ECADENCE is a description of a
society or an organism whose
powers are disharmoniously dissipated,
whose energies are irrelevant to its
contemporary needs.

In evolutionary or historical per-

spective, decadence is often associated
‘with exquisite accomplishment in spe-
cialized fields. We still admire the ba-
roque or the dinosaur, however much
we realize that their exuberance was
self-terminating, that the future path of
culture and life would have to find a
fresh start from principles of higher
universality.

Decadence looms as the contem-
porary corruption of our scientific civi-
lization. But the scientific attitude con-
tains a saving grace: the possibility of
objective self-examination and redi-
rection. I propose that the central
technological goal of the species is the
harmonization of its technical goals.
I would call this process EUTECH-
NICS. Its realization is of course a
moral issue, but it will also require a
massive redeployment of technological
resources.

Eutechnics becomes overwhelm-
ingly more urgent as biological science
brings us to the systematic application
of technique to the design of human
nature. This very issue of TECHNOL-
oGY WEEK is an element of eutechni-
cal thought, suggesting how pervasive
is the concern for harmonizing our
technological objectives, but this is
still a very feeble engine for the enor-
mous task we face.

The Dissipation Proceeds

We see too many paradoxes on the
contemporary scene to make it easy to
refute the label “decadent.” Will any-
one deny that human compassionate
intellect is the most valuable resource
on this planet? Is this resource being
‘systematically mined, irrigated, culti-
vated, conserved anywhere with the
sense of purpose that attends a new
weapons system? The United States
prides itself on technological suprem-
acy, but our infant mortality rate is far
worse than that of Sweden—amount-
ing to 40,000 more deaths a year. Be-
yond this is the matter of how we
would have to grade the part of the
world we care for against reasonable
standards of absolute performance.

technology week, January 23, 1967

~ Eutechnics—Motif
For New Technology

 

JOSHUA LEDERBERG

49
 

We have clear foresight that hunger will
ravage the world within the next 20 or
30 years, but devote orders of magni-
tude more effort to systems analysis of
business paperwork than we do to
framing solutions to an order of human
misery that cannot fail to touch the
affluent as well as the starving.

We support the economy of a coun-
try whose racial policies we detest, by
trading our goods for the gold it mines
out of one hole in the ground, so as to
let us store it away in another one.
Meanwhile, we throw irreplaceable
phosphates down our rivers, from which
they will be irretrievably diluted in the
oceans, We mount a magnificent tech-
nological effort for the scientific explo-
ration of the solar system, then dissipate
it in a spectator sport—astrobatics—as
if Columbus were to organize a water-
polo competition among his caravels.

People prefer airplanes in order to
travel safely and comfortably from 2
home or office in one city to another. ~
The aircraft have already far out-
stripped the ground support system with
respect to safety, cost, actual elapsed
time, passenger comfort; yet our princi-
pal technological initiative is for a
superplane that will simply exacerbate
these problems, and tax the quiet and
composure of the passengers’ families
and erstwhile friends left on the ground
to enjoy the booms.

And, of course, the mere word “pol-
lution” is a sufficient trigger.

Above all, we have unleashed infi-

. nite energy, enough to destroy ourselves
many times over, and still devote mini-
scule efforts to learning how to control
it. We may. congratulate ourselves that
we have somehow survived a generation
of nuclear anxiety—but how well have

50

 

we survived it? Ask the beat generation
what they think of us for this inherit-
ance. And just what are our odds for
another 21 years?

‘Magnificent Opportunity’

This is a familiar sermon, repeated
so often that technologists may not
want to hear it again. But the pages of
TECHNOLOGY WEEK give little evidence
that its message has been assimilated
into the day-to-day thinking of the so-
phisticated do-ers of our society. The
problem is perhaps one of compart-
mentalization, that moral issues are seg-
mented away from technological ones,
This may be indispensable to accom-
plish one day’s work, but it also glosses
over a magnificent opportunity——to ap-
ply technical attitudes to fundamental
human problems, to look for the ways
in which a morally insoluble dilemma
can be mitigated by a technological ad-
vance that restores a new balance to
our repertory.

