Interview on May 07, 2007
with Denise Caruso

Biographical Sketch

Denise Caruso co-founded the nonprofit Hybrid Vigor Institute in 2000 to study and practice collaboration in the service of new solutions for complex social and scientific problems. She also writes the "Re:framing" column, which explores alternative approaches to innovation and creativity, for the Sunday Business section of the New York Times. In December 2006, she published her first book, on risk, public policy and biotechnology, called Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet, which won a Silver Medal in the Science category of the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Caruso continues to work on projects both in academia and the private sector to improve critical thinking and decision-making processes, with a special focus on science and technology-related innovations.

Denise Caruso's Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet challenges two of the most sacred tenets of modern society, innovation and technology, from the perspective of the unique risks they present. Using genetic engineering and emerging biotechnologies as its model, it paints a vivid picture of the scientific uncertainties that biotech risk evaluations dismiss or ignore, and lays bare the power and money conflicts between academia, industry and regulators that have sped these risky innovations to the market. Intervention champions an alternative method for a more democratic assessment of the risks of technology, developed by the world's top risk experts, that can eliminate such conflicts. Even better, it can help renew the public's trust in science and government, and drive research and development toward safer, more useful products.


Initial Interest in Biotechnology

Dan: What got you interested in taking a look at this topic?  What was the initial impulse, for example, to study it?

Denise: I met a biologist named Roger Brent who runs the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley.  In one of our early conversations, he said to me, “Why won’t you eat genetically modified food?  Don’t you know that you could eat ten kilos of this stuff and it wouldn’t affect you?”  So I asked him, “How do you know that?” I guess it’s kind of a journalist’s question, although a lot of journalists haven’t bothered to ask it. A conversation ensued where he finally conceded that this stuff hasn’t been around long enough for science to actually be able to predict the long-term consequences. 

I saw that as a scientist, Roger focused on the evidence about genetic engineering but I was focused on what we don’t know. He was defining risk from the light side of the moon and I was on the dark side, almost literally. From those polar perspectives, we couldn’t even have a conversation. So when he said, “OK, so how do we protect people but not stop progress?”, I said, “I think we have to redefine risk.” For me, the question triggered this whole inquiry about scientific evidence and uncertainty, and how society uses them to make decisions about the risks of innovations and scientific discoveries.

Perceiving What We Measure

Dan:  So you noticed almost immediately that you had different assumptions about what you consider risk to be and you went back to the basics.

Denise:  Exactly right.  What I found is that I consider the uncertainty an integral part of the risk equation, as do most people who aren’t trained in the natural sciences.  But a scientist looks only at the hazards that could result from what is already known.  Roger said it to me very plainly: “If you cannot show me the mechanism for the risk, it does not exist.”  To which I replied, “How can you say that with a straight face?” I was surprised that anyone could look at the history of science and look at the consequences that have unfolded over time and see the tremendous hazards that unfolded that scientists ignored or weren’t studying and say, “If I don’t see the mechanism, it doesn’t exist”?

Dan:  That’s something you discuss repeatedly in your book:  if something isn’t measured it doesn’t count.  We consider what we see based on what we measure.

Denise:  Yes. And you can see where that perspective came from.  If you look back at the history of the laws of probability that risk analysis has been based on, Pascal’s discovery was how to use patterns in data to forecast what might happen based on what had happened in the past.  Well, that’s great when we’re talking about flipping coins and throwing dice – events that are very discrete and where there’s tons and tons of historical data. But it’s less great when we’re talking about complex biological systems all interacting with each other and with technologies that we’ve invented to affect them.  The thing that seems loopy to me in the context of biotech was this reliance on a number that represents the likelihood of a hazard occurring, as though a statistic has any meaning outside of the context that produced it.  In areas like biotech, very smart people have chosen to ignore the issue of complexity entirely, as well as the uncertainty born of complexity. This doesn’t make any sense to me.  It is completely illogical.

The Rise of Probability Mathematics and Reason

Dan:  It seems like noticing the effects of uncertainty and complexity would entail a shift in one’s thinking…

Denise:  Well, you would think so. But what’s happened is that over time, Pascal’s probability mathematics, where for the first time we could forecast what might happen in the future, were so dazzling that we forgot they had limitations. The ability to calculate probabilities based on past events meant that we could have more control over our destinies.  Life wasn’t all about fate anymore. God wasn’t coming down and striking a boat dead in the water. Once we started keeping data on weather patterns, we could predict when storms would most likely hit and not sail our boats then. This was such a radical shift and had such a huge impact on civilization that people became very accustomed to believing that you could predict patterns in everything.  And it’s true for some things. 

