OK, here is number 6 from my presidential platform, in a moment. First just another newspaper note or two, which I will do from time to time when something that happens in the Administration and/or the world echoes with something recently explained in this blog. 

Today's New York Times says on the front page above the fold that as part of the "stimulus" there will be a $1.1 billion program to investigate which medical procedures actually work and which don't, or don't work so well. This echoes directly with yesterday's post about the many reasons for escalating health care costs, and also with the idea of a Federal Health Board proposed by Sen. Daschle and others. This is exactly the sort of thing an FHB would do. The question is, can such a study actually be pulled off, get useful and unarguable results? It's not easy to see how one does this without touching off all sorts of arguments and uncertainties, but I suppose we'll find out. I suppose we'll also find out if this study is a wedge meant to open a crack to create a much larger FHB, one without wise principles of exclusion. Maybe, with all the looming issues in our future concerning biotechnology and the need for triage decisions, we'll have to have a larger government role in health care. Maybe, but the tradeoffs will be ferocious.

Also in today's paper, the Washington Post in this case, Bob Samuelson writes about the similarities between Japan's 1990s' economic doldrums and our own now. He vanquishes conventional wisdom about what happened in Japan. And he agrees with my hunch, back on February 10, above, that what we're seeing is not just the downslope of a typical business cycle but something deeper in the culture. Here's what he wrote toward the end of the column: "Since the early 1980s, American economic growth has depended on a steady rise in consumer spending supported by more debt and increasingly asset prices. . . . The present U.S. slump signals the end of upbeat, consumption-led growth. But its legacy is an overbuilt and overemployed consumption sector, from car dealers to malls. The question is whether our system is adaptive enough to create new sources of growth to fill the void left by retreating shoppers."  That's pretty much what I said, in my own words with more an emphasis on the hopeful end of the throwaway, consumerist, anti-thrift economy we've had since way before the early 1980s, going back at least a quarter century before that. It's nice when you find someone smart who agrees with you.

And now, on to #6, about bioscience and its dangers (as well as promise).

No. 6: Create a new national institution to control biotechnology.

American society is the most history-oblivious, optimistic and market-oriented ever to exist on this planet. For the past century and more, we have been conducting a totally unregulated experiment in the sociology of science on ourselves. Build railroads all over the place if we can? Sure, and who cares what the social, economic and legal implications might be. The internal combustion engine and the interstate highway system? You bet: Pollution, congestion…what’s that? Allow the scale of corporate growth to far outpace any regulatory framework? Why not? Trickle, trickle, trickle down. Television? Right: What harm could that possibly do? Birth control? Yes, indeed, and don’t look back. The Internet, BlackBerries, a cell phone that can double as a toothbrush in a pinch? Um….

Americans commercialize everything our best minds (and our other minds) can invent, let the market take its natural course, and ride each great successive wave of stability-destroying innovation all the way in to the beach. Then we shake our hair dry, take a deep breath, and run back out to catch the next wave. It’s only as an afterthought that most of us ever think to ask if these changes have been worth the costs. Maybe they have been; but not to even wonder about the question as a society has always stuck me as strange. It’s like habitually jumping off the high dive without looking to see if there’s water in the pool just because you like the sensation of hurtling through the air.

Only once in American history did it occur to us to ask whether the government might not have some obligation to think through the consequences of a new technology before letting the market run wild with it. That was with nuclear energy, right after World War II. We created the Atomic Energy Commission to deal with it. Well, contemporary biotechnology is even more fraught with potential for monstrous abuse today even than nuclear energy was in 1945.

And what have we as a nation done about it? Basically, nothing--even as other countries, and the EU as well, have recognized the danger and have begin to act. All we've done is assemble groups of bioethicists to ruminate over the matter, while dangerous problems and horrific precedents have already been set. Leaving this technology to the market has resulted, among other things, in untutored judges ruling that human genes can be patented and owed by corporations. This is outrageous, an abomination to the very spirit of our humanity. We have got to overcome our so-far cavalier approach to arguably the most momentous danger of our century. We need the equivalent of the AEC for biotech, and we need it now.