Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

It's hardly "future": Africans for instance are well aware that the anti-retroviral drug regimes are not as accessible to themselves as to HIV/AIDS victims in the more-consuming countries. Medical technology by its very nature creates gross inequity, but it also creates "miracles". This might be one reason why the "trickle-down" neo-con economics looked plausible for so long, because there are a few fields, notably high-tech medicine, that are driven by an unusually desperate energy (parents' urge to save children, for instance, as noted in a particularly well-written post where Tom bares some of the mental anguish involved). Because we not only tolerate but even to a degree celebrate this inequity especially when children are involved, there's a cultural basis for arguing to accept inequities in fields that matter far less.

Really, who cares who has the cooler Blackberry, once we're done comparing global child mortality rates? Lesser inequities become tolerable.

One fascinating disease to watch is malaria. There's a low-tech solution, that being, mosquito netting distributed to every child in a vulnerable area, for a cost of about $10 each (the charity "Spread The Net" has this as its sole mission). There's also a high-tech solution (or plain menace), that being, the breeding of genetically modified mosquitoes that don't carry malaria at all. They are apparently more robust and can outcompete the malaria-infected kind. This is an astonishing fact for two obvious and one less obvious reason:

1. This is the first time that a genetically modified organism has been claimed to be able to survive better in the wild than the original animal. This opens the long-anticipated debate about duties of humans to the genome. Even a single one of these mosquitoes escaping modifies that genus most likely forever.

2. This is also the first time that a major disease threat to human beings could be potentially wiped out by modifying, rather than extincting, the species that carries it. Keep in mind that more robust mosquitoes however would have a drastically wide range of many other effects, almost all of them unanticipated. Mosquitoes can carry other diseases and the more robust they are, the better they'll carry those. I know of no one who seriously suggests using this "solution". One could end up with a "more robust" breed that's capable of spreading HIV by mosquito bite, say, and that would be horrific. However, this is now a choice the human species has the possibility of making, however wrongly or badly. We've become God in this limited sense of deciding not just to wipe out (done it) but replace one of God's creatures.

3. The less obvious fact is that a low-tech infrastructural capital mod (on our bedchambers) and a high-tech natural capital mod (on the mosquitoes) so directly compete, and that any attempt at "cost-benefit analysis" must inexorably favour the latter. Which is an argument against such analysis.

Never have we needed a capital asset model that took explicit account of the difference between infrastructural (or physical or manufactured) capital assets, which break down and fail and can't grow on their own, and natural (or ecological or genetic) capital assets, which spread into every niche they can find and adapt and evolve and are extremely poorly understood at any of the cellular and genetic and population and behavioural and inter-species ecosystem levels. To make a decision between technological strategies on some kind of "level playing field" between what's alive and what isn't, is categorically insane. It denies the difference between what's alive and what's not.

There's an instinctual understanding of this, obviously, or we would not be happily spreading nets while dreading the potential of super-mosquitoes and quashing anyone who suggests releasing them. However, one thing recent history has taught, there's always some moron ready to trust a spreadsheet and an instinct to go with those who tell them what they want to hear. The mere existence of an experimental organism of this kind of going to require us to radically change not just how we think about medicine, or economics, but about the human role on this planet.

As a parting shot, think about cloning. The monotheistic religions are dead set against it, seemingly because "Man is in the image of God". There's a lot less dead-setting in polytheistic or spiritual traditions. You don't hear for instance the Dalai Lama condemn cloning categorically as an innate evil. And that may be because the Buddhist philosophy is one of continuously changing yourself, and never asking anything around you to change at all.

So not only do we have the politics of access, we have a politics of identity and of diversity (celebrating inequity, perhaps) around medical technology.

Stem cells, which no one sane would save in preference to a real live chimp about to be used in the same experiment (yeah I tested that), were only the absurd opening cartoon to this movie. Question is, is this a HORROR movie?