Policy That Feels Right But Raises Our Risk

Do you use a cell phone when you drive? Not to text, or watch videos, which is just plain stupid. Just to talk, so at least you can keep both eyes on the road, if not both hands on the wheel.

Or maybe you use a hands-free device, one of those in-your-ear Star Trek looking things, or a voice-activated system built into your car. That would be better, right? Eyes on the road AND hands on the wheel. More Control = Safer, right? That’s what a lot of drivers say who use such devices. It’s also what the Massachusetts House thinks, having just passed a bill that would permit DWP, Driving While Phoning, but only using hands-free devices.

That may feel safer. But it’s not. Research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that when three states and the District of Columbia passed laws like the one proposed here, accidents rates did not go down, based on the number of insurance claims for crash damage. Laws like the one being considered in Massachusetts don’t work.

This should not be a surprise. It is well-established that using a cell phone while driving distracts your brain, whether the phone is in your hand or hanging on your ear. But that evidence has apparently been disregarded by legislators here and in 6 other states, and more than 40 countries, who passed similar “hands-free only” laws to reduce the risk of DWP. Why? The answer lies in a deeper understanding of the ways humans perceive risks in the first place, an understanding that might help us make future public health and safety choices more wisely.

Risk perception is a mix of fact and feeling, cognition and intuition, reason and emotion. In this case, the specific emotional factor is control. A sense of control makes any danger feel less dangerous. So the illusion of giving drivers more control is appealing to lawmakers. It just feels like it should make things safer.

But such laws could well make things worse. If you’re DWP using a hands-free device, and you think you’re safer because you’ve done something to increase your control, there is a good chance you’ll be less worried. You are likely to drive less cautiously (even though your brain is just as addled), and the risk to you, and everyone around you, is either the same, or possibly even greater. Laws making it official that hands-free DWP is safer, when it isn’t, contribute to the problem.

The affective nature of human risk perception, ingrained deep in ancient subconscious neural architecture and information processing systems, often leads to policies that feel good, but don’t maximize public health and safety. Risks that involve particularly painful outcomes evoke more fear, for example, which is one reason why America spends way more on cancer research than heart disease research, though both have deep unanswered questions that need such basic research, and though heart disease kills roughly 20% more people - more than 100,000 - every year. (The National Institutes of Health research spending in 2006 came to $9,958 per cancer death, $2,429 per heart disease death.) We’re afraid of risks we have trouble understanding, or that we can’t detect with our own senses, stigmatized by high-profile events. So after Three Mile Island (death toll - 0) and Chernobyl (estimated lifetime cancer death toll - 4,000, according to the World health Organization) we chased nuclear out of our energy mix and ended up with more fossil fuel, which kills thousands every year from particulate pollution, and fills the atmosphere with climate-changing CO2.

We look to government to protect us from many things. But that means more than just protecting us from too many parts per million or drivers using cell phones. We also need government risk managers to protect us from The Perception Gap, when our instinctive risk perceptions leave us more afraid of some things than we need to be, or not as afraid of some threats as we should be. Government decision making impaired by the instinctive way we perceive risk, as right as it might feel, can be a risk all by itself.

Do we care more for some people than others

The unfathomable devastation and loss of the Haiti earthquake has sparked a huge outpouring of concern. Greater, in fact, than that evoked by natural disasters, including earthquakes, when they happen in places further away. Why does the Haitian disaster evoke so much more concern than massive killer earthquakes or natural disasters in Turkey or Bangladesh or China, people just as poor and powerless as those in Haiti? Shouldn't the same number of people anywhere evoke the same care?
Or are there things that are different with Haiti?

Can it simply be we are somehow more moved because Haiti is closer, which makes those people more "real".

Could it be that we relate more intimately to people, some of whose relatives live in the U.S.?

Could it be that because it's closer, and "our" media can get there, that the greater amount of coverage personifies the risk more. The risk perception literature suggests that when a risk is personified - is portrayed in human terms - it raises more concern than when it's abstract (climate change).

