Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Speaking to the Unspeakable
What does Rheinberger mean when, taking off from the incest taboo, he
writes, “Just as the incest prohibition became the scandal of anthropol-
ogy, so has the commandment of truth become the scandal of the sci-
ences of natural things,” including the human body? Is it that, say, with
the “deliberate 'rewriting' of life” that is the basic aim of the new genet-
ics, there is introduced what is also capable of fundamentally altering
the very life that conceived of and then carried out the new genetics—
such that, perhaps, the very possibility and ability of future generations
to do this as well can and will be made impossible?
30
Because we
can
,
are we then free to try and cancel the same sort of freedom of action of
those future generations?
Or is it like the Pasteurian program a century ago, cited by Rhein-
berger, that rejected the entire question of theories or goals, but thought
of means merely, which is precisely what is now being embraced by the
handful of molecular biologists and project managers at the National
Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy on establishing the
Human Genome Project? Rheinberger quotes Bruno Latour to make his
point: those Pasteurians, not themselves especially potent in political
terms, nonetheless “followed the demand that [their own weak] forces
were making, but imposed on them a way of formulating that demand
to which only [they] possessed the answer, since it required [men and
women] of the laboratory to understand its terms.”
31
Nothing, Rheinberger insists, “could describe the political moves of
James Watson, Walter Gilbert and their combatants better than this quo-
tation.”
32
Is this then the scandal: the spectacle of this remarkable finesse
of politicians by, of all things, scientists who are typically thought to be
politically ineffective, but who yet secured immense funding for a scien-
tific project riding on the back, it seems, of what Rheinberger gently calls
a “misunderstanding”? He means, I gather, that genetics is not so much
about diagnosis or even the curing of disease as it is about improving
people (or some of them) by controlling and “exploiting” (in Eccles's
view) human and animal evolution—aims that, because they do not sit
well with a largely uninformed public, must be somewhat hidden behind
stated aims such as treatments for diseases that are valued by that same
public.