But it’s not true for everything.  That is the part that has been missing.  In the West, we’ve come to believe in reason as the only human faculty that’s worth focusing on – usually in the form of data and evidence.  We hear the experts say, “Well, we know this and as a result we can predict that, so we say it’s safe to try these new medicines or deploy all these new technologies” or whatever. But given the uncertain consequences of any innovation, not to mention the complexity of the systems in which it’s embedded, how could any one group of experts possibly make a reasonable prediction about risk?  We’ve ceded too much authority in our culture to letting others make decisions about what’s risky for us.  We don’t have a way of challenging the evidence, challenging their perspectives.  We are led to believe that the experts are unbiased in their assessments.  And the fact is that, for the most part, they’re not.


Challenging Evidence and Assumptions

Dan:  How can people start to challenge evidence?  What do they need to do to make that kind of shift?  You started to question the validity of the information that people were receiving.

Denise:  Well, for starters, that was the job I gave myself when I decided to write the book. Almost all the social science literature says that once people have made up their minds about something they don’t easily change their perceptions.  In order to change, they have to be willing to admit new evidence.  Maybe because I’m a journalist, that’s never been particularly hard for me. I actually find that regular citizens have a much easier time with this than scientists do.

Dan:  Due, in part, to the biases that are built into becoming a scientist?

Denise:  Probably. We all have our biases, but because I am a layperson, I’m a little bit more porous to the idea that maybe I don’t know everything.  But a scientist whose life is devoted to gathering evidence about a specific research topic often makes judgments about the entire universe based on his or her little tiny slice of knowledge. So I encourage people to ask, “How do you know?” whenever anybody makes any definitive statement about the safety or wisdom of something.  To ask, in a non-confrontational way, “How you know what you know?”  Of course, we cannot all do that directly. We need mechanisms in the culture whereby this process happens — where I  can challenge some FDA decision and say “How do you know this is safe?  Whose data did you use? Who else have you consulted?  What other evidence have you considered?” 

The thing that was fascinating about this process for me was that I had to go back to first principles on everything. I got through college without taking a statistics course and I didn’t take any science until I was a senior.  I don’t have any disciplinary barriers to asking the challenging questions. Until I wrote this book, I’d never understood how somebody could throw a marble off a roof and figure out a law of physics.  Maybe this is why some other countries have better arguments about these issues and their societies are more porous to these kinds of conversations — because they are so much better educated than Americans in the basic tools for critical thinking.  Having these kinds of conversations in cafes…

John:  Exactly.  Those public spaces are so important because they give people practice in asking questions – and in being asked what the reasons behind their views are. Because just asking somebody “Why do you think that? Or “How do you know that?”  can evoke a defensive reaction immediately.

Denise:  I’ve cultivated an approach for how to do this.  First you say, “That is so interesting. Where did you learn that?” Of course, if the issue is public policy and not just a casual conversation, it doesn’t matter if people get defensive; they’re obliged to answer the question. What I’m hoping for at some point is that we get the opportunity to ask.


The Understanding Risk Report

John:  One thing I wanted to ask you about was the Understanding Risk report.

Denise: Once I started my investigation, I found a 1996 National Academy study called Understanding Risk:  Informed Decisions in a Democratic Society.  The study detailed a method for assessing the risks of complex products and processes, like genetic engineering, that combined evidence with deliberation. It involved bringing together a group of stakeholders, including experts, who would convene to look at and evaluate the data — in context — and decide together how to characterize a given risk.

It was a real “aha!” moment. for me, where everything fell into place. It was so obviously the right approach! In my lifetime, I’ve never seen that kind of direct democracy in action – just to see how a group of people who are committed to solving a problem could come together in a way that enriched the quality of the decision and made everybody happy was thrilling to me. They were able to drive a decision based on the only rational way to do it — to acknowledge and address the complexity of the problem, and decide together how best to proceed.  


Interdisciplinary Inquiry

John:  Another thing that runs through the book is transparency with these collaborative processes…

Dan:  …not only regarding data and the facts, but people’s judgments, assumptions and values.

Denise:  Yes, this is one of the most remarkable aspects of the process. I find it really exciting to think about sitting around a table with 20 people all from different areas of expertise, all of whom have agreed that everyone else should be there.  Everybody’s biases and investments, financial and intellectual, are on the table. Once I actually know where you’re coming from and have some sort of understanding of that, then I can have a real conversation with you about why you believe what you believe, and vice versa. I actually might have made an assumption that you don’t agree with for many valid reasons.  It may be the right assumption, but you can ask me what went into my thought process in coming up with it and we both come away smarter and more broadly informed.  It’s the classic “higher water floats more boats” idea.  All good things are increased as a result of that process — people’s understanding of each other’s points of view, as well as their ability and willingness to compromise.

