Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
conventionally ill, the reasonable and even required thing for the restora-
tive physician to do about Ben is to stand back from him, trying (most
often unsuccessfully, as Ben learns) not to judge his condition as abnor-
mal—precisely his normal condition.
Yet if you were to ask him, Ben certainly does try, at times desperately,
to be like others—if only he could do that. Faced with Ben in whatever
situation, restorative physicians must surely sense his plight and, given
this, would surely wish it were otherwise. The point is obvious when Ben
talks with Dinah, or later with Jean. His body is seen as lacking—by
others and thus by him. Hence,
he
is lacking, Ben is less than he should
be, and this targets him as the object of gawks, the butt of jokes, a crea-
ture of side-glances and sly pranks, ridiculed, ignored, abandoned,
bypassed, looked-over, mocked.
But Ben would have it otherwise. In fact, this becomes evident when,
as an expert in embryo transfer and in vitro fertilization, he agrees to
perform the procedure for Jean using his own sperm—and suffers the
choices with which he is then confronted. As his training in genetics
makes clear as well, however, this signal event in the novel finds him—
and us, the readers—at a very different place than we might have
expected. For now, even embryo transfer and in vitro fertilization is
transformed when it is in the hands of a geneticist accomplished in the
arcane arts of recombinant DNA techniques—and the sperm donor for
the process. Now, truly awesome issues, previously only barely beneath
the surface, explode onto the scene. More on this in a moment; for now,
other aspects of the phenomenon need to be probed.
The “Scandal” in Medicine's “New Paradigm”
Most of us sense the frustration of being unable to do anything to change
things for Ben. We sense as well the injustice in our social values that
work so powerfully and severely to circumscribe his life. And there is a
cutting irony: Ben is himself a renowned geneticist, the descendant of
Mendel—also a geneticist—and Ben has succeeded in identifying the
“dwarf gene.” Indeed, using rDNA techniques, Ben is even capable of
splicing the achondroplasia gene out of or into his and Jean's resulting
embryo—or, as happens in the novel, of choosing to implant an affected
or unaffected embryo into Jean's uterus.