Could it be because the greater coverage has made us more constantly as well as intimately aware? The literature finds that the more readily we can bring a risk to mind, the more dramatically it troubles us.

Can it be that we're more aware of how impoverished Haiti is than poor parts of the world further away? Another finding of the risk perception research is that unfairness - bad things happening to people who can't protect themselves - makes risks seems worse.

The scale of this tragedy is impossible to imagine. But so was the earthquake disaster in Szechaun China that killed nearly 70,000. So was the 1991 typhoon that killed 125,000 people in Bangladesh and left millions homeless. Those tragedies, and others further away, evoked great concern, but nothing like we're seeing now.

It's not just about the numbers. Risk perception never is. Risk is a subjective thing, not quantitative. It's a matter of how things feel, and this terrible tragedy somehow feels especially awful.

Risk Is In the Eye of the Beholder

This May, the dredging of the Hudson River finally began. After nearly two decades of insistence by environmentalists that the PCB-contaminated muck be scooped off the river bottom and hauled off, it’s finally going away. At least, away from the Hudson River. Of course, “Away” to some is “Here” to others. What’s interesting is that this material, which prompts such intense concern in environmentalists in the Northeast, is barely causing a stir in the community where it will end up. Most of the folks near the disposal site on the Texas/New Mexico border who will suddenly be neighbors to millions of tons of PCB-contaminated river bottom don’t seem all that worried. Same stuff. Dramatically different perceptions. Why?

Maybe it’s just the fact that PCBs can do more harm in a dynamic environment like a river than they can in a secure landfill. In the river the PCBs can harm the aquatic environment and get into fish that people eat. In the landfill, which is lined and below which are several hundred feet of impervious clay (and no groundwater below that) the possibility of exposure to the environment, or people, is practically zero.

But try locating a low-risk facility like that near a lot of communities and, scientific realities aside, the answer would be a resounding “NO WAY!” It’s a safe bet that none of the environmentalists in the Northeast who wanted the material dredged out of the river would have allowed it to be disposed of anywhere near their cities or towns. Yet just five miles from the disposal site sits Eunice New Mexico, population about 2,500, only a handful of whom are worried about the sort of place that would have a lot of other people freaked out.

Why is something that stirs such fierce concern in some, not threatening to others? It’s a great example of how the meaning of the word “risk” is less a matter of scientific fact and more a matter of perception and perspective.

To some, the very word “chemicals” evokes fear, and conjures word associations with “danger” “cancer” “toxic” or “deadly”. This is the risk perception phenomenon of Stigma. The word “chemicals” has been branded with sweepingly negative connotations. In addition, chemical risks are for the most part undetectable by our senses, which leaves us feeling powerless to protect ourselves, and that raises our fears. Also, people commonly fear risks imposed on them by others, especially by industry (the PCBs came from General Electric operations decades ago). And many people are culturally predisposed to a “We’re all in this together” communitarian, government-intervention kind of social organization, the kind of social structure required to solve big environmental problems. Subconsciously people feel that environmental issues like the Hudson PCBs, and climate change, are rallying calls that strengthen the way they think society is supposed to work. So they tend to play those risks up.

Then there are folks like those in Eunice, such as lifelong resident Mayor Matt White, with whom I recently spoke. He notes that “chemicals” means something different to people born and raised in a town with 50-60 oil wells, where the “real” risk is hydrogen sulfide gas brought up with the oil that has killed one or two people in the past few decades. They have a familiarity with at least this sort of chemical risk that puts the overall feeling of chemical risks, including PCBs, in a less worrisome perspective. They also depend economically on the health of the oil industry and, indirectly, the chemical industry that buys that oil. So the benefit of the wells outweighs the risk they accept as part of the bargain. The contaminated dredgings will mean an additional 15-20 jobs at the disposal facility, jobs that pay $40-50,000 a year. That’s an additional part of the risk-benefit equation in Eunice, a tradeoff which always colors perceptions of risk.

