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What happened in northeastern India in the summer of ‘92 and how did it affect the direction you took with your career?
There was an outbreak of a mutant strain of cholera in Bengal, which became known as “Bengal cholera.” Because the surface protein on this mutant strain was slightly different than what’s common, all the cholera vaccines were ineffective in protecting populations from this particular strain. So thousands of people contracted cholera within weeks. In one month alone, as the epidemic spread, some 10,000 people died from this cholera epidemic, in a single state in India. Soon after, this particular strain spread from India to Bangladesh and also turned up in Thailand. That’s when I decided to do something about it. I had to do something about it because I had been thinking about ultraviolet (UV) disinfection for quite some time as a potential way to disinfect drinking water inexpensively for poor communities in poor countries.

What is the scale of the global drinking water problem right now?
About two billion people, roughly one third of the global population, need to go outside their home to fetch water for daily use. Of those, 1.2 billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water; they are forced to rely on biologically contaminated water, in most cases. This leads to a large number of diseases and death, particularly for children below age five. Young children have low resistance to dehydration, which is the resultant condition of diarrheal diseases.

With all the advances in public health, technology and medicine today, why is it that still 20% of our world’s population is without access to safe drinking water?
Right, it is 20% if you exclude the residents of large metropolitan areas like Jakarta, Bombay, Cairo, and Mexico City; if you include them, then the number rises to about 30%. We already have the science and technology to address this problem. It is not anymore a scientifically inaccessible domain, intellectually. It’s something that we can do. It just hasn’t been done, for a variety of reasons, including inadequate investment in water infrastructure. There is also the mindset that in the developing countries we’ll just follow the model of what’s been done in the industrial countries, which is to pipe pressurized safe water 24-7 to everybody - and that requires a level of investment and a level of water availability that’s often just not supportable. There is also the problem of governance. In many developing countries, the political will to provide safe drinking water dissipates as soon as the politically most vocal and powerful segments of society have access to safe drinking water. Sadly, those who are relatively voiceless and politically weak are left to fend for themselves. (more…)

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As computer science and molecular biology intermingle, how does our view of the human body change?
The integration of molecular biology and computer science is a very interesting one. When we think about computers or the Internet or digital this and virtual that, we think about immaterial things, which are completely mutable and portable and exist in a strange non-space. It’s an abstract notion, yet the reality of computers is that they need hardware, cables, and infrastructure. When we think about biology, we think about the “stuff” of life, material, and things that are physical. It’s a tangible notion, yet there are whole strands of biological thinking that go beyond the physical. When computing and biology come together, you get all sorts of strange hybrid artifacts, like an online genome database, or a DNA chip, or lab-grown tissues and organs. In some instances, it means our notion of the body is becoming more immaterial or virtual. In other instances, it means the opposite: that, in fact, our notion of the biological and materiality is changing, and that biological materiality is being defined as informational. This means, rather than any kind of body anxiety or posthumanist fantasies of uploading your mind to a computer, there is an insistence that we can control and manipulate biological matter through the lens of informatics.

Is the body itself a biotechnology?
Yeah, sure. I would say that it is, but with the caveat that it has to be articulated as a technology. I wouldn’t say that this view is so all encompassing that the body’s mere existence means it’s a machine or a technology. But once it’s articulated or framed in such a way, then definitely it is a technology. That’s what I would argue for a definition of biotechnology, that you enframe a “naturally occurring” biological process, and in doing that you make it amenable to instrumentalization and to being used in all sorts of other contexts - and for ends that might not be biological at all, as with the field of DNA computing, which is a field of mathematics that uses DNA to perform computationally complex problems, whose application has nothing to do with biology; the application is mathematics.

How do you define biomedia?
Biomedia is a specific concept that’s meant to describe the informatic reframing of biological components and processes. Packed in that are a couple of ideas. One is the framing or articulating of the biological, as I just mentioned. The other is the way that we articulate biology as a technology, through the lens of informatics, information, and information technologies. This is where we get our common notions now of genetic code or the code script of life. But it’s really through the lens of informatics and information technology that you get this combination of the immaterial and material, or biology and technology. It’s about the process of identifying the biological, but looking at it through the lens of the informatic. (more…)

