Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The morality of tampering with human nature was also debated in
secular circles. Critics condemned such interventions as “playing God,”
a phrase popularized by Ted Howard's and Jeremy Rifkin's
Who Should
Play God?
Rifkin has consistently called for the “resacralization of
nature,” which he considers “the great mission of the coming age.”
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As
Peters notes, this ethic makes no appeal to Christian or Jewish theolog-
ical principles (according to which it is the Creator and not the creation
that is sacred), and Rifkin himself writes from a naturalist or vitalist posi-
tion.
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Indeed, it seems that many who condemn the notion of playing
God are not theists, and what is meant by the phrase is not always clear;
much ink has been spilled trying to sort out the various usages. Most
often, when the phrase is not employed literally, it seems to be a short-
hand way of charging scientific arrogance; that is, as a protest against
the readiness of some people, who are necessarily fallible, to make deci-
sions with potentially irreversible consequences for us all. In any case, it
caught on among both religious and secular critics of genetic engineer-
ing (and biotechnology more generally), and with it, the concept of an
inviolate, because sacred, human nature. Physician/bioethicist Leon Kass,
author of the “wisdom of repugnance” argument, was perhaps the most
prominent advocate of the view that human nature is sacrosanct. Noting
that biological engineering was gathering power, he warned that it would
bring new opportunities for eroding “our idea of man as something
splendid or divine, as a creature with freedom and dignity. And clearly,
if we come to see ourselves as meat, then meat we shall become.”
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On June 16, 1980, in the case of
Diamond v. Chakrabarty
, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that a genetically altered organism—in this case,
an oil-digesting microbe—could qualify for patent protection as a novel
“manufacture” or “composition of nature” (a decision followed in 1988
by the Patent and Trademark Office's award of a patent on a transgenic
mouse that made whole animals, other than humans, patentable). In his
amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in the
Chakrabarty
case, the
biotechnology critic and Rifkin associate Ted Howard asserted in words
that could have easily come from the politically more conservative Kass:
“To justify patenting living organisms, those who seek such patents must
argue that life has no 'vital' or sacred property....But once this is
accomplished, all living material will be reduced to an arrangement of
chemicals, or 'mere compositions of matter.' ”
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