And Mayor White describes his community as a conservative group of people who have a more libertarian view of government’s role, more independent-minded folks who are less inclined to think government should go butting in all the time. To these Individualists, sweeping environmental problems, including like climate change, call for a social response that cuts against their independent-minded grain, so they often play such risks down.

There is no right or wrong here, just valid reasons why the same risk can look one way to one person and different to the next. Feel one way to one person and feel different to the next. That’s what’s really going on under all those fierce arguments about environmental risks after all. They are battles over perspectives, battles over underlying worldviews. The facts are just the weapons by which the battle is fought. The facts aren’t never the reasons for fighting it in the first place. It’s how people see those facts.

In this case there was no battle. Both perspectives “won”. They got what they wanted. But there is a valuable lesson here for all the times such issues get contentious. “Risk” is in the eye of the beholder. There is no “truth”. The facts can look quite different from different perspectives, and anyone arrogantly claiming that their view of the facts is “right”, is arrogantly denying the valid concerns of the other parties and pouring gasoline on the fire. Solutions will be a lot easier to reach if the parties to these conflicts respect the reasons why people feel the way they do about the issue, and account for those feelings and worldviews in the steps proposed for moving forward.

Uh Oh Nano, Part 2.

(The following essay was written 2 years ago. It is being posted now in connection with research released this week in Nature Nanotechnology showing that people's cultural self-identification also contributes to their perceptions of risk, in this case the risks that may arise from nanotechnology. For a summary of that research and a citation to the original journal article, see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081207133749.htm. For an earlier post on nanotechnology, see the second post at http://onrisk.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2007-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&updated-max=2008-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=

