The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [143]
Genes
Every advance in human genetics and reproductive medicine is greeted with predictions of Frankenstein doom. The first attempts at genetic engineering of bacteria in the 1970s led to moratoria and bans. The activist Jeremy Rifkin said that biotechnology threatened ‘a form of annihilation every bit as deadly as nuclear holocaust’. Yet the result was life-saving therapies for diabetics and haemophiliacs. Shortly after, the pioneers of in-vitro fertilisation, Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, were vilified on all sides, even by their fellow doctors, for their supposedly dangerous experiments. When Louise Brown was born in 1978, the Vatican called it ‘an event that can have very grave consequences for humanity’. Yet their invention has brought no eugenic abuse and heartfuls of individual happiness to millions of childless couples.
When the human genome was sequenced in 2000, pessimism soon dominated the commentary. People will fiddle with their children’s genes, moaned some: yes, to avoid passing on terrible inherited diseases like Tay-Sachs or Huntingdon’s. Predicting illness will make health insurance impossible, groaned others – yet health insurers’ rates are so high precisely because they cannot predict who will get ill, so predicting and preventing will bring some costs down. Diagnosis will run far ahead of therapy, wailed others, so people will know their fate but not know how to cure themselves. In practice, there are very few diseases for which some kind of preventive intervention cannot be tried once a predisposition is known, and knowing is still and always should be voluntary. Then, to cap it all, within a few years the pessimists were complaining that genetic insights were coming disappointingly slowly.
Plague
By the late 1990s, the modish cause for doom was the resurgence of infectious disease. The combination of an incurable and brand-new sexually transmitted disease, AIDS, with a growing resistance to antibiotics among hospital bacteria gave genuine cause for fear. But it also sparked a search for the next and still more lethal plague. Book after book trumpeted the alarm: The Hot Zone, Outbreak, Virus X, The Coming Plague. Hundreds of millions of people were going to die. Infectious disease was on its way back into human affairs as part of the planet’s revenge for human despoliation of the environment. The human race was due a culling. Some of the more misanthropic authors, sounding like Puritan preachers, even expressed something approaching satisfaction at the thought. Yet once again, the auction of competitively pessimistic forecasts that surrounded Ebola virus, Lassa fever, hanta virus and SARS proved ridiculously overblown. Ebola outbreaks – which wreaked horrible disintegration upon their victims and wiped out whole villages in the Congo a handful of times in the 1990s before fading away each time – proved to be very local, easily controlled and partly man-made. That is to say, it soon emerged that what was turning this occasional bat-borne infection into a raging local epidemic was such things as quinine injections given by well-meaning nuns with re-usable syringes. Even AIDS, while terrible especially in Africa, has failed to live up to the dire predictions commonly made in the late 1980s for its global effects. The number of new cases of HIV/AIDS worldwide has been falling for nearly a decade, and the number of deaths from the disease has been falling since 2005. The proportion of the population infected with HIV is falling, even in southern Africa. The epidemic is far from over, and much more could be done, but the news is getting slowly better, not worse.
Remember mad-cow disease? Between 1980 and 1996 about 750,000 cattle infected with the brain-destroying prion called vCJD entered the human food chain in Britain. When it became clear in 1996 that some people were dying of the same agent, acquired from eating infected beef, there was perhaps understandably