Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1960s by Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel laureate in genetics, and in the late
1970s by two Nobel laureates, John Eccles and Macfarlane Burnett, and
first became a reality for complex animal vertebrates in the 1990s' work
of Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslyn Institute in Scotland.
2
What Blish only imagined has now begun to be more than a mere prom-
issory note.
More recently, another Nobel Prize winner in genetics, Walter Gilbert,
expressly, if with some hyperbole, portrays just that underlying vision as
the “holy grail” of our times. The secret foundations of human life (in
the multiple shapes proteins can take) seem now to have come close
within sight. The unraveling, mapping, and sequencing of the human
genome being accomplished in countless projects around the world,
Gilbert avers, promises to “put together a sequence that represents . . .
the underlying human structure...our common humanity.” Soon, he is
convinced, we'll be able “to pull a CD out of one's pocket and say, 'Here
is a human being; it's me'!”
3
The response to the ultimate questions of human life will thus be that
it is either the genes or in the genes, and that it will not be found in the
quaint metaphysical quests that moved Plato or Aristotle, Saint Thomas
Aquinas or William of Ockham, Immanuel Kant or Martin Heidegger.
Something like a full circle will then be reached, for at the time of DNA's
discovery—what a 1961
Life
magazine cover declared as the “secret of
life,” and what Kurt Vonnegut satirized in his classic first novel,
Cat's
Cradle
—it was thought that the new genetics was indeed the holy grail
of science and society.
4
The human genome is thus regarded as the secret
hiding place of the self, indeed of life itself—a notion already somewhat
passé perhaps as there is now talk of digitizing the entire genome onto
ever-tinier chips that can be embedded in any cell, a sort of postmodern
covert mole always on call and ready to be pulled out, read, and possi-
bly cloned.
This motif is historically fascinating as well, for it is of a piece with
one of the core convictions in medicine's long history, as articulated in
one or both of two fundamental visions. Ancient physicians were struck
by the ways in which the human body and soul could be changed by
either medicines or, more likely, dietary regimens. Galen went so far as
to assert the need to “clear the path for using bodily factors to elevate
man beyond the possibilities of purely moral teaching.”
5
Galen's concern,
