The Goddess of Dystopia

either way we are doomed.

Listen to some eloquent purveyors of prophesy.

Margaret Atwood, Canada-born Booker Prize winner, says she began her latest novel Oryx and Crake with a brown box full of clippings on the exploits of geneticists and a map of the world. The story is chilling. It is some time at the end of our century. Jimmy, once a happy-go-lucky fellow, has been cast away from his world. Human-like creatures genetically engineered by his old friend, Crake, have taken over. They are biological marvels. Good-looking, emotion-less, programmed to smell of citrus (to keep away mosquitoes) — and content with an eco-friendly diet of grass and leaves — these Children of Crake keep turning to Jimmy with questions. “What is toast?” “What is chaos?” “What’s a disease?” Global warming and disappearance of other humans have reduced Jimmy to foraging daily for sustenance and dreaming back to his vanished life to remember words, to identify the forces that wheeled him to this lonely hell.

Atwood places that vanished life too in the future, but its dynamics are eerily familiar. The rich and cerebral live in gated communities, safe from the unprivileged hordes in the pleeblands. Jimmy’s father hops lucratively from companies like OrganInc Farms to HelthWyzer. Within these compounds wealth is created and human life (for those who can afford it) ameliorated with the creation of creatures like pigoons (pigs transgenically modified to grow human tissues) and rakunks (a racoon-skunk hybrid that doesn’t smell or have a bad temper).

And Atwood’s dystopia is complete with the downgradation of the arts. Whizkids like Crake go to the Watson-Crick Institute (which is “like going to Harvard before it was drowned”) and dreamy drifters like Jimmy to the Martha Graham Academy (“named after some gory old dance goddess of the 20th century”). All because of gene hunters.

A bit unfair, wouldn’t you say, in the anniversary year of one of modern science’s brightest moments. Fifty springs ago James Watson and Francis Crick burst into a Cambridge pub announcing they’d discovered the secret of life, they’d cracked the double helix structure of the DNA. That discovery fostered a better understanding of life, it facilitated deeper biological inquiries, it promised cures and treatment for a variety of ills like Alzheimer’s and dysfunctional organs.

How did the dream sour so soon? After all, just a couple of years ago we were optimistically looking to the years ahead as the Biotech Century, to a rapid ascent up the spiral staircase. How have we got ourselves stranded in the middle of this nightmare?

It could be the extremism of the anti-GM lobby. With farmers and consumers happy enough with crops like genetically modified cotton, with reduced pesticide consumption and increased yields, the movement needs more stirring images of apocalypse to make an impact. For them, it’s but an easy leap rom transgenic tomatoes that transport well to glassy-eyed clones of dead dictators — from vitamin-fortified rice to social segregation between a genetically enhanced upper class and a biologically inferior majority. It, of course, does not help any that enthusiasts of genetic engineering like Watson veer to the other extreme and foresee a day when children with hereditary ailments that could have been cured before birth will take their parents to court.

The very idea has driven Francis Fukuyama, who foretold the end of history when the communist regimes tumbled in East Europe in the late 1980s, to rewrite his thesis. The end of history, he now says in Our Posthuman Future, does not lie in the triumph of liberal democracy: “there could be no end of history unless there was an end to science… but we are nowhere near the end of science, and indeed seem to be in the midst of a monumental period of advance in life sciences.”

The possible fallout of advances in genetic engineering is so horrifying, he argues, that greater political control over the uses of S&T is imperative, that a libertarian approach is untenable. Governments must agree forthwith to put in place a regulatory regime. Scientists must congregate and okay voluntary bans on experimentation.

Surprisingly, many scientists agree. The buzzword in science journals these days is the precautionary principle, to suspend work on anything with no obvious gain to offset possible risk.

Among them is cosmologist Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, who predicts in his new book Our Final Hour that human civilisation has only a 50/50 chance of surviving the 21st century.

Why? Why do they want us to tie our own hands at a time when biomedical advances include assistance for those suffering from Huntington’s disease and possible help for Parkinson’s sufferers? It could be a free-floating anxiety, in these times of terrorism and SARS.

Remember that old quip, never prophesy, especially about the future. The alternative is a matrix of manufactured dread, a matrix beyond which lies a rational choice between known benefits and possible risks, a happy hunting ground between Luddite and unabashedly libertarian extremes. As for Atwood’s anti-utopia, life doesn’t always imitate art.