In Genesis, the people of Babel try to build a tower to heaven. God stops the project by giving everyone a different language. They can’t communicate, so the tower is abandoned. Biotech and life sciences are facing a similar conundrum as the various parties involved in what should be a national dialogue about building the best tower possible don’t always do the best job of communicating with each other. The result is bio-Babel — a discussion that often stalls out as the various parties talk at each other or only among their immediate colleagues.Scientists tend to talk to scientists, business people to business people, and activists to activists. Groups meet and invite representatives from other groups to speak, but they are too often treated as foreigners speaking a different language who seem to say hello when they mean goodbye, or they receive a cordial but smug welcome from roomfuls of partisans who oppose their points of view. It’s like inviting Genghis Khan to represent the tyrant’s point of view at a meeting about world peace or Gavin Newsom to defend gay marriage to the John Birch Society.The media, my professional world, are among the worst offenders. Typically, we report new discoveries, new prospective cures and new studies on the risks and dangers of, say, a new drug as either gee whiz or apocalyptic. Magazine covers and television news magazine shows proclaim that a new breakthrough is going to cure cancer or make sex better. Or we’re all going to die because some mad scientist is about to unleash a Frankenstein nano-probe. Telling the real story — that science works slowly and often gets things wrong before it gets them right, if it does get them right — doesn’t sell magazines. Nor do drugs that work routinely or treatments that help, but not spectacularly so. Adding to this balkanisation of the debate is the rise of ideological polarisation, which depicts discoveries that are the least bit controversial in stark political terms. The left says this, the right says that.Meanwhile, scientists and biotech executives are baffled about why the public both demands treatments and fears science running amok. The public is equally baffled by why cancer is not yet cured after all the promises.Excerpted from an article by David Ewing Duncan in ‘The San Francisco Chronicle
