Recipient of a Silver Medal for science writing in the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Awards, INTERVENTION challenges two of the most sacred tenets of modern society, innovation and technology, from the perspective of the unique risks they present. Using genetic engineering as its model, it paints a vivid picture of the scientific uncertainties that biotech risk evaluations dismiss or ignore, and lays bare the power and money conflicts between academia, industry and regulators that have sped these risky innovations to the market. 'Intervention' champions an alternative method for assessing the risks of technology, developed by the world's top risk experts, that can eliminate such conflicts, help regain public trust in science and government, and drive research and development toward more useful, safer products.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
Perhaps the most balanced and readable look yet at assessing the risks of genetic engineering. ... One can only hope that the meticulously-argued 'Intervention' will receive a wide reading in Washington, where our national risk assessment policies are forged. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine that we will manage to avoid another thalidomide or Chernobyl, but this time with potential damages that could span continents and last for generations. ... 'Intervention' makes a strong case that it doesn t have to be that way. --Michael Rogers, 'The Practical Futurist,' MSNBC
I learned more about biotechnology from this book than any other I've read ... Caruso lays out in chilling detail exactly why even (perhaps especially) those of us who are strong supporters of science and innovation ought to be extremely concerned about the unintended consequences of contemporary biotechnological industrial research.... ['Intervention'] offers such clear thinking it becomes a step towards solutions. And when the person ringing the alarm bell is no luddite, but one of our brightest technology writers, the alarm demands our attention. --Alex Steffen, founder, Worldchanging.com
In Intervention, Denise Caruso challenges scientists to do a better job of evaluating the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and communicating unbiased findings to the public ... One of the major strengths of the book is its accessibility to a general audience. ... Sadly, many of the experts and industry representatives whom she targets are unlikely to read the book, although they should. --Allison Snow, Ph.D., in 'Nature'
I learned more about biotechnology from this book than any other I've read ... Caruso lays out in chilling detail exactly why even (perhaps especially) those of us who are strong supporters of science and innovation ought to be extremely concerned about the unintended consequences of contemporary biotechnological industrial research.... ['Intervention'] offers such clear thinking it becomes a step towards solutions. And when the person ringing the alarm bell is no luddite, but one of our brightest technology writers, the alarm demands our attention. --Alex Steffen, founder, Worldchanging.com
In Intervention, Denise Caruso challenges scientists to do a better job of evaluating the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and communicating unbiased findings to the public ... One of the major strengths of the book is its accessibility to a general audience. ... Sadly, many of the experts and industry representatives whom she targets are unlikely to read the book, although they should. --Allison Snow, Ph.D., in 'Nature'
About the Author
Denise Caruso is the co-founder and executive director of The Hybrid Vigor Institute, a not-for-profit research and consulting practice focused on collaborative research and problem-solving. She writes the Re:framing column in the Sunday Business section of The New York Times. Also a veteran technology journalist and analyst, she began covering the personal computer era in the early 1980s for a variety of trade and national publications. For the five years prior to founding Hybrid Vigor in 2000, Caruso wrote the Digital Commerce column for the Times.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
By P. Shanks
Amazon Verified Purchase
Caruso is trying to operate in the difficult space between unquestioning supporters of biotech and reflexive opponents of the technology. Her careful examination of the regulatory process becomes an indictment of it, but also points a way towards reform. The book is particularly good on questioning both the "benefit" and the "risk" sides of the risk/benefit equation, and in pointing out the repeated tendency of regulators to look only at what they know they can see, rather than asking deeping and wider questions.
I gather that the original publisher backed away from the book because it was not sensational enough. That in itself is an indictment not only of publishing but of our civil discourse, because this is an important book that deserves a wide audience. Scientists should read it to get a broader perspective; non-scientists should read it because we are all being affected by decisions on the use of biotechnology.
I gather that the original publisher backed away from the book because it was not sensational enough. That in itself is an indictment not only of publishing but of our civil discourse, because this is an important book that deserves a wide audience. Scientists should read it to get a broader perspective; non-scientists should read it because we are all being affected by decisions on the use of biotechnology.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Verified Purchase
Denise Caruso successsfully brings her considerable writing and science policy skills to bear on a fundamentally important issue. Society is confronted by increasingly complex and difficult decisions as science progresses and the scientific community itself is seldom well equipped or credible to serve as the advocate. Caruso provides a critical bridge between the advances of science and the needs and values of society.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Roger Brent
In Intervention, Denise Caruso, a columnist for the New York Times, has written an important and timely book. The set of people who need to read it include but are not limited to policymakers and voters in the US, in the affluent world, and in the developing world.
