2019 by BRAM E. GIEBEN (AKA TEXTURE)

Chapter 5 - BABEL

Source: Rolling Stone Magazine
Dated: January 16th, 2017
Format: Unexpurgated Transcript

WITH HIS MIRRORED RAYBANS AND BLACK SILK SHIRT, JOHN ROMNEY looks more like a louche rock star than a celebrated scientist and philosopher. His home too is sparse, minimal and elegant, with surprisingly few books. “Print is dead,” pronounces Romney when I remark on the apartment’s lack of shelves.

Overlooking New York’s Central Park, the Fifth Avenue brownstone is definitively a bachelor pad, which Romney shares with two intelligent, genetically-altered black cats named Kali and Shiva. The cats eat, walk and play in perfect, almost synchronised movements. “When they walk down the hall, they look like furry sine waves,” Romney says, cracking the first and only smile of our interview time.

Romney’s book, ‘Nanotechnology: Death in Life’ has topped the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for eight consecutive months. As the most outspoken critic of nanotechnology in the field, Romney has become both an outcast in the scientific community (a position which he seems to occupy with no small amount of relish), and a popular spokesman for the groundswell of public opinion which opposes recent and forthcoming advances in nanotech.

Romney speaks softly and hesitantly at first, but when he finds something to rail against – and he often does – his shades come off, and his pale blue eyes flash insistently.

How does it feel to be the world’s best known scientist, but to have your colleagues and contemporaries reject your work so completely?

First of all, I don’t think I’m the world’s best-known scientist. What about Brian Cox, the physicist, or the geneticist Helena Wilder? They’ve popularised physics and chemical genetics to an audience that was educated to believe that science was essentially a mystery religion. Thanks to people like Brian and Helena, and their forebears like Richard Dawkins, or Stephen Hawking, people have a far greater appreciation today of the actual realities of modern science. We live in a very different time than the intellectual climate I myself grew up in.

Secondly, not everyone disagrees with my arguments against nanotech, especially in Europe, and within the Asian and Arab communities. It’s just that in the US, business interests and naked profit are seen as more important - even to so-called ‘real’ scientists - than good practice, ethics, and rational debate.

Isn’t it true that the wealthy nanotech billionaire Vincent LeSanto has called your work ‘unpatriotic and pessimistic,’ and accused you of making statements that have ‘no basis in objective, hard fact’?

That’s true. But I don’t let it bother me.

You seem remarkably resigned to your reputation.

It doesn’t bother me because the likes of Vincent LeSanto are not scientists. They are businessmen. They would rather make money from poorly thought-out and inefficiently tested products than spend money getting the science right. They are quite able to bribe, misdirect and avoid the process of peer-review and safety-checking, because they have administrative officials in their pockets and not even the ghost of a conscience. Why do you think they employ such large and expensive legal teams? They’re not above the law, they’re beyond its reach: if an aggrieved customer sues, they can afford to settle, in almost every case they are faced with.

In fact, they are so confident of their status that they actually build in faults to their products. This kind of built in obsolescence you find in their products has much more dire consequences than say, the Trojan viruses associated with Windows Ultima, or the way your toaster will brown one side more than the other. The consequences of poorly-made, mismanaged nano-assemblers being unleashed onto the world are potentially apocalyptic. I don’t say these things to be controversial. Far from being unpatriotic, I consider it my duty as a scientist and an American to speak out against these cowboys.

So you’re saying LeSanto is a cowboy?

The only way that could be more obvious is if he wore a ten-gallon hat. Look, if you’re gonna push me, I’ll give you the quote you want. Vincent LeSanto is an unscrupulous, megalomaniacal pseudo-scientist whose outdated religious beliefs completely cloud his judgement on all scientific matters. He is unfit to walk into a science lab, let alone run a scientific corporation.

This man believes that the world is just over six thousand years old; that the biblical story of Adam and Eve is literal truth; and most damagingly, that nanotechnology is God’s gift to humanity, to be used as he sees fit. He’s on record as saying that, by the way. In my opinion, LeSanto is a hack who should be disbarred from scientific practice altogether, along with every single last one of his employees.

Let’s talk about your book. How has becoming a best-selling author changed your life?

I live in a bigger apartment. I’m constantly jetlagged from travelling from conference to book launch to signing... apart from that, things are the same. I still even work in a lab from time to time (laughs).

Tell us, what’s the follow-up to ‘Death in Life’ all about?

It’s a departure. I’m writing a speculative piece about the future we could inherit if we simply learn to control nanotechnology, and prevent it from becoming a third replicator at work in Earth’s evolutionary continuum. It’s called ‘Babel.’ I’m about half way through the manuscript now.

As he shows me out, Romney admires my Rolex wrist terminal, which has been filming and recording our interview. “Nice watch,” he says, winking ironically. “See? I’m not against all nanocomputers. Only the stupid ones.”

Interview by Mitchell Bradley