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You talk about the Next Industrial Revolution, where industry and environment come together in harmony. What does this look like?
It looks at the idea as Francis Crick said in 1962, that in order for something to be vital it has to have growth, it has to have a free form of energy, and it has to have an open system of chemicals. So if we think about a tree, it has to have some cells that grow, even for simple reproduction, and it has to have free energy from outside the system, in this case natural sunlight, and it needs an open system of chemicals that synthesize within its metabolism for the benefit of the organism, its reproduction, and its ecosystem.
If we saw human industry in a similar way we’d realize that there’s something relatively new in evolutionary terms that we call technical nutrition. Not just biological nutrition, which is the living thing powered by the sun and “consumed” by other organisms as they breakdown (or, as we say, “waste equals food”), but actually seeing human artifice and technology as something that is put into the same kind of cycle. These are what we call technical nutrients. Take aluminum for example. Our species has made 680 million tons of aluminum since 1880 and we still know where 440 million tons are. So the idea would be that you would design two kinds of things, one is what we call “products of consumption”, those things that are literally biologically consumed and go back to soil, or “products of service”, things from which we want the service, but not necessarily the molecular potential. With something like a computer or a car or carpet, the user is a “customer” not a “consumer”. These are services and in fact, when you finish with a synthetic carpet, for example, you should be able to either return it back to industry forever and remake carpets or other useful things. So biological and technical nutrition - that’s the protocol we initiated and have been continuously championing and developing.

What is the difference between eco-efficiency and what you call eco-effectiveness?
Eco-efficiency (doing more with less) as a strategy is well meaning but not necessarily adequate to the task. Being efficient means that you’re probably doing something right, in terms of using the least to do the most, but the problem is that if you’re doing the wrong thing, it might be pernicious because it perpetuates the wrong system with the erroneous thought that things are getting better. For someone to tell a company to be more eco-efficient and please make twice as many cardboard boxes out of the trees in Indonesia, sounds like a factor 2 efficiency. Even if they said make it factor 4 or factor 10, you still haven’t really solved the problem, because it’s still goodbye to Indonesian forests. Why would you use something as beautiful and as diverse as a tree for something as prosaic as a cardboard box that’s used once or even twice, and then put into a chlorine-laden “recycling” loop that is actually continuously down-cycling all the materials and destroying water quality? From our design perspective, the question really needs to be, “With eco-efficiency, is being less bad being good, or is it simply being bad, just less so?” With eco-effectiveness, on the other hand, we ask the question, “Am I doing the right thing?” And then we start to do it efficiently, so we can create prosperity and growth. (more…)

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In Tomorrow Now, you travel through Shakespeare’s “seven stages of man” - from As You Like It - as a way of navigating the next fifty years. Why?
Tomorrow Now is a book about nearly everything. But you can’t simply write a book about every aspect of the future because it’s like writing a book about every aspect of the present. So the framework I decided to use was the human body. This book is very body-centric and I try to make human flesh and a human sensorium into a sort of key that opens the future. That’s our real encounter with the future; it’s not these abstract notions of drivers or changes, but the fact that time flows through your body and you can’t really live unless you’re moving into the future at the rate of one second per second.

You say genetic engineering is in its infancy. How is this new baby, so to speak, shaking up our global household?
Genetic engineering is barely getting anywhere and it’s already subject to a great deal of controversy. If you look at what genetic engineering really does, as opposed to the things that it gets headlines for, it seems likely that it’s going to get as close to the DNA as it can and as far away from the products of DNA as it can. The sorts of images we have of genetic engineering are the Frankenstein baby, Dolly the clone, and weird, monstrous, animals. But when you look at what DNA is good for, it doesn’t make sense to put it into humans or animals. It takes too long. DNA moves fast and the best way to carry it is in a microorganism. Let’s say you decide to create a super-baby next month using whatever techniques you found in Craig Venter’s DNA lab. By the time this super-baby is an adult in the year 2024, there will have been another 20 years of further advancement in the field. So why would you make a baby with today’s technology knowing it’s going to be twenty years out of date when it’s grown up and can actually vote?

Moving on to The Soldier now, can you explain the stylistic differences between the military and the paramilitary?
It’s taking people a surprising amount of time to get their head around the idea that the bipolar world of communist/capitalist confrontation is over and we now have a confrontation between New World Order and New World Disorder. In other words, people don’t get it that lawless narco-terrorism actually makes a lot of money and is a newfangled kind of mountain banditry. I mean, terrorism is not terror. When you’re talking about a war on terror, that’s like a war on technique. It’s like having a war on Blitzkrieg when the Germans would suddenly come over the Belgian border in tanks. What we really have is a serious disorder problem. We’ve got breakdowns in the Westphalian nation-state system because governments just can’t control these huge living streams of illicit revenue from narcotics, arms smuggling, human smuggling and so forth. It’s not too hard for the U.S. to bomb anything from orbit. We can send over a B1 bomber from the heartland of the United States and have it literally circumnavigate the planet and drop munitions with absolute precision anywhere. But it turns out to be extremely difficult for the U.S. to walk block to block with military police trying to enforce order on people who really don’t want any aliens around. So if you’re in Serbia you’re in big trouble - sort of - if the U.S. decides to take it upon itself to smash your government. They can smash all the government buildings and knock down the bridges and telecom centers, and so you have a hard time getting around. But if you’re Somalia and there’s nothing left to smash, the U.S. has got a problem. The secret of the struggle between the New World Order and the New World Disorder is that they feed on one another. It’s our own appetite for destruction that underwrites this warlord activity. (more…)