Molecular biologist James Shapiro and his colleagues refused to participate any further in what is perhaps the most threatening of all technological enterprises so far -- genetic engineering, the creation of evolutionary new forms of life. Even if this technology were neutral, they argued, the basic control over scientific work in the United States was in the hands of a small minority of industrialists and bureaucrats who have always exploited science for harmful purposes so as to increase their own power. They believed that scientists, and everyone else for that matter, should actively work for radical political changes and that if this means that the progress of science itself may be interrupted that is something we will have to accept. Shapiro resigned from his post, but few have followed his lead. So far, all attempts to bring genetic engineering under social control have failed. To quote the Nobel laureate David Baltimore,
        "Contemporary research in molecular biology has grown up in an era of almost complete permissiveness. Its practitioners have been allowed to decide their own priorities and have met with virtually no restraints on the types of work they can do."

        A few eminent scientists have continued to warn us of the terrible perils of genetic engineering. Erwin Chargaff of Columbia University writes of the
        "awesome irreversibility of what is being contemplated... You can stop splitting the atom, you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs, but **you cannot recall a new form of life.**... An irreversible attack on the biosphere is something so unheard-of, so unthinkable to previous generations, that I could only wish that mine had not been guilty of it."

        Liebe Cavalieri of Cornell University, warns that "a single unrecognized accident could contaminate the entire earth with an ineradicable and dangerous agent that might not reveal its presence until its deadly work was done."
        But Chargaff and Cavalieri represent only a small minority of the scientists involved in genetic engineering which provides the basis of an increasingly big and powerful industry whose irresponsible activities are now totally out of control.
        Our inability to control technological intrusions into the workings of the ecosphere constitutes an ever growing threat to human survival as the scale of the interventions increases.

-- from "The Way: an Ecological World View" Edward Goldsmith