Nanotechnology, the capacity to manipulate materials at atomic and molecular scales, holds promise bounded only by the human imagination. But if this promise is to be fully realized in ways that respect potential harms to human and environmental health and safety, serious and ongoing consideration needs to be given to the way the public will react to nanotechnology and all its specific applications. For despite it’s benefits, if public apprehension builds, the potential of nanotechnology could be severely limited. The findings of the field of research known as risk perception offer valuable insights into what that public reaction might be. Understanding those potential reactions will allow proponents of nanotechnology to respect public concerns and address them through more effective risk communication, and advance the prospects of the entire field.
The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus observed “People are disturbed, not by things, but by the view they take of them.” Indeed, researchers including Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischoff, Sarah Lichtenstein, and others, have found that risks seem to have shared characteristics which, quite apart from the scientific facts and statistical probabilities, play a key role in making us more or less afraid. These affective/emotional characteristics are a fundamental part of how we frame our worries. They essentially form the subconscious backdrop by which we “decide” what to be afraid of and how afraid to be.
Perhaps the most important of these characteristics is the matter of trust. As leaders in the field of risk perception and risk communication have found, the more we trust – the less we fear. And the less we trust – the more afraid we are likely to be. Trust will almost certainly play a key role in the acceptance of, or resistance to, nanotechnologies.
Trust is determined by many factors. It is determined in part by who does the communicating. The facts being presented could be the same, but the trustworthiness of the communicator will help determine how worried the audience will feel. For example, people who learn about nanotechnology from the chemical industry, which is less trusted according to many polls, are more likely to worry than people who learn about it from health care professionals like doctors or nurses, more trusted professions.
Trust is also established through honesty. BSE affords a good example. In Japan, after the first indigenous infected cow was found, the government promised there would be no more. A second cow was found just days later. The government then said they had created a ban on feeding ruminant protein back to healthy cows – which is how the disease spreads – only to have the press learn and report that the “ban” was only voluntary. The press also reported that the government had kept secret an EU report rating Japan at high risk for BSE. These less-than-honest statements by the government badly damaged trust and fueled much greater fear in Japan than in Germany, where, within about a month of the discovery of the first indigenous infected cow, two cabinet ministers were sacked and changes were proposed to make agricultural practices more natural and less mechanical. Beef sales rebounded in Germany quickly, unlike Japan, partly because of the different degrees of honesty on the part of the government.
Trust also grows from an organization’s actions. Again BSE affords an example. In Canada and the U.S., after the first infected cows were found, the governments were able to point out that they had long ago instituted a feed ban and other restrictions to keep the risk low. As much as citizens might not have trusted the government in general, in this matter the responsible agencies had demonstrated their competence in keeping the risk low. This demonstration of competence probably played a role in the relatively minimal impact on consumer beef sales experienced within each country.
Trust is also established when an organization respects the reality of the public’s fears, even though there may be no scientific basis for those fears. In the U.S., authorities withdrew muscle meat from the market that had come from the slaughterhouse that processed the BSE-infected cow. This despite the scientific consensus that muscle meat is not a vector for BSE. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it was acting “out of an abundance of caution…”. In other words, they were acknowledging and responding to the reality of the public’s fear and doing something that did not reduce the physical risk, but reduced public apprehension. The implicit message in such actions is that the agency was not being defensive, but was being responsive to public concern. That kind of action encourages people to trust such an agency, more than when the message is “There are no scientific reasons for your fears. The facts as we see them says there is no risk. So we are not going to act.” This potentially damaging message has already been heard from a small number of scientists in the area of nanotechnology.
Trust is also established by sharing control. In the case of nanotechnologies, this could include shared control over the writing of public health and environmental risk regulations, or shared control over the development of societal and ethical guidelines. The more that people feel they have some control over their own health and future, the less afraid they will be. The same risk will evoke more worry if people feel they have less control.
Trust is also built by openness. In the development of nanotechnologies, this should include dialogue with various stakeholders, a fully open exchange of scientific data, open government regulatory development, and open discussion of societal and ethical issues, among other areas. The more that people feel they are being deceived, lied to, or manipulated, the more afraid of a risk they are likely to be. Openness reassures them that they can know what they need to know to keep themselves safe. An open process is inherently trust-building.
Trust will be difficult to establish as nanotechnologies develop, because the driving forces behind such development will be principally commercial, industrial, corporate, and government, and the politically and profit-driven sectors of society are, de facto, perceived to be out for their own good more than they are out to serve the common good. So special attention and effort must be paid to establishing trust in everything that a government, a business, or a scientist does while working on commercial nanotechnological research, development or application.
But there are other risk perception characteristics that could bear on public acceptance of, or resistance to, nanotechnologies.
People tend to be more afraid of risks that are human-made than risks that are natural. Nano is almost certainly going to perceived as a human-made technology.
We tend to worry more about risks like nanotechnology that are hard to comprehend because they are scientifically complex, invisible, and not yet completely studied and understood. This could well invoke calls for a stringent application of the Precautionary Principle, and proponents of nanotechnology would be well advised to give serious consideration to such calls until a reasonable amount of safety data is developed.
We tend to worry more about risks that are imposed on us than risks we knowingly choose to take. Nanotechnologies will provide finished materials in some cases, which could appear in the label of a product to alert the consumer and give them choice. But in many cases, nano substances will serve as intermediates or raw materials or catalysts, substances which can not be labeled, and which therefore could evoke concern because people are going to be exposed to them without any choice.
We worry more about risks that are new than the same risk after we’ve lived with it for a while. While carbon black and some nano materials have been around for a while, many nano materials and products are new, with different behavioral characteristics than anything we’ve ever known. And of course the precise ability to manipulate things on a nano scale is new. This too could feed greater public apprehension about this technology.
And we tend to worry more about risks from which we personally get less benefit, and vice versa. For some nanotechnologies, for some people, the personal benefits may well outweigh the risks. But when they don’t – or when the benefits principally accrue to someone else - fear and resistance could rise.
It is important to respect the reality and the fundamental roots of these perception factors. They can not be manipulated away or circumvented with a clever press release, website, or a few open public meetings and dialogue. Human biology has found that the brain is constructed in such a way that external information is sent to the subcortical organs that generate a fear response before that information gets to the part of the brain that reasons and thinks “rationally”. In short, we fear first and think second. No press release can undo that biology. It is quite likely that, because of some of the characteristics of nanotechnology listed above (human-made, hard to understand, imposed, new, lack of trust in industry), that if the first way people hear about it involves some hint of threat or negativity, that the initial reaction many people have will be worry and concern.
Moreover, the brain is constructed such that circuits stimulating a ‘fear’ response are more numerous than those bringing rationality and reason into the cognitive process of risk perception. In short, not only do we fear first and think second, we fear more, and think less.
Again, this suggests the likelihood that first impressions many people will have of nanotechnology will be predominated by caution and concern.
Fortunately, both the biology and psychology of risk perception have been fairly well characterized. Insights from those fields can guide the design of research to find out how people are likely to react to nanotechnology as it becomes more common, is introduced into their lives, and as it gets more and more attention in the press, a trend already beginning in many places. Research that understands how people are likely to react is the first step toward designing risk management strategies, including risk communication, to address public concerns.
It is imperative that such research be done soon, so it can be used to develop risk management and risk communication strategies that will maximize public understanding of nanotechnology, and public participation in the process of its development and implementation. With these steps, the potentials of this remarkable field can be more fully realized while respecting public concerns and insuring public and environmental health and safety.