Decline for Funding for Research in Universities

Dan:  One thing you mention that interferes with that process is how power impacts the way people do a risk analysis:  the money, the funding, the balance between scrutinizing a process and the invested party that wants to carry it forward into the market.  Can you say more about how people can deal with that?

Denise:  Well, we can’t deal with it, frankly.  There’s nothing people like you and I can do about it until we change the process or fix some of the inputs to the process. For example, one of the things that happened in this country over the course of the last 2 or 3 decades is that research funding from the government to universities has been steadily decreasing.  This drives universities more and more into the arms of private industry to do their research.  And the twin demon in this scenario is that universities have also become very greedy.  They have these technology transfer offices that control and demand that scientists patent their discoveries so that the university can license them. 

This not only drives research in a direction where all the money is going to the kind of research that can be patented and commercialized, as opposed to basic research.  It also drives the perceived need by the scientist to move a discovery more quickly from the lab into the market.  So, there’s a strong economic push toward proprietary commercial research. And when you take the economics of the situation and bring that into the public policy world where regulators have to decide whether or not some new innovation is safe — well, it’s a paradox of governance that we handle particularly badly in the United States. 

Governments are supposed to walk this line between protecting the public interest and encouraging economic development because it’s a global society and we all know that.  There’s a lot of pressure, right?  You want people in government who are willing to be in that paradox, to handle that ambiguity.  But how do you navigate it?  Well, in this country, we don’t navigate it.  There’s the appearance of navigating it.  You hear a lot of blah-blah out of the EPA and the FDA about public interest.  But if you really look under the surface, what’s happening is that the way risks are calculated is by a cost benefit analysis that’s driven totally by the needs of industry. 

There’s a story in Intervention, for example, about the Monsanto lawyer who actually got a job inside the FDA in order to write the original regulations for transgenic food.  This kind of stuff happens in all of the agencies.  That’s where the change needs to happen.  To actually shed some light on how the sausage is made and who those people are, before they start making decisions.  To have some thoughtful, open deliberation about who we let into those appointed positions as regulators because it’s a very political process — which means that it’s driven by money, because that’s the way it is in this country.  It’s not necessarily that the methods they’re using couldn’t be useful if they were in the hands of people who could be trusted with them.  But they clearly regulate in favor of industry almost exclusively, based almost solely on industry’s data and evidence.


Monetizing Risk

Dan:   Another thing you mentioned is that if you were to do a risk analysis and not monetize it, you’d have a different way of thinking about risk.  Perhaps that’s something people take for granted?

Denise:  Monetizing risk? Well, I don’t take it for granted.  Most of the people that I talk to don’t, either. But of course, they aren’t in positions of power, so there you have it. But monetizing cost and benefit is expedient.  Cost benefit analysis is literally the lingua franca of the regulatory agencies in the U.S., even though many, many people who study risk and who practice risk assessment do not believe that this is a wise or useful method to use for regulating complex products and processes like those of biotech. They affect many different social and scientific dimensions, and they affect people in many other dimensions besides economics.  In fact, they don’t affect most people economically at all, except that they cost money. The problem is that regulators do in fact think of everything in terms of money, of financial pain or gain for someone or another, generally for an industrial concern.  Until we can get them to consider some other factors, it’s going to be very hard to steer this boat in a different direction. 


Independent Reviews and Interdisciplinary Discussions

Dan:  You also mentioned setting up independent reviews for risk assessments. It seems like one approach is for people to ask questions about how they arrived at their conclusions historically.

Denise: Yes, that’s classic interdisciplinary research stuff. You bring a group of people together and what ends up happening when you have the inevitable conflict about data is that you’ll end up in a conversation about “How do you measure evidence?”  or “How do you make conclusions based on evidence?”  A lot of times what comes out of that exchange is a new tool, a new way of thinking about things, or a shift in focus that actually enlarges the conversation.

Dan:  Instead of getting caught up in arguing about the measures themselves, you think about how you measure?

Denise:  Right.  And another thing that’s beautiful about these deliberative risk processes and what makes them classic interdisciplinary collaborations is that you all have to agree on the problem, and everyone at the table has to have an investment in it being solved. Depending on the problem there are some people who may not show up at the table, or who might not be invited.  I figure it’s a bell curve. There are going to be people on both ends of the curve who probably shouldn’t be at the table because they are really invested in their own point of view and aren’t interested what other people have to say.  That’s been my experience with the book. One end of the curve has been the biotech types who really think that I (Denise) am the anti-Christ and “How dare you question the goodness of our wonderful technology?”  But I get as much grief from the hard-core activists who say, “You’re not championing our cause.”

