Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
with gleaming gray hair. A recent
New York Times Magazine
lead article
on “The Recycled Generation” extolled the “promise of an infinite
supply of replaceable body parts” via stem cell research, although that
research is now “bogged down in abortion politics and corporate rival-
ries.” One of the entrepreneurs, who stands to make millions of dollars
in what the article calls the “scientific chase” for “the mother of all
cells—the embryonic stem cell,” bemoans the fact that the rush forward
is being slowed down by a terrible problem—namely, the “knee jerk reac-
tion” on the part of many people to “words like 'fetal' and 'embryo.' ”
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The image that came bounding out of the piece is that genetic inno-
vators who face opposition from religious and superstitious people, who
go “completely irrational” when they hear certain words, fearlessly forge
forth in the teeth of sustained opposition—thus reversing the actual sit-
uation in which critics are compelled to fight a rearguard battle against
a powerful, monied, and influential set of cultural forces who, in line
with the story our culture likes to tell about itself, represent progress and
a better future.
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The upshot is that rather than approaching matters of
life, death, and health with humility, knowing that we cannot cure the
human condition, we seek cures based on the assumption that the more
we control, the better. As I completed a final revision of this chapter,
word came that a human embryo had been cloned. Television commen-
tary resounded with the promise that this will make possible, in the
future, an endless supply of body parts that can be harvested to indefi-
nitely prolong human life. Hence, even before a grown clone appears—
and let us pray this does not happen—the clone is reduced to property
to be harvested for the benefit of others.
The underlying presupposition is, of course, that nothing is good in
itself, including embodied existence. It therefore becomes easier to be
rather casual about devising and implementing strategies aimed at selec-
tive weeding out or destruction of the bodies of those considered imper-
fect or abnormal, or even the bodies of the “perfect” if that human entity
is cloned. Questions about whether the path we are racing down might
not turn old age itself into a pathology and at some point usher in a cul-
tural “encouragement” for the “unproductive” elderly to permit them-
selves to be euthanized because they are extra mouths to feed and a
nuisance to just about everybody are cast as part of a sci-fi dystopian
mentality.