This is Your Brain on Fear

So I was walking my dogs in the woods the other day and it happened again. There was this long skinny curving line on the ground, and my rational brain said “That’s a root” and my animal brain screamed “SNAKE! SNAKE!”, and the animal brain won. I froze.

This happens to me all the time, which is dumb for three reasons. First, I KNOW it’s not a snake. Second, this is what I study and teach…the way we human animals perceive risk and how to communicate about risk better, so I should be able to overcome this apparent irrationality. And third, every time it happens I tell myself not to let it happen again…but it does. By the way, this DOESN’T happen to my dogs.

The good news is we understand pretty well how this works…how whenever we encounter something that could be hazardous, that information goes first to the part of the brain that sets off a fight or flight response just in case, and THEN it goes to the parts of the brain that can give it a little thought, and send back the message “You did it again you idiot.” By which time, I’ve already frozen.

It doesn’t matter what the potential threat is. It doesn’t matter whether we see it, smell it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or even if it’s just information assembled in our brain…a thought…or a memory. The same thing happens. The information goes to where we fear first, and to where we think, second.

And then, in the ensuing battle between rationality and gut instinct…guess what? Instinct usually wins, or at least it has the upper hand, again because of wiring in the brain.

So there I am on the trail. My dogs look at me to try to figure out why we’re stopping. I ignore this innocent interrogation and move on. And I am reminded once again that talking to people about risk a messy affair. Most risk communication just tries to find really clear ways to explain the facts, to educate. But if just learning the facts was enough, I wouldn’t be freezing when I saw a root on the ground in the woods. If just the facts were enough, we probably wouldn’t be as afraid as we all are about a lot of things…like terrorism (the fear of which helped launch a war) or nuclear power, or industrial chemicals…and we’d probably be more afraid of the things that are much more likely to kill us, like heart disease (it kills 2200 Americans every day), and stroke, and motor vehicle crashes and other accidents.

I find that if I want to help my friends make informed, healthy choices about the risks they face…well, yes, it might help to offer what few facts I can…but I also have to respect their fears, and not just say ”Here are the Facts. Calm Down”. I have to respectfully help them know that risk perception is a combination of facts AND feelings, and though both are valid, sometimes the feelings can lead to behaviors that actually increase the risk. Just knowing that challenges me to think about risks more thoroughly.

Unless, of course, it’s another root in the shadows at my feet. Maybe I should just let my dogs walk ahead of me.

CLIMATE CHANGE - What, ME worry?

Anyone interested in climate change paid close attention to the December meetings in Bali, where the world’s leaders worked on how to deal with this unprecedented global threat. The meetings took place under the challenge of the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, who said “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

But as policy makers focused their attention on the Bali meetings, the rest of us were paying attention to the same things we always do; our health, our jobs, our personal budget, our spouses or love lives, the daily commute, etc. The policy makers in Bali considered climate change from their usual perspective, as if looking down on the earth from high above. But we don’t live up there. We live down here. We don’t live on a planet. We live in our homes and our neighborhoods. We don’t live in the climate of the earth. We live in the weather of our daily lives.

