Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The aim is to make people “taller, thinner, more athletic, or more attrac-
tive.” Zallen lists potential harms, including the reinforcement of “irra-
tional societal prejudices. For instance, what would happen to short
people if genetic enhancement were available to increase one's height?”
The “historical record is not encouraging,” she adds, noting the earlier
eugenics movement with its hideous outcomes, most frighteningly in
Nazi Germany, but evident in the United States as well where policies of
involuntary sterilization of persons with mental retardation and other
measures went forward apace.
17
The calmer voices remind us that the scientific community at present
has only the “vaguest understanding” of the details of genetic instruc-
tion—unsurprising when one considers that each “single-celled con-
ceptus immediately after fertilisation” involves a “100-trillion-times
miniaturised information system.”
18
Yet the enthusiasts who claim that
the benefits of genetic manipulation are both unstoppable and entirely
beneficial, downplay any and all controversies and short-circuit any and
all difficulties. In this way, they undercut (or attempt to) any and all
“nonexpert” criticism in a manner that “effectively precludes others
coming to an independent judgment about the validity of their claims.”
19
The upshot is that it is difficult to have the ethical and cultural discus-
sion we require. Those who try to promote such are tagged with the label
of technophobes or Luddites.
Despite this, there are a few critical straws in the cultural wind. In the
1997 film
Gattaca
, for example, the protagonist (played by Ethan
Hawke) is born the “old-fashioned way” (a “faith-birth”) to his parents,
who had made love and taken their chances with what sort of offspring
might eventuate. In this terrible new world, when a child is born an
immediate genetic profile is done. Our protagonist, Vincent, is a beauti-
ful, yet it turns out, genetically hapless child (based on the standards of
the barren world that is to be his lot) who enters life not amid awe and
hopefulness but misery and worry. His mother clutches the tiny newborn
to her breast as his genetic quotient is coldly read off by the expert. “Cells
tell all,” the prophets of genomism intone. Because of his genetic flaws,
for his was an unregulated birth, young Vincent isn't covered by insur-
ance; he doesn't get to go to school past a certain age; and he is doomed
to menial service. He is a degenerate. Or, as the scanners immediately
pronounce it, an “Invalid.”