Thus, better teaching machines and
higher-level programming software
could broaden the educational process.
The technology for detecting nuclear
detonations would be a great help for
policing nuclear tranquility. A psycho-
physical truth-machine somewhat more
reliable than present-day lie-detectors
could pacify world politics. Technologi-
cal goals nowadays tend to be framed
as the more obvious incremental ad-
vances over existing, self-reinforcing,
tactical technique, and we reliably ex-
pect thé demand to follow the availa-

. bility. Instead we should discover what

our real needs are, then strategically
harness our technological enterprise to
reach them.

The enormous potential of physical

technology is sufficient reason to vitalize
eutechnics. We can well proceed as if it
were true that no technical goal that
can be precisely formulated is beyond
human accomplishment: we need merely
measure whether we are willing to in-
vest what it will cost. However, even
“cost” may be a decadent concept: are
we more than a trillion dollars worth of
development away from the industrial
machinery that could give us virtually
infinite productivity, ie., an economy
that needed only design engineers, pro-
grammers, scientists and of course exec-
utives to operate it? And which of
these human categories will indefinitely
forestall their own technological dis-
placement?

A New Human Design?

A prophetic glance over biology
should add more poignancy to these
concerns. The root concept of deca-
dence is accented in our confusion
about the very definition of human life.
This is a sacred value, to be conserved
at all costs (except on the battlefield or
the circum-military zones of a sovereign
adversary). But biology shows how
naive we are in defining either “human”
or “life.” We can, for a while, continue
to rely on the traditional heart-beat as
a sign of survival, and a pragmatic
ethics still supports the physician who
may have to admit defeat in his efforts
to sustain one patient in order to meet
his responsibilities for others. This is
not the place to enlarge on these merely
ethical problems that are confounded
by scientific analysis. For beyond the
patchwork of contemporary medicine
we have realistic prospects of biological
engineering, the kind of design of hu-
man beings that Aldous Huxley had
anticipated in Brave New World,

Some existing techniques play an
important part in this branch of eutech-
nics—we might even call it eumanics,
the design of man, hopefully for the
better. In fact this science is so far ad-
vanced that it is already divided into
three historically recognized disciplines:
eugenics, euphenics and euthenics. Eu-
genics is the optimization of man’s
genetic constitution; euphenics the
modification of his biological develop-
ment; euthenics the amelioration of his
environmental opportunity, i.e., his
education.

The main technique proposed for
eugenics is selective breeding: to en-
courage the “best” humans to repro-
duce, or conversely to discourage “de-
fective” humans from doing so. Until
recently, this has hardly been a tech-
nological issue. However, techniques of

technology week, January 23, 1967
contraception now play a central role
in the facts of differential reproduction,
and generally have an anomalous dis-
tribution. Family limitation tends to
reach the poorest people last, just those
whose sheer economic survival most
desperately needs it to countervail the
benefit of infant survival through better
public health.

Only the arrogant would say that
the poor are also genetically defective;
the scientist must insist that we know
almost nothing about the biology of af-
fluence or poverty. It is, however, plaus-
ible that malaptive genes play some part
(but just how much?) in economic
failure. The over-breeding of the poor
may then be eugenically disadvan-
tageous.

The time-scale of useful effect is,
however, so long in comparison to so-
cial and technological change that urgent
efforts to repress the poor seem not
only futile but misdirected by compari-
son with deeper scientific analysis of
the actual factors of physical and psy-
chological development that influence
social fitness. It would be technically
sound, at least as a subsystem-panacea,
to suggest that poverty might be abol-
ished by preventing the poor from re-
producing at all, but if so why stop
there? Instead, abolish poverty by evap-
orating the poor altogether, which
would be more humane than letting
them starve.