That chasm in perspectives, between the global view and the local, could be the biggest obstacle to meeting Dr. Pachauri’s challenge. The things we need to do at the system level will have impacts at the personal. But we may not be willing to accept those impacts, because most of us don’t see how climate change actually threatens us. The wisest policies agreed to in Bali and subsequently will come to little without public support. The leaders dealing with climate change at ’defining moment’ must devise solutions that will work globally, and appeal locally.

Ask yourself this; Over the next 20 years, can you name one specific way that climate change will have a serious, negative, direct impact on you or your family? Most of us can’t answer that question. You probably know that climate change will have all sorts of serious negative impacts, but not how it’s going to impact you directly. A survey of public perceptions of climate change by Anthony Leiserowitz, “Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery, and Values” found that while an overwhelming majority of respondents believed that climate change is real and that we should do something about it, only 12% were most concerned about the effects of climate change on them. 50% were most concerned about effects on the U.S. as a whole. 18% were most worried about effects on nonhuman nature. 10% weren’t worried about the effects of climate change at all. Small wonder, then, that the study found the following support in the United States for various ways to deal with climate change.

US Reduce Emissions - 90%
Kyoto Protocol - 88%
Increase CAFE standards - 79%
Regulate CO2 - 77%
Business tax - 31%
Gas tax - 17%


People are ready to support ideas. Fewer are ready to support spending what it will take to make those ideas reality.

Or consider a Globescan survey of 22,000 people in 21 nations released by the BBC in November. 83% said personal changes in lifestyle are needed to help combat climate change. But when asked if they themselves would be willing to make such changes, the number goes down. It’s still large, 70%, but note that it goes down. Fewer still, 61%, agree with the idea of paying higher energy costs. Ask them if they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to combat the problem and it effectively becomes a toss up, 50% saying yes, 44% saying no.

The trend is similar in most surveys. An overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. and around the world believe that climate change is a real threat, but when you ask people what should be done about it, as the cost to them goes up, their readiness to act goes down. That bodes poorly for the prospect of public support for the changes we need to make to address the problem.

Research into the ways humans perceive risk has found that, not surprisingly, we worry more about things that could happen to us than about things which threaten others. The survey evidence makes pretty clear that the “ME” factor is not much at work in most people’s perceptions of climate change. Which makes it unduly hopeful to expect people to give up the benefits of maintaining their current lifestyles? Why would they agree to pay higher energy bills, or gasoline taxes, or more for goods and services whose prices rise because of CO2 trading? The benefits of the comfortable status quo outweigh the minimal risks that we think climate change poses to us personally.

The science and policy communities tend to see the issue through their own professional lenses of fact and science and reason. The science of human behavior, particularly the psychology of risk perception, robustly shows that we use two systems to make judgments about risk; reason and affect, facts and feelings. It is simply naïve to disregard this inescapable truth and presume that reason and intellect alone will carry the day. That's just not how the human animal behaves. Even as potentially catastrophic as climate change might be, if people don't sense climate change as a direct personal threat, reason alone won't convince them that the costs of action are worth it.

There are still too few scientists and policy leaders describing the potential impacts of climate change on a local level. This is an admittedly dicey business because it’s hard to know specifically what changing the climate of the planet is going to do to Denver or Delhi or Dusseldorf. But there is plenty of scientific evidence of the harm climate change might do at the local level. These potential local risks need to be emphasized, in the concrete terms that will give people more of an idea of what climate change might do to them.

The costs of policies to deal with this global challenge also have to be presented in local terms. What will carbon sequestration or CO2 trading do to the prices of the goods and services we buy? What will requiring renewable energy sources do to our electricity bills? How might energy efficiency requirements cost us money, or perhaps save us money?