Dan:  Could you say more about that?

Denise: If you read Intervention, you will realize that I’m asking some very serious questions about the safety of biotechnology especially in relationship to living organisms and on the planet.  But I’m not making a blanket indictment; I’m saying we aren’t asking the right questions or gathering the right data, therefore it could very well be extremely risky and we would never know. 

In the biotech world, they’re offended that I would even ask.  But in the world of the anti-genetic engineering activists, they are equally offended that I asked the question and didn’t come to the conclusion they did; e.g., genetic engineering is bad, de facto, and must be stopped .  Let me just be really clear that the word “activist” covers a lot of ground here and I’m only talking about a very narrow band of people who really believe that any kind of intervention into natural processes is bad and wrong.  There are a lot of people who are painted into that activist category who are very much like me and who ask thoughtful questions.  But the activists ask them from a perspective that allows industry to paint them into an corner as extremists.  I refuse to be painted into that corner and I will fight against anybody who puts me in that corner.  I’m not an activist.

John:  It’s a way to marginalize those questions.

Denise:  Yes, and the person who asks them. And that’s exactly what happens.  I don’t understand how it is that a scientist can ask a legitimate question about the validity of these risk assessments and be painted as an “activist scientist,” which has happened a lot in this area.  Industry scientists who actually have much, much more at stake are not also called pro-biotech activist, yet they have far more invested and have far more at stake.  It’s one of these areas where the media drives me crazy because they have allowed the industry to set the tone of that conversation.  It’s very damaging , wrong and it’s really unfair.  It does not help the conversation at all.

Dan:  So there’s much nuance in dealing with complexity…

Human Dynamics and Complexity

Denise:  There’s nuance to so much of this stuff.  The deliberative risk assessment I described is a study in group dynamics.  It’s about trust.  It’s social science.  It is, by definition, not objective, not an experiment that you can replicate and have the data come out the same twice.  It’s about human beings interacting with other human beings.  This makes people who make their living by gathering data extremely uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, I love scientists!  We would not have conquered so many problems in the world without them.  But their perspective is only part of the whole picture.  I don’t think that there’s a replacement for expertise, but there are many kinds of expertise.  When we are dealing with the kinds of problems in this world right now, you can’t extrapolate the big picture from the ground.  I’m growing increasingly intolerant of people who believe that you can.  It doesn’t make any sense to me. You have to use the methods that let you fly up to 35,000 feet.

Dan:  Given what you’ve discovered in this process – how do you maintain a sense of balance?

Denise:  Assuming that I do maintain a sense of balance.  A friend of mine said that the sensation he had reading Intervention  was “the invisible rising tide.”  So here’s my answer to the balance question.  First of all, if I hadn’t read Understanding Risk, I would never have written the book.  If I hadn’t known that there was a solution, I would not have been able to spend 3½ years writing this book.  The other thing that I do is that I really limit my input. I don’t read the newspaper.  I don’t read other people’s books about the subject.  I find that if I read too much mass media stuff – because it so clearly contributes to the problem – it drives me nuts.  Thirdly, I found ways to completely immerse myself in fiction when I’m not doing this work.

John:  Elaborate on the Hybrid Vigor Institute.  You founded something that you want to move forward in the world.  Why did you found the Institute? What are your hopes for it and what have you learned so far?

Denise:  I founded it selfishly, not knowing anything about interdisciplinary anything. I had a friend who helped build the first high definition television camera, and he was puzzled by how this amazing camera still couldn’t see the way the human eye saw.  He started sniffing around, looking into human vision, and found a bunch of different disciplines that studied it — none of which were sharing information or paying attention to each other.  Once he put it all together for himself, he found that findings from all of their work could actually improve camera technology, based on a completely different paradigm than the one he had used.  I thought, “Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing in the world to wake up every morning and find the group of people who were working on the same problems and make the space for them to get together and solve them?”

So I found some people who gave me seed money with this in mind. My vision, based on the work that I’ve done for the last few years, is not all that grandiose.  I started looking for interesting people working on interesting problems.  It’s been enormously rewarding to watch this come together. Even the parties — everybody loves to come to Hybrid Vigor parties because there are such remarkable people who are all so open and interested in each other.  It starts to happen immediately.  You see people networking and buzzing…

Dan: Cross-fertilizing…

Denise:  ….that’s really what people thirst for.  People want connection, more understanding. 

