Review: The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution

The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution by Susan Hockfield
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ll say this for this book: it would have made an interesting magazine article in an alumni magazine. As a book, well, its core idea is spread awfully thin, and it’s all the more troubling that Susan Hockfield doesn’t do more to interrogate the risks and costs of the technological promise she explores.

Hockfield begins with a thrilling claim: just as the different fields of physics, chemistry, engineering, and math converged to create the rise of electronics and the technologies that have transformed our world, we are on the brink of another convergence with the way the biological sciences are marrying those earlier ones. We are, she claims, close to knowing how to use viruses to build more efficient and less environmentally taxing batteries, close to new devices that can purify water at little cost and with portability, and close to fashioning medicines that can treat us in targeted and personalized fashion.

It’s an exciting notion, and it does make me perk up my ears and imagine the possibilities. At the same time, she repeats her thesis over and over in this fairly short book. We get the idea quickly, but we get told it far more often than we need.

What’s worse, as far as I’m concerned, is that the whole tone of this book is of a college president trying to sell her faculty’s accomplishments to a group of donors. We get some of the science, but never its intricacies. We do get the names of individual researchers, but I always hear a small “and we’d be happy to assign this young scientist a professorial chair with your name on it” in the background. And, even more loudly, I hear a “and these people are creating start-up companies that, with an angel investor or two, could make someone an awful lot of money.”

In other words, there’s more sizzle than steak in support of that core thesis, and it gets old.

Worse than such condescension, as far as I’m concerned, is that we never hear about the risks of such technologies. There’s a brief acknowledgement that we want to be careful before we release genetically modified crops into the world, but I’d like to hear more. There’s no consideration of the risks behind wanton distribution of vaccines. You don’t have to be an anti-vaxxer to know that the HPV vaccine – whatever benefits it might legitimately have – has harmed a great many who’ve had it. We may still want to go ahead with that sort of aggressive mass-vaccination, but we ought to recognize the need to monitor its effectiveness and its hurts. There are potential health benefits, but there are profit certainties as well.

I’ve recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, his first novel in which he characterizes a nostalgia for an American “can-do” attitude as somehow missing the very point of human existence. Here, I see Hockfield making the very claim that Vonnegut mocked more than half a century ago.

I do like optimism, and this book is filled with it, but I think it’s crucial to temper our sense of what technology can do with the toll it exacts on the world and on us. Hockfield is selling us something, but she’s not quite letting us see the price tag.


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