Heatstroke by Anthony D. Barnosky

Author:Anthony D. Barnosky
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Losing the Parts

Imagine trying to understand the ecology of tropical rainforests by studying environmental changes and interactions among the surviving plants and animals on a vast cattle ranch in the center of a deforested Amazon.

—Nancy Knowlton and Jeremy B. C. Jackson, 20081

AS CIRCUMSTANCE would have it, I live in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, arguably the entrepreneurial capital of the world. This is the place where two guys started a company in a garage and flipped a coin to see whether it should be named Packard-Hewlett or Hewlett-Packard. And where later, in another family garage, two other guys named Jobs and Wozniak started to build personal computers and named their company after Jobs’ favorite fruit, the apple. It’s the home of the start-up company, where you pitch a wild vision to a venture capitalist, or develop a caffeine-fueled idea with your friends, and if things work out as planned, you become a millionaire virtually overnight. When I got there in the 1990s, the dot-com era was gearing up, and the start-ups included companies with strange names like Yahoo! and Google.

Although Silicon Valley takes its name from the silicon chips of the computer industry, that’s not the only kind of entrepreneurism evident there. In 1976, a San Francisco venture capital firm got behind an idea to use the then brand-new dream of genetic engineering to make medicines, pitched by Stanford University biochemist Herbert Boyer and venture capitalist Robert Swanson, an idea that very soon turned into Genentech. Now the region is swarming with biotech firms. And then there’s the recent Silicon Valley biotech buzz, a start-up called 23 and me,2 which bills itself as “a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA,” and has the tagline “genetics just got personal.”3 A swab of saliva, they claim, is all it takes for them to tell you everything your genetic code has to say about your ancestry, what diseases you might be susceptible to, what drugs will be best tailored to help you stay healthy, and so forth.

What most people don’t realize is that there’s a hidden fact behind virtually every one of these biotechnology breakthroughs. They owe their existence to the preservation of biodiversity, which traces back to the decision of the U.S. Congress more than a century ago to create and protect Yellowstone National Park. In 1872 when the park was established, they didn’t call it biodiversity, of course; they called it “a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people” and gave the Secretary of the Interior the authority to develop “regulations as he may deem necessary or proper for the care and management of the same. Such regulations shall provide for the preservation, from injury or spoliation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders within said park, and their retention in their natural condition.”4 In short, preserve the landscape and the species—the biodiversity—within the park boundaries.

Because of that, genetic engineering actually moved from the realm of dream to reality.

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