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    By Anne C. Wyman
    (c) 1981 Boston Globe (Field News Service)
    Genetic engineering that could change the human gene pool is only 20
years away. ''It presents no theoretical problems, only logistic
problems,'' says Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore.
    ''There is no limit to the degree that artificial intelligence can
be achieved with machines,'' says computer scientist Joseph
Weizenbaum.
    If the MIT scientists are right, these two developments alone will
have a stunning impact on civilization.
    In the 18 months since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, that
''a live, human-made micro-organism'' could be patented, more than
100 patent applications have been filed in recombinant DNA
technology. Almost every major scientist in the field is the founder
of a new company formed to manufacture human growth hormones, human
insulnor interferon. Following consultations with scientists last
summer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved clinical
trials of these products by Genentech, Hoffman LaRoche and Eli Lilly.
    Gene therapy that could alter or replace defective mechanisms in the
body was tried unsuccessfully on patients with a fatal form of anemia
in Italy and Israel in the summer of 1980, despite disapproval by
local review boards. Such therapy, which affects one individual for
one generation only, will almost certainly be authorized and prove
workable in the near future.
    The next step will be to alter genes in the egg cells themselves.
''We already have in-vitro fertilization ... the next step is to say,
can we replace a piece of human genetic material once we have that
fertilized egg,'' says Prof. Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of urban
and environmental policy at Tufts.
     A member of the National Institutes of Health Recombinant Advisory
Committee since 1978, Krimsky worries that the ability to engineer
genes so that hereditary diseases such as Tay Sachs are wiped out, so
that humans have longer life-spans or are better able to survive
cancer ''will legitimize research and ultimately applications into
trying to improve human social behavior.''
    Computer science poses different problems, says Jerome Wiesner,
former president of MIT. ''What the computer should do is free man to
do the creative things man can do best,'' he says. ''A world in which
information technology is the dominant ingredient will require people
with much better education. The worst challenge is that the system
will run ahead of our ability to take advantage of it.''
    Michael Arbib, a professor of computer and information sciences at
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who has been invited to
give the prestigious Gifford Lectures on natural theology at the
University of Edinburgh in November, 1983, likens the benefits of
intelligent computers to the transition from oral to written history.
     Computers may challenge man's self-image but, Arbib argues, just as
Copernicus and Darwin gave us better ways to understand mankind, so
with intelligent computers: ''We can still see real value to human
beings. The existence of machines doesn't make us less intelligent;
they can make us more intelligent. We can now stride over huge
domains of information where, before, we walked slowly over a limited
acreage.''
    But if computers can enhance human intelligence and play a leading
role in education, they may pose problems in overconfidence and
raised expectations.
    Marvin Minsky of MIT has noted that a computer program quickly
becomes so complex, containing input and modification from so many
people, that it outruns the understanding of its makers. ''The
programmer begins to lose track of internal details, loses his
ability to predict what will happen, begins to hope instead of know,
and watches the results as though the program were an individual
whose range of behavior is uncertain.''
    For Joseph Weizenbaum, ''The relevant issues are neither
technological nor even mathematical; they are ethical .... Since we
do not now have ways of making computers wise, we ought not now give
computers tasks that demand wisdom.''
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    x x x DEMAND WISDOM.''
    He would outlaw ''all projects that propose to substitute a computer
system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect,
understanding and love. (Also any program) which can easily be seen
to have irreversible and not entirely foreseen side effects'' -
unless ''it meets a pressing human need that cannot readily be met in
any other way.'
    Daniel Dennett of Tufts, whose books ''Brainstorms'' and ''The
Mind's I'' deal with computer intelligence, believes slow progress in
the field supports the idea that human intelligence ''is much greater
and more wonderful than any theory has yet been able to account
for.'' His concern is that computers may be used by the military,
which funds most of the research, to undertake such decisions as
whether or not to bomb Cologne.
     ''Predictions yielded by highly sophisticated computer simulations
have no particular warrant,'' he says. ''All you would have to do is
change one little datum, which people put in with a shrug of their
shoulders, and the whole thing would be different. ... That doesn't
mean they aren't scientifically valuable, but it means they aren't
soothsaying machines.''
    Dependence on machine intelligence and intervention in man's
heredity are not the only issues deserving social concern. Science
historian Charles Weinercq of MIT cites research in automatic gene
sequencing, mass tissue culture test-tube fertilization and cell
fusion among other exploding areas of knowledge. Hybridoma
technology, which may give man finetuned control over the body's
immune system, now receives more funding than recombinant DNA.
    Can scientists, who developed atom bombs, who now see enormous
financial gain in their newer discoveries, be trusted to continue
their work unchecked? Can laymen understand enough to judge what they
are doing and make wise decisions about the work?
    Within the last month, the Program for Science, Technology and
Society at MIT moved into a totally refurbished building on the
campus. The program, conceived largely by Wiesner and now directed by
Carl Kaysen, a former Kennedy adviser and head of Princeton's Center
for Advanced Studies, is designed ''to help students learn about
these questions,'' Wiesner says.
     Similar programs exist at half a dozen U.S. universities, including
Pennsylvania, Stanford and Cornell. The launching of the MIT center
and a special December colloquium on computers and society at
Wellesley College provide opportunities for focused debate on such
ethical questions.
    The Institute of Society, Ethics and Life Sciences at Hastings-on
Hudson, N.Y., and the Kennedy Institute Center for Bioethics in
Washington, D.C., are among a handful of private organizations
focusing on social problems posed by the new sciences.
    Most universities and some municipalities have bio-hazard review
boards; the one in Cambridge, Mass., has been convened on two
occasions to study proposals for biotechnology in the city. Hospitals
receiving public money for human experimentation are also required by
the National Institutes of Health to have local institutional review
boards. But the boards' mandate is unclear and their accomplishments
uneven. Moral and ethical considerations have not been their concern
so much as immediate questions of public health.
    The same has been largely true of federal agencies. The National
Institutes of Health's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, made up of
scientists and laymen such as Baltimore and Krimsky, has largely
avoided broad issues in favor of safety questions and is reportedly
seeking to further reduce its monitoring role. Due to budget cuts,
individual agencies reporting to the Federal Interagency Advisory
Committee on Recombinant DNA Research have been forced to restrict
even their limited enquiries into such areas as occupational safety
and environmental impact.
    The congressional Office of Technology Assessment completed a
technological review of the impacts of applied genetics last April
and is now doing studies for Rep. Albert Gore's (D-Tenn.) Science and
Technology Subcommittee on investigations and oversight into the
commercial applications of recombinant DNA technology and genetic
screening in the workplace. Both are expected to touch on ethical
concerns.
    The one arm of government actively dealing with broad social
questions appears to be the President's Commission for the Study of
Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research.
Established in 1980, it added genetic engineering to its six-part
mandate a year ago in response to a letter from Jewish, Catholic and
Protestant groups, themselves undertaking a separate study. The
commission will issue a discussion paper on the ethical and social
implications of gene splicing next year.
    Meanwhile most of the big questions have been raised by scientists
themselves. It was the scientific community that took the
unprecedented step of calling a halt to research in recombinant DNA
technology, first at a Gordon Conference in 1973, then in an open
meeting at Asilomar, Calif., in 1975. The moratorium ended only when
national guidelines were established in 1976.
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