Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
There seems nowadays to be the possibility, at least, of a sort of license
for genetic medicine to try and outdo, replace, or even transcend nature
and natural evolution, to remake Ben, because being Ben is regarded as
profoundly offensive—in much the same way that the “feebleminded”
were regarded by Charles Darwin:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that
survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the
other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums
for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our
medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last
moment.
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Saving the imbecile, the severely disabled, the simpleminded, the hope-
lessly confused and nonproductive—even encouraging them to repro-
duce—can only be “highly injurious to the race of man,” Darwin
believed, and eventually leads to the degeneration of “man himself.” The
sensible thing for nature, God, or whatever set evolution in motion in
the first place would have been to prevent such individuals from repro-
ducing. Since that did not happen on its own, so to speak, Darwin and
his legacy took it on themselves to do it by inspiring, if not recom-
mending, various sterilization laws to prevent the feebleminded from
reproducing. It then naturally follows, Kurt Bayertz argues, that with
this striking failure of “natural selection,” the ground was well prepared
for the more recent proposals for deliberately controlled experiments to
produce more useful citizens, precisely as Eccles, Burnett, and other
geneticists and molecular biologists had proposed, using whatever means
necessary.
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Then we must wonder about that pervasive silence by the research
community. As Katz sees it, it leads to a slippery slope of engineering
consent for research projects, and this in turn inexorably leads to the
dreadful perversions of Tuskegee, the radiation experiments in the United
States with whose outrageous aftermaths we are still living, but that took
so long even to acknowledge publicly. How could any of this happen?
How can any of it be understood? How could any physician in the
restorative, Hippocratic tradition ever be caught up in such deliberate
designs not only to ignore, abandon, and literally overlook individual
human beings but to do so in the name of science and medicine?
