Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The new genetics is for all practical purposes capable right now of
serious control of human reproduction; experiments with animals since
the early 1980s demonstrate that the same can be done with humans. Is
the scandal, then—what either should not, cannot, or will not be openly
admitted—that only those with the power to control the knowledge and
exploit the technology will do so, and they will never let the truth of
what's happened be known—a type of potent, silent priesthood? Is the
point that scientists should or must give politicians the ammunition
needed for their reelection—marching out genetics under the banner of
changing medical practice by finding ways to cure disease—and the
money mill will open wide? And that the rest of us will not be able to
know before or after the fact what went on behind closed doors?
Politics, Power, and the Loss of Norms
This may be at least partly what Rheinberger is saying with his talk about
scandals. But for his case to be well argued, it seems to me, there is some-
thing else that needs an accounting. How and why is it that such wide-
spread suspicion, with distrust spreading to everyone and everything, has
come about, especially toward one of the last bastions of social prestige
and authority: medicine (and the biomedical sciences)?
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And why is
there distrust, even cynicism, concerning those people who can and will
actually control procreation?
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As Barbara Ehrenreich caustically noted
in her editorial for
Time
on the occasion of the first (although mistaken)
announcement in 1993 that human cloning had been achieved: we
should be apprehensive, not about twenty-first-century technology—
which promises the kind of genetic cloning Blish forecast in his cunning
novel, technology with which to “seed” the stars—but about putting
such potent technologies into the hands of twentieth-century capitalists,
whose money, after all, pays for such adventures.
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If our concern is not
about the scientists whose research results in the feared technologies,
then it has to do with a distrust of the genetic engineers who will put
the theories to work; and if not them, then toward those who provide
the funding for the enterprise, or possibly those with positions in policy
formulation and enactment.
Is this passion for control, for epistemic and political power, then, the
real scandal? If so, then Rheinberger's point about science and the loss