Many scientists from a wide range of fields have built the evidentiary case for climate change, and identified a range of solutions. But far too little attention has been given to the science of risk perception, and the tools of risk communication, to build a base of support for those solutions. Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Program, said that the ominous IPCC report released last fall sends a message; “What we need is a new ethic in which every person changes lifestyle, attitude and behavior.” A wonderful goal, but unlikely to happen unless individuals are more worried about how climate change might affect them directly. As the leaders of the world move on in the wake of Bali, they need to remember the real people in the local neighborhoods of our global village who will have a lot to say about whether the policies they choose will succeed.

Cloned Food - "Waiter, my burger tastes like test tube."

Choices, Choices.

Most risks usually involve tradeoffs. We like dessert and fried food so we take the risk of being overweight. We enjoy that nice healthy tan so we're willing to run the risk of skin cancer. We lead busy lives, so we use our cell phones when we drive and dismiss the danger of distracted driving.

But those are all matters of choice. Now comes a new risk-risk tradeoff that could be in our stores soon, over which we might not have any choice at all. We may soon have milk or meat from cattle, pigs, or goats which are clones, copies of the original animal but conceived in the lab, not the uterus. The farmer just has to identify the animals with the traits that produce more meat or richer milk, and copy them, from the DNA up. Those breed stock animals will be used to generate offspring with the superior traits. So what’ll it be, diner? Beef that started out the old fashioned way, or beef from descendants of a cow that never knew its mother...never HAD a mother?

The FDA says this is safe. They studied cloned animals for 6 years before recently declaring that meat and milk from cow A is equivalent to meat and milk from Cow B. But the question of safety isn't just one of lab analysis. Safety is a matter of how we feel. And a Pew Institute study found that 43% of Americans feel that cloned food is unsafe (64% aren't sure). Said one opponent of cloned animal products to the FDA “I would rather pay more for natural processed food (than) have what was cooked up in some science lab.” So show me the company that wants to be the first to bring such products to market.

The problem is, the FDA has not required food produced this way to carry some sort of label. This is just what industry wanted. But it's a big mistake.

Remember, we're less afraid of risks when we have some choice. A risk we take on our own feels less frightening that one which is imposed. No label = No choice. The possibility that there may be something different about one gallon of milk compared to the next, but we won’t know it because the difference won’t be on the label, makes many of us leery. The FDA assures us that cloned product is equivalent to what we eat now. But the Pew survey found that 64% of us aren’t sure, so we want to be able to make that choice ourselves. As the Consumer Federation of America complained, "The products will not be labeled as such and American consumers will have no way to avoid consuming them."

A label to give us choice makes sense, for the consumer and the for the food industry. By giving people choice - good for consumers - labeling will reduce opposition to cloned food products, probably enough to allow them to come to market - good for the food industry. Want proof that this works? Concern in Europe about genetically modified foods went down (not away, but down) after labels appeared telling consumers which foods contained GM products. In the U.S., producers are loathe to use irradiation to sanitize food - also safe and legal - for fear that consumers won’t buy something labeled as irradiated. Yet in test markets where such products have been sold, bearing a label that identifies the food as having been treated with radiation to kill germs, consumers buy these products, in part, they say, because the label lets them choose for themselves.

Will labeling give consumers all the facts they need to make a fully rational information-based choice? Of course not. The GM food label doesn’t. The irradiated food label doesn’t. A label that says something general like “Contains products from cloned animals” is not exactly full disclosure. But it’s enough. Enough to say to the consuming public that our government acknowledges our concerns and respects that we should have the final say about what we eat.

Notwithstanding the science that it’s safe, this stuff is scary to some. The FDA needs to look beyond the science of animal biology to the psychological study of risk perception, which explains why our very real fears often don't match what scientists say are the facts. Requiring a label on food from cloned animals or their offspring could go a long way toward allaying consumer concerns, and allow a food technology that promises more, healthier, and cheaper food to move forward, without being forced down anyone’s throat.