So what I would like to do is make the world safe for this kind of research, make the world safe for collaborative problem solving.  Right now it’s not.  In Academia, there are no reward structures for it.  Tenure is rewarded based on disciplinary accomplishments.  Funding goes to people in disciplines.  Publications are generally very disciplinary.  And, in fact, you still are very often punished for reaching across disciplines because you are taking intellectual energy away from the Mothership.

I’m certainly not the only person working on this. But people need to understand that you have to create the space for it to happen. If you’ve spent the last 30 years of your life becoming an expert on something, you’re used to walking into a room and commanding it. But when you walk into a room with peers from other disciplines, everybody is uncomfortable. Everybody is on shaky ground, and that’s good — because shaky ground is where things happen. I’d love to see a world where there are safe places to do this work, where the process is respected and honored and most importantly, rewarded. 

John:  Then you entertain the possibility of people giving up being right in the service of solving the problem. 

Denise:  Oh yes. Being right is nothing compared to this. When it happens, it is such a beautiful thing.  You feel it in a room.  It’s different from going to a conference or sitting on panels.  It has an energy, a life force and an excitement to it that’s unlike anything else. It’s a really lovely thing.

Dan:  To discover.  To explore.

Denise:  And to solve the problem!  This is the point that lots of people lose because from the outside, it can look like a feel-good exercise.  The bottom line for me is that it’s so effective and actually much more efficient than trying all these little solutions based on each narrow band of expertise.

Dan:  I want to come back to the notion of using fairness as a standard.  How do you do that? It often seems to me that fairness is a tricky thing to put up as a standard.  Where do you get your measures for that?

Denise:  In that particular context, what I’m saying is that it wouldn’t be fair to call me an “activist” without asking me whether or not I thought of myself as one.

Dan:  It’s too one-sided.

Denise:  And it’s biased. When you’re the person writing the story, you make the final decision about how people are represented or not represented.  There are some people who would very definitely represent themselves as activists.  Being an activist is a fine thing, if that’s what you want to be.  I find for myself that it’s a way to be marginalized in this culture.  And I don’t understand why the media buys into it when it’s so clearly a part of the power structure here.

Dan:  Fairness is about being too narrow a view…

Denise:  And it’s a biased view.

John:  In general, what’s been the reception to the book?

Denise:  Stunning.  The most heartening thing is that people (like my layperson friends) wondered if they could understand this book.  When they read it, they told me it really transformed their way of looking at the world. When “genetic engineering” is in the news, their ears perk up. They are more skeptical. They question what they read and hear. This is a very good thing! Both of your reactions have been the typical ones – it’s very sobering when you realize the extent of the problem. I want to make sure I’m able to grab this idea while it’s still fresh and agitate and help them think about the world in a different way.  Frankly, I’m just delighted that people are reading the newspaper differently.

Dan:  It’s a very transformative book – you can read it and get educated about the whole issue and you don’t have to be familiar with science.  You’ve done a tremendous service.

John:  It shows really powerfully that inquiry is an intervention.

Denise:  Yes, exactly. I consider the book an intervention. That’s where the title came from, in fact. But the publishers thought of it as not sensational enough. I think that they really underestimate the public – underestimate the kind of information people want, and the kind of information people are capable of understanding. I didn’t do what the activists wanted me to do – I didn’t say, “We’re going to die.”  I think it’s scarier to have all this technology and not to know, actually. To realize that we are willfully not looking, and keeping ourselves in the dark.

Dan:  One other question. If you look at this from a larger perspective, it’s an interesting moment in human evolution. We are coming up with technologies that we don’t know what to do with.  I wonder –  do you have any musings about where humanity is in terms of how we’re modifying ourselves and our environment?

Denise:  You could think about it as the end of evolution as a natural phenomenon.

Dan:  Which raises the question of what is natural.  I guess you could say that humans developing technology is a natural phenomenon.

Denise:  Well, that’s a way to justify whatever anybody wants to do.  And it’s a rhetorical argument that does get used.

Dan:  Are we taking ourselves out of our niche?

Denise:  That depends on what you think is our niche. I think humans are singular in their desire to conquer nature. The book Radical Evolution, that came out 2 months before mine, says we’re now entering a post-human era.  We are augmenting human abilities that would note be possible without technology. So if you think of our niche as being the species that demanded dominion over nature, what comes to mind is that we may have launched an era where we’ll have no control over nature whatsoever.

That said, I’m not anti-interventionist about anything. I would just feel better about what we were doing if we were being more thoughtful about how we were doing it.