Intervention is mainly about transgenic organisms. One of the numerous unsolved problems people need to tackle this century is devising a workable regulatory framework for transgenic plants and animals, aka genetically modified organisms, aka organisms into which engineers have dropped pieces of DNA. In the US, the existing regulatory regime is a patchwork. The biggest part of the patchwork comes from at the dawn of recombinant DNA work at the Asilomar conference in 1975. Asilomar led directly to the "NIH guidelines". These guesstimated different levels of potential risk for different kinds of recombinant DNA experiments, mandated lab practices and levels of containment to conduct research at each level, and set up bodies for review and approval of experiments local to each university. Asilomar also brought about the establishment of an overarching national body, the Recombinant Advisory Committee (aka RAC) to rule on the appropriate level of containment for contested experiments, and established mechanisms by which levels of containment could be ratcheted up or down in response to information coming from new experiments, which in practice has led to sunset of most of the most burdensome regulations as the feared risks did not materialize. The regulatory framework affected experiments in universities funded by the US government, but was extended to commercial work via local communities. Individual cities caused, via their control of zoning, biotech firms to follow the NIH rules. Most of this "Asilomar framework" governs recombinant DNA research in lab organisms such as E. coli, yeast, and mice. In the US, use of recombinant DNA in people, for example in gene therapy, is regulated by the FDA, and release of an organism into the environment, for example a herbicide-resistant potato or an oil-eating bacterium, is regulated by the EPA.
Recombinant work is also regulated in other advanced countries, but in no country is there a system of local and national oversight as strong as that in the US. And the US framework, 32 years old, is fraying at the seams. It is showing its age by showing gaps. Many of the issues are due to the Moore's-law-like growth in the scope and power of the technologies, the democratization of the technical ability to hack DNA, the adoption of recombinant DNA methods by new classes of hackers , and the use of recombinant DNA to engineer different classes of organisms.
The Asilomar framework was designed to regulate research in universities and, extended by zoning regulations, in companies. The Asilomar framework was not designed for a world in which the number of people with basic training in recombinant DNA methods has increased from hundreds to tens or hundreds of thousands worldwide. For example, in most US localities, the only framework that governs recombinant DNA work by private citizens is that sometimes provided by local zoning regulations; and this at a time when affluent parents can and do outfit labs for their high school aged children.
But perhaps the most public change since Asilomar is the increase in the number of different engineered organisms intended to be used outside of the lab. Here, agriculture has emerged as a flashpoint. Last year most of the dollar value of the US corn, soybean, and cotton crops came from transgenic plants. Although introduction of recombinant crops in Europe is stalled, due in part to old fashioned trade protectionism, worldwide, farmers are planting them everywhere they can, from Brasil, where the Lula regime retroactively legalized herbicide resistant soybean seed in the face of the fact that farmers were enthusiastically smuggling in metric tons of the stuff from Argentina and Paraguay, to China and India, where genetically modified insect-resistant rice seed, probably made by multiple independent firms, has been sold since at least 2005. In agriculture, without outright prohibition, the spread of genetically engineered plants and animals is likely to continue until most species of economic importance have been engineered. But even though farmers may love the stuff, it turns out that people tend to view technologies such the recombinant DNA that enables transgenic plants as affecting their lives. Moreover, many may feel that the changes the technologies are bringing are occurring without their understanding or consent.
In Intervention, Caruso uses this steady increase in the contribution of genetic engineering to the economy as a test case, an example to consider how new technologies might be regulated. The book requires the reader to face the question of what an international regulatory framework for recombinant DNA work and genetic engineering of organisms should look like.
Caruso does not lay out solutions, but she does describes processes for involving larger numbers of stakeholders in decisionmaking, promising tactics to provide additional ways for societies to get a handle on the pace of technical change.
Intervention is not horatory, it is not prescriptive. Caruso raises issues and suggests mechanisms that might help address them, but does not provide a ten point set of solutions. I find this aspect of the book to be a strength, although as a consequence the book leaves the reader with many more questions than answers. Here, I will mention two.