Propagation and Surgery

Social eugenics by differential repro-
duction may be supplanted by experi-
mental eugenics, which is merely the ap-
plication to man of techniques of genetic
design already well authenticated for
simpler organisms. The most telling of
these may be clonal propagation, the
formation of genetically identical twins
of an existing individual, by a process
analogous to taking cuttings from a
rosebush. a :

If some humans now seek immor-
tality through their children, how much
more impelling that neurotic motive will
be for a clonal child! This would be
design by horticultural selection; but if
nothing else it would provide crops of
similar infants for experiments on the
effects of different environmental treat-
ments, like diets or educational regimes.
The process need be no more (or less)
authoritarian than sexual propagation is
now within the bounds of family life.
Indeed, the exercise of individual choice
is one reason to expect this kind of
eugenics to be implemented more effec-
tively, sooner, than many other pro-
posals for eumanics. But then, who are

technology week, January 23, 1967

the best families?

Once clonal propagation—in effect
making an egg from the genetic infor-
mation in a skin or a livercell—is tested
and calibrated, we can consider more
calculated modifications of the genetic
makeup of an_ individual—genetic
surgery. Many schemes for this have
been suggested, but they appeared im-
possibly cumbersome until recently. It
has just become evident, however, that
certain viruses can be tamed so that, on
the one hand, they produce no percepti-
ble disease; on the other, they carry in-
teresting genetic information to add to
that already in the cells of the host
organism. Therefore, innovations for
new enzymes can first be bred (or
chemically grafted) into a virus strain.
Then this virus can be used to -infect
babies—for example, those suffering
from a genetic defect like phenyl-
ketonuria. A virus so bred as to code
for the enzyme phenylalanine hydroxy-

Jase should cure the child infected with

it.

With time, we can see the develop-
ment of viruses bred to convey any
number of other specific traits, ranging
from the cure of diabetes to sterilization
or changes in intellectual or emotional
development. Here the chances of au-
thoritarian control are the most alarm-
ing, for the viruses could be spread
against the will of the populace, or by
accident, or as military weapons. There
are many wild viruses that may be ex-
pected to have rather subtler effects on
personality than we now label as in-
fectious disease, but this is a com-
pletely uncharted scientific territory.
Nor is the constructive use of a virus
completely futuristic: at an abstract
level, the use of cowpox or of the live
attenuated polioviruses for mass-immu-
nization depends on the identical bio-
logical principle. Only, different mole-
cules are designed as the beneficial

   

\ irene * th

ull

product: in these cases, antigens that
will provoke immunity against the
specified diseases,

Euphenics is the betterment of a man
by changing his development—for ex-
ample feeding him better or supple-
menting his hormones. In these terms, it
is a familiar byproduct of nutrition and
medicine: observe how stature has gone
up steadily in Western society and
girls have matured earlier. More re-
cently, we see the calculated use of hor-
mones not only to cure disease, but to
influence muscular development or the

‘sexual characteristics of an individual.

When we learn just a trifle more
about the hormonal control of brain
development, these phenomena will
peak out in human interest. Since the
effects will be manifest in the treated
individual, euphenics is more immedi-
ately manageable than eugenics. The
vatious techniques obviously interact:
the best gene-set, achievable by eugen-
ics, is the one most manageably respon-
sive to the developmental controls input
as euphenic chemicals.

Euthenics is also a kind of develop-
mental modification, but the inputs are
informational rather than material.

Guarding Man’s Humanity

The point of this essay is not to pin-
point specific hazards or opportunities.
It is rather to suggest that there are no
limitations to technology, whether we
think of the outer universe or the inner
man as its domain. Hence we need a
technology of decision, to know better
what to do. The ultimate judgments are
moral ones, but before we can act mor-
ally, we need technical information: the
consequences of our actions. Then we
need better predictive models of the fu-
ture, better simulations to give us a
Tealistic cost-benefit analysis of the
whole human enterprise, better alarm
systems to tell us of specific technologi-
cal gaps which must be filled, and better
communications and information to
support democratic decision.

In the eutechnical society, the penul-
timate crime may become to introduce
any technological innovation as a sub-
system benefit without analyzing its im-
pact on the whole future of man. The
ultimate one would be to deny man his
humanity by denying him the chance to
think, to know himself.

 

Joshua Lederberg, professor of
genetics at Stanford University School
of Medicine, shared the Nobel Prize in
medicine (1958) for his work in funda-
mental biology, and is best known for
his studies of the genetic code.

55