Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Of the Scandal, Chance, and God
As Ben reflects when he's in the passionate moment of wondering how
it was that he ever came to be just this specific person, this Ben the dwarf,
there simply is no way to know the why or how just one specific sperm
made its way into one specific ovum, nor the countless accidental split-
tings, changings, connectings, shiftings, and turnabouts of both Ben and
his mother as she bore him from the tiniest of the tiny into birth, and
beyond, into himself. Even were there to have been an in vitro infusion
of a preselected sperm—“get that one there, Shirley....No, not him,
that
one . . .”—how is one to account for, how is one to make under-
standable, what constitutes just
that
life,
that
unique life, which then, if
all goes well, becomes just that unique individual, Ben Lambert, dwarf?
Now, these reflections evoke not so much that the new genetics places
this entire, awesome process at risk, as Rheinberger and many others
suggest; nor do the novel genetic techniques and theories threaten my
“who I am” and the variety of foundational relationships among us
(father, mother, son, daughter, and so forth), as Kass insists. Rather, it is
my being at all
that is at issue, for this is now placed in a radically new
light, and in this there may be a true scandal:
that
I am
at all
,
that
I have
come or been brought into being (into life) neither through my own
action or choice, nor through anyone's decision, while yet being born
free to choose from that point on.
Nor did Ben's parents choose Ben, this unique individual. Perhaps
they had wanted a baby, but
his
coming on the scene, the unique
Ben
,
is wholly outside any parents' or anyone's ken, foreknowledge, or choice.
Being a baby—being
this
baby—is always and essentially a surprise—to
itself and its parents. But the reverse is also true, for Ben no more chose
his parents than they chose him. Hence, for Ben to be what he is, to be
himself, is to be an ontological surprise. He is an accident (the “accident
of birth”) that embodies chance in its purest form, though being himself
is not only that.
What is scandalous about that? At one point in Mawer's deeply ironic
novel, Ben succeeds in sequencing the genes that, incorporating a single,
apparently trivial error in a single base pair in “this enigmatic, molecu-
lar world,” likely eventuated in him, Ben Lambert. That so-called genetic
error involves a “simple transition at nucleotide 1,138 of the
FGFR3
