Monthly column for the arts

In my spare time I do cancer research. Not a lot of people know that I'm actually part of a worldwide team involved in an Oxford University project. It's run by an organisation called United Devices. What we do is 'help scientists characterise therapeutic targets and identify and assess drug candidates, by performing automated docking of flexible ligands to a protein's binding site'. We are a key part of current cancer re-search. And I don't even know what a ligand is, or where a protein keeps its binding site.

Oh, all right, I'll come clean. This is an arts column. I've never met or talked with an Oxford cancer research scientist. Actually it's my computer that does the re-search. Every time it's turned on and I'm not using it - and that includes the fractions of a second between key strokes, as well as the prolonged pauses for thought and meditation that are such crucially important parts of a writer's work - the computer is doing cancer research.

When it's finished one batch of research, it waits for the next time I go on the internet, then sends what it's done to Oxford and downloads another lot. It doesn't consult me and I don't ask what it's doing. If I want to, I can look at attractive pictures of the protein it's currently assessing. I can't tell a neutron from a quasar. But the computer can.

Contribution

Since I joined the programme a year or two ago my computer has made use of odd nanoseconds and coffee-breaks to do a total of 142 days' worth of research. If that seems impressive, consider the project as a whole: a total of 50,000 years' computing time has been donated by one million computer users world-wide. We have analysed 3.5 billion small molecules.

It's wonderful to be part of such a project, and one can only marvel at the imagination of whoever dreamed up the idea. If you want to be part of it too, you only need a computer with internet access. Come on over and join us at http://members.ud.com/home.htm. You don't need to know a thing about cancer research to be involved, even though this is technology undreamed of by the first men who walked on the moon, let alone our grandparents. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would have had no idea how a digital watch worked, let alone the United Devices project. Such is the pace of change.

Utopia

One of the interesting things about how people have viewed the future is that there are hardly any technological utopias. William Morris and H.G. Wells foresaw mankind's happiest ages as those in a rural future. Orwell's 1984, by contrast, and the films Brazil and Bladerunner, show a harsh, industrialised, scientific, dehumanised future nightmare.

The United Devices project, however, suggests that technology might in fact have a part to play in bringing about a better world, in which cancer is no longer the scourge it is today. But computers are a very mixed blessing. For example, I regularly contribute to an Internet C.S. Lewis discussion group, which means publicly sharing my email address with like-minded people. This makes me immediately vulnerable to the 'spambots', futuristic computer routines programmed by commercial entrepreneurs to roam the internet and collect any addresses they find. The results, millions of email addresses at a time, are then sold as mailing lists to organisations and individuals willing to pay a hefty price. So my discussions on C.S. Lewis's attitude to predestination are a direct cause of the flood of pornographic junk mail that reaches my computer every time I collect my email, and which I've had to programme my computer to delete unread.

Glory and disgrace

Computers and the internet are just one example of new kinds of problem that will increasingly demand new approaches by Christians. We have probably gone past the time that the internet can be excluded from normal life, even though individuals can still do so. Schools expect children to use internet resources for homework, more and more organisations use the World Wide Web as their main shop window, and more and more people and organisations are turning away from conventional post and turning to email. Broadband, together with the Government's commitment to extend efficient internet access nationwide, can only hasten the process.

The theological implications, as Charlie Brown once said, are staggering. And here is one. The whole internet phenomenon illustrates exactly the complexity of the Fall. Human invention, like humanity itself, mirrors the glory and the disgrace of us fallen Image-bearers. On the one hand it mobilises huge cancer-research programmes: on the other, it delivers gang rape and bestiality to our doors. Humanity invented the internet: now humanity has to learn to cope with it.

But then, that's human history all over, isn't it? The only difference with the internet is one of scale. The problem has not changed. And, mercifully, neither has the answer.

David Porter

© Evangelicals Now - November 2002
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