful. (Libertarian economist
David Freidman begged to differ in his
presentationthe market would provide new jobs.)




The effect of nano
on international economic and military
competition, and the consequent need for
transnational regulation, was addressed by a
number of speakers. Robert Haak reviewed the
enormous Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese
government nanotechnology initiatives. Gary
Marchant

discussed the difficulties we have faced trying
to regulate nuclear and biological weapons,
which have no dual civilian use. Regulating
molecular manufacturing, when the same device
that makes your soy burger can make a bioweapon,
will be 10 times harder.

Can't keep transhumanism down

So like the bioethicists, the
nanotechnologists were grappling with the needs
of the world's poor. But they were likewise
divided by the politics of human enhancement.

Many panelists enthusiastically noted the
ways that nanorobotics will make possible
radical body modification. For instance
Robert
Freitas, author of

Nanomedicine, talked about his proposals
for

respirocytes, nanorobot red blood cells,
which he thinks will be feasible within 20
years. Respirocytes would be a thousand times
more efficient at providing oxygen than organic
red blood cells. Similarly, artificial platelets
or "clottocytes" could provide immediate
clotting at the site of wounds at 10,000 times
the efficiency of natural platelets.

Microbiovores, or robot killer cells, would
supplement the immune system and be programmed
to kill novel pathogens and cancers. Molecular
assembly even offers the manufacture of
chromosomes to order that could then be used in
gene therapy. Phoenix noted that these kinds of
nano-enhancements will speed up clinical trials
and medical innovation by making it possible to
reverse the harmful effects of experimental
drugs and technologies.

But the bioconservatives were
well-represented by

Adam Keiper, managing editor of the journal
The
New Atlantis, the unofficial journal of
Kass's bioethics commission, published by the
Ethics and Public
Policy Center. Keiper arranged for the EPPC
and The New Atlantis to endorse the
conference, and he

blogged every talk and posted video clips of
speakers. Why did a biocon get so excited about
a gathering of transhumanist-inclined
nano-geeks?

In the summer of 2003 Keiper published his
essay "The
Nanotechnology Revolution" in The New
Atlantis, in which he noted that the only
opposition to nanotechnology at that time was
from nutty leftists and environmentalists
(although

the Christian Right joined the fray shortly
after that). Dismissing concerns about safety,
equity and unemployment (the market would
provide) he outlined what he thought the real
debate over nano should be: the "extinctionist
challenge" of transhumanism, deciding how much
"we tinker with and revise our bodies," and
whether we "choose a future as men or machines."
According to Keiper:

The era of nanotechnology may be one of
hubris and overreach, where we use our
godlike powers to make the world
anew....Those who care about the deeper
questionsabout what nanotechnology means
for human naturemust also master the
details, both political and scientific. And
they must offer not only lamentations for
the disruptions and dehumanization that
nanotechnology might cause, but a sensible
vision of how nanotechnology might do some
practical good...

 

In other words, bioconservatives need to join
the nanotech movement, champion everything short
of radical changes in the human body, and
militate against transhumanists.

When Keiper spoke, he smirked that the
molecular manufacturing faction was "getting its
ass whipped" politically, and then tempted the
crowd with the possibility of future federal
largesse. There were only a couple things the
Foresighters had to do to clean up their act and
start winning the big bucks. One was to examine
the disproportionate number of political
extremists in their ranks, mentioning
"anarcho-capitalists" and "neo-Marxists" in
particular. They weren't going to get anywhere
politically unless they joined the political
power structure as it is, such as, for instance,
the GOP. They also needed to stop tipping their
hat to the UN, which he noted was despised in
Washington (at least by his friends).

The final conclusion he offered the audience:
shun transhumanists. The "great political
realignment" that is emerging, he argued, is
between transhumanists of right and left, and
those on the right and left who fear the
"dangers of human hubris." If the
nano-enthusiasts want to get their horse ridden
they need to ensure their prospects don't rise
or fall along with those of transhumanism.

So call me a Pollyanna, but this made me
smile. A flack from the party that controls all
three branches of government, who sits in an
office in a multimillion dollar complex on
Capitol Hill serving as an adjunct to Kass's
cleansing of American bioethics of
post-Reformation ideas, funded by the bottomless
coffers of the conservatives churches,
foundations and corporations, this young policy
warrior thinks the most important political
intervention he can make is to get nanotechers
to cut loose transhumanists?

Keiper is certainly right that a battle
royale between bioconservatives and
transhumanists is brewing in US politics. From
ground-zero communities such as bioethicists and
nanotechnologists, the struggle for our right to
use technology to control our own bodies and
minds is spreading. But before people are
tempted to follow Keiper's advice and sign up
with the biocons, they might want to ask Kass
whether he thinks he's winning or losing.