Science and technology

In this section, we discuss some major wildcards relating to science and technology, recognizing that additional uncertainties exist within this domain as well.

Raging success or major meltdown?

What are the odds that we will see a biosciences “meltdown” similar to the Three Mile Island nuclear power disaster? Failure of a widely adopted medical device or tragic side effects of a new bioscience therapy could be a showstopper. This happened a few years ago in the United States when a genetically engineered adenovirus, used in a gene therapy experiment to treat a rare metabolic disorder, triggered a massive immune response that killed an 18-year-old patient (see Chapter 3, “Snapshot of the biosciences”).³ This put a damper on gene therapy research for years. The uncontrolled spread of a genetic mutation from a genetically engineered crop could have a similarly dampening effect on bioscience research.