When Donna Haraway first began writing the Cyborg Manifesto, she included a lot of material on genetic engineering (we’re talking about the early 1980s here). And I’ve written here about Bruce Sterling’s division of cyborgs into Shapers and Mechanists, with the former using genetic shaping to produce augmented humans. Now, there are two Shaper projects in the Mad Science section of Wired Magazine, one aimed at saving bees, the other at saving our soil.
There’s something about how bees do all this free work for the planet that has always affected me. Busy bees, indeed; what would we do if we lost bee labor (just part of the economy of the natural world that capitalism simply rips off)? But then you read about the varroa, a parasite that causes huge numbers of bee deaths. According to the article, “With colony losses fluctuating around 30 to 40 percent every year, scientists and commercial interests are desperate for anything that’ll help these pollinators thrive.”
Enter Marla Spivak, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota. She found a way to select for bee behavior that would respond to the varroa threat (why do I keep thinking of the Borg?). In her work, she
used liquid nitrogen to kill a handful of baby bees inside their wax-sealed hexagonal cells. And then she waited. In some colonies, bees would never uncap the cells and clean them out. But in particularly neat-freak colonies, the corpses were gone in 24 hours or less. That’s the trait she selected for, eventually coming up with a line she dubbed Minnesota hygienic. In colonies of Minnesota hygienic bees that get invaded by varroa—an eight-legged mite that drinks bee blood and lays its eggs inside cells—the bees uncap and clean out the cells containing infected, sick pupae before baby mites grow and reproduce—a contraceptive counterpunch.
Now that breeder are using her methods, she is moving on to possibly making the better bee, focusing on the propolis that the Borg like bees use as a “a sort of collective immune system.”
So. What sort of cyborg measurements should we use to see whether this kind of work is simply restorative (restoring bees to an ability to pollinate) or augmentative (what other ‘powers’ should we select for? What possible side effects might result from such human-guided selection?).
In a second article, the problem isn’t the death of bee colonies, but it is a similar issue of the threat to systems we depend on for food. In this second case the issue is the way traditional agriculture has exhausted the soil. And the answer is the same: genetics. Here plant geneticist Wes Jackson wants to replace soil-depleting annuals with genetic versions that incorporate the virtues of perennials, plants “that build extensive root networks and healthy soil, conserve water, and recycle nutrients.” Some examples of Jackson’s work: domesticated Kernza (“a perennial relative of wheat”), perennialized sunflower-Jerusalem artichoke hybrids, and Illinois bundleflower (a native legume).
Again, this work sounds a lot more future-friendly than the usual bogus arguments for the genetic engineering of plants like GE alfalfa (recently approved by the FDA in spite of huge evidence of corruption; see my post on this). And yet…the Wired article makes it sound like it isn’t a problem with the Green Revolution or Big Ag. Hmmm. Really? They haven’t made this problem worse? Really? Perhaps it is the Wired rhetoric, but again, how would we know if this approach is being evaluated, and by what measuring stick.
Both of these projects raise the question of the genetic hybrid cyborgs that don’t happen to be human. And reading Windup Girl, one gets the distinct impression that large corporations such as Monsanto are likely to scoop up such technologies, and allow the unfree market to once again (using the Hidden Hand of profit and short term analysis where bottom lines are in money and not sustainability or even survival) determine which genetic cyborgs will flourish under which conditions.
So. How then ought we to proceed as a species intent on sustainability and survival? I keep coming back to the Jared Diamond book Collapse. Though I understand the problems with his analysis (based as it is on island populations, often on early technological ones), I keep thinking of the Vikings who starved to death and ate their calves when Erik the Red’s Greenland colony overwhelmed the tundra ecology’s ability to sustain their cattle raising culture. They starved to death because, although the nearby ocean teemed with fish, they didn’t turn to that food source. Why? Because that is what the natives ate; if Vikings began eating fish, they would no longer be Vikings.
Both of these cyborg technologies purport to solve problems that are potentially catastrophic. Neither technology addresses the obstacles to success facing such techno-solutions. And yet…it does seem that in some small spate of years, humans – humanity really – will face some profoundly difficult choices after peak oil.
I really want to believe that we will become cyborg sophisticated, and treat the two halves of this hybrid – the cybernetic and the organic – with equal care. Otherwise, we’ll be in the land of geoengineering as the best tool lying around to fix a dying planet. And I’m not sanguine about such a technology sky hook getting the job done at the 11th hour.
PS After I’d written this, I came across a short article in Discover Magazine about cyborg bees. The photo in the blog is from this article. Here is the blurb:
This orchid bee was one of 16 outfitted with a radio transmitter backpack as part of a study of the insects’ flight habits by ecologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “We can ask animals how they see their surroundings by observing their movement,” says lead researcher Martin Wikelski. Teams on the ground tracked the pollinators while a helicopter crew provided additional monitoring. The results, published in May, indicate that individual bees typically cover a home area of about 100 acres, but some set off on long-distance flights. One intrepid bee took a three-mile jaunt across the Panama Canal, where it spent a few days before returning home. [http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jan-feb/77]
The study in toto is called Large-Range Movements of Neotropical Orchid Bees Observed via Radio Telemetry and can be found at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010738
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