No Place for Confusion

Years of railing against government incompetence by the President and others, along with occasional glimpses of supporting evidence introduced by government itself, have left their mark.

A road crew in Colorado, trying to make certain that no boulders roll down a hill into passing vehicles on a road below, dislodges a boulder that smashes into a passing vehicle. Navy vessels are dispatched into the Persian Gulf like a SWAT team answering a burglar alarm at a filling station with no sign that Washington understands that they are being hurled into a religious war that may be impervious to the best high-tech weapons.

Now government’s ability to cope is in question in the field of biotechnical research, which must follow strict rules if it is not to provoke a public revolt against the application of discoveries promising to ease the pain of disease and the pangs of hunger for people the world over.

So far the leaders of the revolt have been motivated by ignorance, a very human resistance to change of any kind and visions of a man-made blob that will consume the planet--as often happens in bad science-fiction movies. Experiments conducted to date--bacteria that reduce frost damage to strawberries, for example--have produced nothing resembling a blob. So far, also, most Americans support biotechnical research, though they may do so with their fingers crossed. Even the irreverent magazine Economist recently viewed some genetic engineering with alarm.

But biotechnology is in its infancy, still concentrating largely on Dutch elm disease, the wellbeing of potatoes and drugs that increase a cow’s yield of milk. But it is working its way cautiously toward diseases that afflict humans. Since humans are not strawberries, public interest and occasional alarm will almost certainly outstrip research if the perception grows that experiments are out of control. Demands for stronger intervention on behalf of the public could scarcely be ignored in a democratic society.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture already intervene to screen proposed experiments. And, although panels of scientists have judged harmless to public health all projects reviewed to date, all is not going smoothly.

The most serious hitch has been with a handful of research scientists who have jumped the gun, testing genetically altered microbes in the open air without review or approval. But the most recent case, in Montana, has also brought into the open air complaints not only by a scientist who seems to have jumped the gun but also by colleagues that the regulations are ineffective and confusing.

The average American can no more tell whether the complaints about regulation are valid than whether any given experiment is safe. But it would be difficult to miss the meaning of a prolonged argument between researchers and government monitors. It would mean that something was wrong somewhere, and the Jeremy Rifkins and other know-nothings of genetic engineering would need no bigger opening than that to rally public opposition. Washington has shown that it can get its act together when the stakes are high enough. On this issue they are high enough.