Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Ben also knows the sharp edges of the new genetics. After delivering
his speech to the Mendel Society, he meanders through the tiny village
where his great-great-great-uncle had worked and reflects, “This acre of
space was where it all started, where the stubborn friar lit a fuse that
burned unnoticed for thirty-five years until they discovered his work in
1900 and the bomb finally exploded. The explosion is going on still. It
engulfed me from the moment of my conception. Perhaps it will engulf
us all eventually.”
15
Although a science of genetics could not truly get going until Mendel's
work had been discovered and understood, this has now been done;
reality has swiftly caught up with Blish's and Mawer's imaginative skills.
The human genome has been almost completely mapped and sequenced,
and, although understanding lags far behind, it too is picking up momen-
tum. But here something quite different has appeared. Now, unlike any
other time in medicine's history, the ground has shifted and what is still
called medicine might soon be capable of
doing something
for Ben—
something that could hitherto only barely be imagined. A fundamental
limit in restorative medicine seems now more a challenge and problem
to be surmounted by molecular medicine.
To be sure, there is still a kind of limit: it remains true that nothing
can be done at the moment to change Ben's body into a “phenotypically
normal” one. What's already happened cannot be altered—at least in his
case, at least not yet. In other cases (cystic fibrosis, breast cancer, and
others), the same techniques that Ben uses to discover his gene and later
for his and Jean's embryos, can now be used with very different aims in
mind—even, it may be, for the fully formed child or adult. That, at least,
is part of the promissory note of the unraveling of the genome, the loca-
tion and functional identification of each gene.
The implications of this are remarkable. Rather than being beyond the
limit or norm, much of the sort of human affliction hitherto outside now
seems capable of being brought inside. That is, in the end, not even Ben's
warped and gnarled body is any longer thought to be beyond the pale—
as within traditional restorative or curative medicine it had to be—no
more than, say, is the neural regeneration of a quadriplegic's spine.
Where the traditional view of medicine put in place the long-standing,
still-viable endeavor of restoration, that approach and its limitations are
now being challenged and potentially changed, decisively. Beneath the
