Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
9
.
Ibid., 94.
10
.
Ibid., 130.
11. This, too, is more complex than simple acquiescence. For example, where
the matter of abortion is concerned, there is enormous popular support for some
forms of restriction and restraint on the practice. The elite culture (the media,
those with incomes over $50,000 per year, and lawyers, as the most reliable social
science studies demonstrate) long ago fell in lockstep with an absolute abortion
“right,” including partial birth abortion, a practice that the American Medical
Association itself has declared not to be a legitimate medical procedure. So on
the level of opinion all is not homogeneous. But this opinion rarely translates
into action of any sort. Thus, the atrophy of civic habits of the past four decades
or so goes hand in hand with the triumph of projects that constitute flights from
finitude.
12. Not ours alone, of course, but I will concentrate primarily on North
American culture in depicting this obsession and grappling with its hold on the
collective psyche.
13. Just to be clear at the outset, I do not intend to issue strictures against any
and all attempts to intervene through modern forms of gene therapy in order to
forestall, say, the development of devastating, inherited conditions or diseases.
There is a huge difference between preventing an undeniable harm—say, a type
of inherited condition that dooms a child to a short and painful life—and striv-
ing to create a blemishless, perfect human specimen. How one differentiates the
one from the other is part of the burden of argument. One example of justifi-
able intervention would be a method of gene therapy that spares children “the
devastating effects of a rare but deadly inherited disease. In the condition, Crigler-
Najjar syndrome, a substance called bilirubin, a waste product from the destruc-
tion of worn-out red blood cells, builds up in the body....Bilirubin accumulates,
causing jaundice, a yellowing of the skin and the whites of the eyes. More impor-
tant, bilirubin is toxic to the nervous system, and the children live in constant
danger of brain damage. The only way they can survive is to spend 10 to 12
hours a day under special lights that break down the bilirubin. But as they reach
their teens, the light therapy becomes less effective. Unless they can get a liver
transplant, they may suffer brain damage or die” (Denise Grady, “At Gene
Therapy's Frontier, the Amish Build a Clinic,”
New York Times
, June 29, 1999,
D1, D4). Because previous attempts at gene therapy have all fallen far short of
expectations, none of this may work. But it would spare a small number of chil-
dren tremendous suffering, and this sort of intervention is entirely defensive—it
involves no eugenics ideology of any kind.
14. Walter Gilbert, cited in Roger Shattuck,
Forbidden Knowledge
(New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 178.
15. As reprinted in an editorial in
Commonweal
, March 26, 1999, 5.
16
.
Ibid.
17. Doris T. Zallen, “We Need a Moratorium on 'Genetic Enhancement,' ”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, March 27, 1998, A64.
