Several years ago, Francis Fukuyama was asked “What ideas, if embraced, would pose the
greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?” He identified
transhumanism, “a strange liberation movement” that wants “nothing
less than to liberate the human race from its biological
constraints” as a serious menace.
Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason
magazine, is a sharp and sometimes eloquent advocate of this
radical vision for humanity. He argues sweepingly that “there are no ethical reasons
for forbidding people in the future to use safe biotech
enhancements to alter their personalities, abolish sleep, increase
their physical strength, boost their intelligence and memories,
change their sex, live much longer healthier lives, and even change
the number of their chromosomes.”
Bailey argues that it would also generally be “ethical for
parents to use safe biotech to enhance their children in these ways
as well.” He believes “[t]ranshumanism epitomizes our most daring,
courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations,” and it would
be a shame for Jr. to miss out on that.
Naturally, such a vision leads Bailey to be critical of
“bioconservatives” such as Fukuyama, Leon Kass, and, most recently,
the Catholic Church. In his article “Is Suppressing Scientific
Research Sinful?” Bailey writes that “the Vatican” has denounced “experiments
[and] genetic manipulation” as “violations of certain fundamental
rights of human nature” and wonders “what kinds of genetic
manipulation might earn researchers consignment to the flames of
Hell should they die unshriven?”
You don’t have to be a transhumanist to recognize this is a fair
question, even if Bailey’s claims of the Vatican “speaking” are
overblown. (The quotes were from a mid-ranking curial official.)
Because “genetic manipulation” is a broad term that encompasses a
broad range of engineering processes, the Vatican should clearly
outline what it believes is acceptable before condemning
anything.
There is a reason that the Vatican has been slow to pronounce
authoritatively here. It would be irresponsible to issue a blanket
condemnation on a technology that has been used in a number of
beneficial ways. Genetic engineering has been used in the creation
of insulin and the splicing of genetic material from childhood
vaccines into plant genomes to provide a form of affordable,
robust, and edible immunization.
Some agreement with Christian bioconservatives should be
possible, even while they and Bailey would part company in their
overall outlook on humanity and the role of technology. Christians
bioethicists have spoken out mostly in favor of prudent stewardship
of God’s creation, including the responsible use of biotechnology
to alleviate human suffering. On that important point, Bailey and
the Church are actually likely to be in agreement.
BUT BAILEY ATTEMPTS to portray Catholics as bio-Luddites. He even
creates a theologically thin strawman by implying that “some
religious leaders might be all right with God for us to modify
plants, but not animals.” This characterization overlooks the fact
that animal modification goes all the way back to Jacob’s
experiments in Genesis.
Bioconservative reservations are not with the crude
“modification” that occurs through animal husbandry but rather with
the potential for harm and threat to a species’ dignity that can
occur from transgenic manipulations. Even so, many Christian
ethicists do not consider trangenics — the creation of new
organisms that occurs from adding genetic material from one species
to the genome of another species — to be inherently unethical,
even when human genes are involved.
To wit, human DNA is inserted into the genome of pigs to create
Factor VIII, a human protein used in treating hemophilia. This is
an application of biotechnology that vanishingly few Christians
have found objectionable.
A gene is, after all, simply a single string of DNA, a molecule
that carries specific information. A number of Christian
bioethicists have previously noted that that the imago
dei — the image and likeness of God that we are said to have
been created in — is not “contained within our DNA, as DNA is just
a molecule.” That means it’s OK to insert a gene into a harmless
virus or bacteria for the creation of a therapeutic substance such
as human insulin or growth hormone.
Serious ethical quandaries arise, however, when such legitimate
boundaries are breached. Prior to this millennium, most transgenic
animals were created by inserting just one or two genes from one
species into an animal of another species. But as bioethicists
Nancy Jones and Linda Bevington noted in 2000, “the current trend is to insert
more and more human DNA into an animal of another species.”
The border of acceptable limits has subsequently stretched to
the point where scientists have begun inserting human genes into
the eggs of other animal species.
CHINESE RESEARCHERS BEGAN in 2003 by fusing human cells with rabbit
eggs to produce the first human-animal chimeras. Two years later
scientists at Stanford University planned an experiment to create
mice with human brains.
At the time David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for
Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University, said that the ethical concern was not with the procedure
itself but whether or not chimeras would be put to uses that are
problematic, risky, or dangerous.
An experiment that would raise concerns, he noted, is
“genetically engineering mice to produce human sperm and eggs, then
doing in vitro fertilization to produce a child whose parents are a
pair of mice.”
Magnus added, “Most people would find that problematic…but
those uses are bizarre and not, to the best of my knowledge,
anything that anybody is remotely contemplating. Most uses of
chimeras are actually much more relevant to practical
concerns.”
The ethical assumption underlying this attitude is that since
humans at the embryonic stage of development are nothing more than
genetic material anyway, scientists should not be hindered in their
research unless they propose uses that are “bizarre.” Apparently,
the killing of an embryo is not strange enough to warrant moral
concern.
Bailey makes a similar sneaky acknowledgement using carefully
selected language. “It is true that the proposed human animal
cybrids would contain mostly human genes, but researchers have no
intention of creating cow/human or rabbit/human babies,” he
writes.
By combining the obscure technical term “cybrid” (an egg cell
from an animal that contains the nucleus from a human cell) with
the common, emotionally charged term “baby,” Bailey deftly
obfuscates what is occurring. While the researchers are not
creating cow/human babies (beings that have reached the
infancy stage of development) they are creating cow/human
embryos (beings that have reached the embryonic stage of
development).
Denying the humanity of embryos is nothing new, of course, but
the broad-based acceptance of certain biotechnologies has made such
semantic evasion tactics essential.
FOR YEARS THE biomedical community oversold the therapeutic
promises of embryonic stem cell research. On the periphery of the
debate they acknowledged that producing individualized treatments
for diseases such as diabetes requires obtaining stem cells from
embryos created by somatic cell nuclear transfer, or “therapeutic
cloning.”
What they failed to mention is that to obtain the human ova
(eggs) needed to create the embryos, every woman of reproductive
age in America would need to undergo an uncomfortable, painful, and
potentially dangerous procedure in order to harvest her eggs.
Recognizing that this is not within the realm of possibility,
they’ve turned to the creation of hybrids, cybrids, and other
chimeras in order to meet the demand for spare embryos that such
research and speculative treatment requires.
Bailey observes that “many contemporary thinkers and leaders in
the Roman Catholic Church appear to be haunted by the fear that
scientific research will transgress God’s will.” A fair, informed
observer might find that such fear is not unreasonable when that
“scientific research” entails the creation, killing, and
parts-harvesting of human-animal beings on a fairly massive
scale.
But for transhumanists like Bailey, the real issue is that the
priests and bishops have committed the unpardonable sin of refusing
to bow before the bloody god of Technological Progress.