Slow Down, Doctors Frankenstein

The main character in Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” has always been known by that name. Frankenstein. But in the book, the new life form created by Dr. Victor Frankenstein has no name. In public talks, Shelley was said to have referred to the creature as “Adam”…the human created in the Bible by God. The subtitle of the book is “The Modern Prometheus”…another God who, according to some versions of Greek myth, created Man.

Now we are a significant scientific step closer to the day when the creators of life will be us, not in the stories of novel and myth, but in our modern laboratories. A group of scientists has taken the DNA out of one bacterium, put it into a bacterium of a similar but different species, and watched as the inserted DNA took over and turned the host cell into a replica of the species from which the DNA first came. Now all we have to do is manufacture the DNA ourselves, add own specifications, and we will have the ability to create new, completely synthetic, forms of life.

We’re not quite at the moment when Igor throws the switch and the voltage brings Dr. Frankenstein’s creation to life. But this work has brought us much closer. It has also brought us closer to a dangerous conflict between scientific progress and public perception. Public fear that scientists are creating new, synthetic forms of life….playing God in the lab. …could bring this work, with its risks and its phenomenal potential benefits, to a screeching halt.


Recent history bears this out. There was public apprehension about and resistance to recombinant DNA research in the 70’s. Uncertainty was high, and fear followed close behind. Scientists were alleged to be “toying with life”. Legislative restrictions started to limit such work. Experiments were shut down. Progress in the field slowed dramatically.
The relatively tepid resistance to that earlier work will pale compared to the public uproar sure to erupt when scientists announce they have manufactured DNA, put it in a cell, and created life. Reaction to that could interfere with progress in life sciences for years.

As was the case with recombinant DNA research in the 70’s, the science of manipulating life is charging ahead with all the energy of human curiosity, the seduction of ego, the lure of riches, and the promise of solutions to many of our most pressing health and environmental problems. And as was the case with recombinant DNA science, while the ethical implications of synthetic life science are being considered, the public perception implications are not. Far too little is being done to communicate to the public about this work; the safety controls under which it is done, the great benefits it can bring, the respect that scientists have (or should have) for public concerns, and their willingness to develop and live by self-controls.

Again, the recombinant DNA episode instructs. As the pressure mounted back then, researchers gathered with lawyers and doctors at a conference near Asilomar State Beach in California. They came up with a long list of biological safety procedures, self-imposed legal restrictions, and the vital acknowledgment that for scientific knowledge to advance, scientists also have to develop guidelines for how their work should be regulated.

The participants at Asilomar also recognized the need to help the public understand their work, to demystify their science, to respect and address public apprehension. Many of them engaged much more actively with the press and accepted the responsibility that communicating about their work to the general public was nearly as important as the work itself.

Asilomar was in many ways an act of self-interest. Nonetheless, by recognizing and responding to public apprehension in tangible ways, the participants at Asilomar took a vital step in re-establishing public trust in science, which in turn has allowed for decades of progress in biology that has put us on the brink of being able to create synthetic life.

But the lessons of Asilomar seem to have faded. The leaders in the field of synthetic life science need to recognize the concerns the public is starting to have about their work…ethical concerns, safety concerns…and deal with our apprehensions actively, now, before Igor throws the switch and some lab creates a life form in a glass beaker that has never existed on earth before. They need to tell us what they are doing to keep their work safe. They need to tell us what they are doing to try to develop new ways of improving safety. They need to tell us how they, and we as a society, might oversee their work in ways that will allow progress but avoid harm. They need to simply explain what they’re doing, to reduce uncertainty and the fear that goes with it. They need to demonstrate that they take our worries seriously, and not just give those worries lip service while they chase their Nobel Prizes, patents, and personal fortunes.

The ability to construct DNA to our specifications and insert it into living cells, the ability to powerfully influence all biological life, has profound ethical and safety concerns. But it also offers almost unimaginable promise, to eliminate hunger, clean the environment, cure disease. Far less of that promise will be realized if the men and women doing this work don’t recognize and address our concerns about what they are doing. Otherwise they may learn how to create their Adam, only to find that, out of fear, we want to chase down what they have done and kill it.

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