First, at the moment, in the US, a new technology is typically regulated only after has been shown to cause harm, and, by law, the degree of regulation is based on assessed risk, and the assessment of risk is supposed to be based on the best science available. Overall, at least for recombinant DNA, I believe that this conceptual framework for regulation has worked pretty well (To my knowledge there has only been one death directly attributable by recombinant DNA (the child Jesse Gelsinger, who died during an experimental gene therapy trial in the 1990s from a dose of a gene therapy vector that should never have been allowed by the local review committee)). But there are other ideas on which regulation can be based. Should the US exchange this basis for regulation for that used in the EU, grounded in "precautionary principle", derived from German Social Democratic legal theory in the 1930s, even if to do so were to carry a cost of delaying the benefits new technologies might bring?
Second, in part because of the science-based risk assessment mandated in the US, people who feel uneasy about a new technology or who simply dislike it are almost always required to assert that their opposition or unease is due to the fact that the technology presents a risk. Why always talk piously about risk if the real issue that one finds some work of engineering distasteful (Caruso even has a term for this, the "ugh factor")? In a democracy, should widespread dislike, by itself, ever constitute grounds for regulating or even prohibiting a technology? If not, why not?
I hope that the publication Denise Caruso's Intervention marks the start of a broader discussion, one that might help societies gain better control of technical change and its consequences.
Intervention is mainly about transgenic organisms. One of the numerous unsolved problems people need to tackle this century is devising a workable regulatory framework for transgenic plants and animals, aka genetically modified organisms, aka organisms into which engineers have dropped pieces of DNA. In the US, the existing regulatory regime is a patchwork. The biggest part of the patchwork comes from at the dawn of recombinant DNA work at the Asilomar conference in 1975. Asilomar led directly to the "NIH guidelines". These guesstimated different levels of potential risk for different kinds of recombinant DNA experiments, mandated lab practices and levels of containment to conduct research at each level, and set up bodies for review and approval of experiments local to each university. Asilomar also brought about the establishment of an overarching national body, the Recombinant Advisory Committee (aka RAC) to rule on the appropriate level of containment for contested experiments, and established mechanisms by which levels of containment could be ratcheted up or down in response to information coming from new experiments, which in practice has led to sunset of most of the most burdensome regulations as the feared risks did not materialize. The regulatory framework affected experiments in universities funded by the US government, but was extended to commercial work via local communities. Individual cities caused, via their control of zoning, biotech firms to follow the NIH rules. Most of this "Asilomar framework" governs recombinant DNA research in lab organisms such as E. coli, yeast, and mice. In the US, use of recombinant DNA in people, for example in gene therapy, is regulated by the FDA, and release of an organism into the environment, for example a herbicide-resistant potato or an oil-eating bacterium, is regulated by the EPA.
Recombinant work is also regulated in other advanced countries, but in no country is there a system of local and national oversight as strong as that in the US. And the US framework, 32 years old, is fraying at the seams. It is showing its age by showing gaps. Many of the issues are due to the Moore's-law-like growth in the scope and power of the technologies, the democratization of the technical ability to hack DNA, the adoption of recombinant DNA methods by new classes of hackers , and the use of recombinant DNA to engineer different classes of organisms.
The Asilomar framework was designed to regulate research in universities and, extended by zoning regulations, in companies. The Asilomar framework was not designed for a world in which the number of people with basic training in recombinant DNA methods has increased from hundreds to tens or hundreds of thousands worldwide. For example, in most US localities, the only framework that governs recombinant DNA work by private citizens is that sometimes provided by local zoning regulations; and this at a time when affluent parents can and do outfit labs for their high school aged children.
But perhaps the most public change since Asilomar is the increase in the number of different engineered organisms intended to be used outside of the lab. Here, agriculture has emerged as a flashpoint. Last year most of the dollar value of the US corn, soybean, and cotton crops came from transgenic plants. Although introduction of recombinant crops in Europe is stalled, due in part to old fashioned trade protectionism, worldwide, farmers are planting them everywhere they can, from Brasil, where the Lula regime retroactively legalized herbicide resistant soybean seed in the face of the fact that farmers were enthusiastically smuggling in metric tons of the stuff from Argentina and Paraguay, to China and India, where genetically modified insect-resistant rice seed, probably made by multiple independent firms, has been sold since at least 2005. In agriculture, without outright prohibition, the spread of genetically engineered plants and animals is likely to continue until most species of economic importance have been engineered. But even though farmers may love the stuff, it turns out that people tend to view technologies such the recombinant DNA that enables transgenic plants as affecting their lives. Moreover, many may feel that the changes the technologies are bringing are occurring without their understanding or consent.
