Distraction - Bruce Sterling [46]
“And what will that bring us—your brand-new Cognition Age?”
“Nobody knows. If we knew what the outcome would be in advance, then it wouldn’t be basic research.”
Oscar blinked. “Let me get this straight. You’re dedicating your life to neural research, but you can’t tell us what it will do to us?”
“I can’t know. There’s no way to judge. Society is too complex a phenomenon, even science is too complex. We’ve just learned so incredibly much in the past hundred years.… Knowledge gets fragmented and ultraspecialized, scientists know more and more about less and less.… You can’t make informed decisions about the social results of scientific advances. We scientists don’t even really know what we know anymore.”
“That’s pretty frank, all right. You’re frankly abandoning the field, and leaving science policy decisions to the random guesses of bureaucrats.”
“Random guesses don’t work either.”
Oscar rubbed his chin. “That sounds bad. Really bad. It sounds hopeless.”
“Then maybe I’m painting too dark a picture. There’s a lot of life in science—we’ve made some major historic discoveries, even in the past ten years.”
“Name some for me,” Oscar said.
“Well, we now know that eighty percent of the earth’s biomass is subterranean.”
Oscar shrugged. “Okay.”
“We know there’s bacterial life in interstellar space,” Greta said. “You have to admit that was big.”
“Sure.”
“There have been huge medical advances in this century. We’ve defeated most cancers. We cured AIDS. We can treat pseudo-estrogen damage,” Greta said. “We have one-shot cures for cocaine and heroin addiction.”
“Too bad about alcoholism, though.”
“We can regenerate damaged nerves. We’ve got lab rats smarter than dogs now.”
“Oh, and of course there’s cosmological torque,” Oscar said. They both laughed. It seemed impossible that they could have overlooked cosmological torque, even for an instant.
“Let me switch perspectives,” Oscar said. “Tell me about the Collaboratory. What’s your core competency here in Buna—what does this facility do for America that is unique and irreplaceable?”
“Well, there’s our genetic archives, of course. That’s what we’re world-famous for.”
“Hmmm,” Oscar said. “I recognize that gathering all those specimens from all around the world was very difficult and expensive. But with modern techniques, couldn’t you duplicate those genes and store them almost anywhere?”
“But this is the logical place for them. We have the genetic safety vaults. And the giant safety dome.”
“Do you really need a safety dome? Genetic engineering is safe and simple nowadays.”
“Well, sure, but if America ever needs a Class IV biowar facility, we’ve got one right here.” Greta stopped. “And we have first-class agricultural facilities. A lot of crop research goes on here. Overclass people still eat crops. They love our rare animals, too.”
“Rich people eat natural crops,” Oscar said.
“Our biotech research has built whole new industries,” Greta insisted. “Look at what we’ve done to transform Louisiana.”
“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Do you think I should emphasize that in the Senate hearings?”
Greta looked glum.
Oscar nodded. “Let me level with you, Greta, just like you did with me. Let me tell you about the reception you might expect in today’s Congress. The country’s broke, and your administrative costs are through the roof. You have well over two thousand people on the federal payroll here. You don’t generate any revenue yourselves—outside of winning the favor of passing celebrities with nice gifts of fluffy rare animals. You have no major military or national security interests. The biotech revolution is a long-established fact now, it’s not cutting edge anymore,