Homo perfectus
Whether we worship it in the marketplace for its ability to create wealth or as the purest expression of human endeavor, science is a god of unintended consequences. Not since the innovations of astronomy during the Renaissance have unexpected technical advances spurred so many arguments over the meaning of life and our place in the universe.
Legislators today routinely grapple with human cloning, genome sequencing and embryonic stem cells. Advances on the horizon in neuroscience and genetics promise even more control over human biology and behavior. Congress is only at the beginning of a debate over how much freedom people should have to alter not only their own progeny but also the fundamental biological character of the human species.
Imagine a world in which human embryos are tailored for desirable hereditary traits, one in which children are customized with packets of genetic aptitudes and talents that can be switched on or off at the age of consent. Imagine a time when even normal variations in behavior become conditions to be treated medically by mind-altering drugs: the more sophisticated descendants of today’s Prozac and Ritalin. Imagine as well a world in which people use computer chips implanted in the brain to boost mental abilities. This is a future in which we may become something more and something less than we are.
This revolution in biology is no less worrisome because it is uncertain. No one can know where innovation will lead. Could any futurist have predicted that the internal combustion engine would result in suburbs and shopping malls or that antibiotics would eventually make diseases harder to cure?
Today, as always, progress moves well in advance of wisdom. Scientists bridle at any legal limits on their curiosity. Reams of expert testimony document the special pleadings of medical entrepreneurs, their desperate patients and researchers who wish to be left to their own devices. They offer little guidance on how society should safely navigate this maze of possibilities, and legislators instinctively reach for the brakes.
In weighing the political consequences of scientific advances, two of the clearest voices belong to Johns Hopkins University social philosopher Francis Fukuyama--who was recently appointed to President Bush’s Council on Bioethics--and UCLA futurist Gregory Stock. As authors of incisive new books on biopolitics, Fukuyama and Stock take opposite sides of the controversies over biotechnology. One prods us to press ahead. The other urges caution. If only we could be more certain which of them was right. Theirs is an argument at the confluence of possibility and political choice.
Fukuyama, author of “Our Post- human Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution,” is convinced that only a powerful new government agency can safely channel what he considers an assault on the biological foundations of human nature.
“We appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous periods of technological advance in history,” Fukuyama writes. “These developments will be hugely controversial because they will challenge dearly held notions of human equality and the capacity for moral choice; they will give societies new techniques for controlling the behavior of their citizens; they will change our understanding of human personality and identity; they will upend existing social hierarchies and affect the rate of intellectual, material and political progress; and they will affect the nature of global politics.”
For those who would look before they leap, Fukuyama has written an invaluable prescription for government regulation. Rarely has someone entering the policy arena so eloquently and precisely laid out the case for political control of emerging technology.
By contrast, Stock, author of “Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future,” is certain that nothing can check the impulse to manipulate human heredity, even if it ultimately means turning humanity itself into something unrecognizable. Stock relishes the prospect.
“Remaking ourselves is the ultimate expression and realization of our humanity,” he writes. “We are beginning an extraordinary adventure that we cannot avoid, because, judging from our past, whether we like it or not this is human destiny.” Resistance, he argues, is futile. “If there is a window of opportunity for government to influence the path of these technologies, it is unlikely to last for long.”
Indeed that window may already be closing. Even as Congress debates bills to ban human cloning, other unsettling bioengineering experiments are moving ahead. Medical experts are debating whether they should attempt to cure hereditary diseases by making genetic changes in human embryos that can be inherited by succeeding generations, even though many biomedical ethics experts, religious leaders and researchers contend that such genetic changes are technically uncertain and morally perilous.
Stock, however, envisions a kinder, gentler eugenics. In his vision of things to come, reproductive control will remain, in spite of government efforts, a matter for parents. The love for a child is a powerful incentive to innovate, especially if the child suffers from an inherited disease. If science gives doting parents the opportunity, Stock argues, they inevitably will stylize their children’s genetic makeup, at first only to cure illness but soon enough to insert new talents or excise undesirable traits. Call it genetic cosmetic surgery. But Stock recognizes the peril: Driven by parental fads and fashion, humanity could unintentionally transform itself into hereditary castes of genetic haves and have-nots, like the Eloi and Morlocks imagined by H.G. Wells.
But, as Fukuyama and Stock recognize, though the possibilities may be limitless, our political vocabulary is not. For decades, the debate over advances in the technology of human reproduction has been couched in terms of abortion politics and how much control people have over their bodies. How then to fit clockwork chromosomes, designer genes and customized neurochemistry into a frame defined solely by a woman’s right to choose and the right to life? The debate so far over cloning and stem cells has centered more on the troubling source of these tissues--human embryos--than on where the technology may lead us. Here, the worry is how we may alter the biology our children inherit. Perhaps we have a birthright to an unaltered existence.
This drive to perfect the human condition--is it really anything less?--touches more than one raw cultural nerve. In the 24 years since the birth of the first test-tube baby, at least 85 national bioethics and law reform commissions in 25 countries have debated the reproductive technologies developed as a result of embryo research. At least 24 countries have banned human reproductive cloning.
William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Eric Cohen, a fellow at the New America Foundation, understand this apprehension. In their anthology, “The Future Is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics,” they have assembled 60 years of second thoughts about modern biology’s dark side. For those with an archival interest in the history of this debate, there may be no more useful primer to conservative arguments over human nature and the limits of science.
On one thing Stock and Fukuyama agree: Ultimately, nothing less than the character of the human species is at stake. They share a touching, almost Victorian faith in the power of science and the inevitable march of progress. Much of what they treat as science is still speculation. In the end, this is not a debate about science so much as it is about hubris and half-knowledge. For science can do far less than politicians fear, patients hope or scientists today claim. When it comes to supplanting sex and procreation, even the simplest in vitro fertilization procedures are painful, expensive, fraught with failure and often emotionally devastating. Even so, thousands of healthy newborns are delivered every year who began life as sperm and eggs in a petri dish or embryos frozen in a tank of liquid nitrogen, without undermining verities of love and the human family.
To be sure, the advances debated today may never fulfill their promise. Even apparently healthy clones may harbor unpredictable genetic flaws that can cause premature death or abnormalities. Stem cells are surprisingly unstable. For all our newfound ability to sequence the genes that code for humankind, we still have little understanding of the biochemical text we read there.
Moreover, genes rarely behave in the simplistic way that political debate demands. The proteins they make are infinitely more complex. The people they code for are no less unpredictable, for the influence of the world around us orchestrates the life and death of brain cells in ways that genetic imperialists are reluctant to acknowledge.
We should take comfort in this uncertainty. As members of a species defined by curiosity, we always are poised at the edge of the abyss of the future. Our next step is forever an act of faith.
