Opposition to Life Patents

* Re “Faiths Unite to Oppose Patents on Life Forms,” May 18: At the end of your article, readers were invited to answer the question “creation or invention?” referring to human and animal life forms. Evidence and data convince me and most educated people that the answer is that life is the result of evolution! Not human invention; not divine creation. Natural selection and evolution!

Images of wild-eyed scientists and Frankenstein monsters feed into the anti-intellectual atmosphere that allows people to deny or dismiss hard evidence in the O.J. Simpson trial.

GWEN ROBERTS

Los Angeles

* The point which ethics expert Alexander Capron fails to appreciate is that the almost universal protest to the patenting of human life is not the fear of “Frankenstein monsters and wild-eyed scientists.” It is the objection to the arrogance which would create human beings with longer life expectancy and resistance to disease without the political acumen to ensure that this population will not exist in a state of poverty and starvation.

My personal fear is the shift of worldly power to people like Capron, who believes scientists should be rewarded “for having investigated God’s work and put it to useful use.” I’m sure God is very sorry if the creation of heaven and Earth and all things in it is not useful enough for the ethical Capron. Furthermore, the unified resolve of the world’s religions to block this patent attempt is not “an example of misuse of people’s deference to religious authority.” It is an example of humble deference to our lord and creator.

If Capron has an ounce of humility, perhaps he will understand that the vast majority of human beings in this world believe in a power more divine than science and a being more sublime than even the genetically superior, biologically enhanced ubermensch into which he and his fellow “experts” hope the rest of us unenlightened slobs will someday evolve.

CELESTE SADOSKI ROTHSTEIN

Lakewood