In Intervention, Caruso uses this steady increase in the contribution of genetic engineering to the economy as a test case, an example to consider how new technologies might be regulated. The book requires the reader to face the question of what an international regulatory framework for recombinant DNA work and genetic engineering of organisms should look like.
Caruso does not lay out solutions, but she does describes processes for involving larger numbers of stakeholders in decisionmaking, promising tactics to provide additional ways for societies to get a handle on the pace of technical change.
Intervention is not horatory, it is not prescriptive. Caruso raises issues and suggests mechanisms that might help address them, but does not provide a ten point set of solutions. I find this aspect of the book to be a strength, although as a consequence the book leaves the reader with many more questions than answers. Here, I will mention two.
First, at the moment, in the US, a new technology is typically regulated only after has been shown to cause harm, and, by law, the degree of regulation is based on assessed risk, and the assessment of risk is supposed to be based on the best science available. Overall, at least for recombinant DNA, I believe that this conceptual framework for regulation has worked pretty well (To my knowledge there has only been one death directly attributable by recombinant DNA (the child Jesse Gelsinger, who died during an experimental gene therapy trial in the 1990s from a dose of a gene therapy vector that should never have been allowed by the local review committee)). But there are other ideas on which regulation can be based. Should the US exchange this basis for regulation for that used in the EU, grounded in "precautionary principle", derived from German Social Democratic legal theory in the 1930s, even if to do so were to carry a cost of delaying the benefits new technologies might bring?
Second, in part because of the science-based risk assessment mandated in the US, people who feel uneasy about a new technology or who simply dislike it are almost always required to assert that their opposition or unease is due to the fact that the technology presents a risk. Why always talk piously about risk if the real issue that one finds some work of engineering distasteful (Caruso even has a term for this, the "ugh factor")? In a democracy, should widespread dislike, by itself, ever constitute grounds for regulating or even prohibiting a technology? If not, why not?
I hope that the publication Denise Caruso's Intervention marks the start of a broader discussion, one that might help societies gain better control of technical change and its consequences.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intervention: GMOs, Are We Scared Enough Yet?
If you've become worried about our food after watching Food, Inc. or reading Michael Pollan, or our planet after watching An Inconvenient Truth or the natural disaster du jour on... Read more
Published on May 6, 2010 by David Cardinal
4.0 out of 5 stars
As a whole, a good book
The contemplation of genetic engineering and many other modern technologies frightens many, and a study of this book reveals that the author is one of these people. Read more
Published on January 17, 2010 by Dr. Lee D. Carlson
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Eye Opener on Risk in Our Brave New World
This easy-to-read, cogent analysis of the bio-tech - including genetic engineering - industry serves a critical purpose in the world right now. Read more
Published on May 6, 2008 by Ian Browde
4.0 out of 5 stars
We need more books like this
I am not familiar with genetics, genomics, post genomics and all this stuff, but I read Intervention with a lot of interest, as a guide into the unknown. Read more
Published on November 28, 2007 by Francis Pisani
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Book That Matters
Intervention in one of those books that wakes you up. Not only did I learn a tremendous amount about the potential risks of genetic engineering, I also gained a new understanding... Read more
Published on November 1, 2007 by John Esterle
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intervention is fantastic
Denise Caruso brilliantly articulates issues around genetic engineering with clarity and insight in Intervention. Read more
Published on October 29, 2007 by Tiffany Shlain
5.0 out of 5 stars
Important Book: Buy, Borrow, READ
I bought "Intervention" a couple of months ago and found it extremely enlightening, sobering, and supportive of very very careful and broadly inclusive development in transgenics. Read more
Published on October 27, 2007 by Robert Searfoss
5.0 out of 5 stars
"When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk...
An important and interesting book. Important because of the timing as millions of acres of new food crops could conceivably alter the genetic legacy of the biosphere. Read more
Published on October 26, 2007 by David Thaler
5.0 out of 5 stars
Informing, Cogent, and a little scary
I'm one of those technology-positive people who believe we can solve problems by building better solutions--and I still do. Read more
Published on October 26, 2007 by Nathan Shedroff
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering
I read `Intervention` right after it came out in 2006 and enjoyed it very much. I found it to be an excellent comprehensive survey of the risk issues behind genetic engineering. Read more
Published on October 25, 2007 by George M.
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