Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
gene,” which, in the dark recesses of his mother's womb and impreg-
nated by a single sperm, mutated into what eventually became Ben.
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A
single mistake in the 3.3 ¥ 10
9
base pairs in his genome, one mistake,
one substitution of guanine for adenine, in the transmembrane domain
of the protein—that part that fits through the cell membrane—and the
result was Ben. Is this not a scandal: the sheer, accidental fact that of all
the millions of pairings along those snaky helixical arms and spiraled
columns of deoxyribonucleic acid busily replicating, churning out pro-
teins (those building blocks of life), a single exchange, a single letter error,
and there's Ben, the achondroplasic dwarf, that gnarled, disfigured
“monster” who despite everything is a genius and, more, loves Jean? And
Jean, the accidental outcome of the same sort of sinewy organic work-
ings, tries mightily to love him, too, but in the end has to confess that
she just cannot.
Picking up on Herbert Spiegelberg's insight, it must be noted that
despite having no choice in our birth—not even that we will be born—
each of us as we grow older assumes the prime responsibility for our-
selves.
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Save for that initiating happenstance, each of us is responsible
for whatever may eventuate. At some also unchosen point, Ben gradu-
ally emerges from a globally undifferentiated entity at birth that we name
and celebrate as “baby.” From the same playing out of chance, Ben could
just as easily
not
have been born, hence not
be
at all—or if born, then
born without that chance mutation, and for any number of incalculable
reasons themselves as accidental as that, the multiple biological processes
and timings managed to eventuate in his birth. But from then on, it is
his life, whatever he may subsequently do or not do about that: he, Ben,
is the continuous outcome of
chance
and
choice
. Even more, beyond
all that, being born as “me” with its unchosen accoutrements is,
Spiegelberg is anxious for us to understand, the purest kind of “moral
chance” and therefore utterly undeserved: there is no moral entitlement
to what I happen to be, whatever the station of my birth, no more than
what I biologically inherit is something to which I am entitled.
The phenomenon of moral chance seems quite essential to having been
born of woman, mother—nor, I strongly suspect, can there be any onto-
logical or theological accounting for that uniqueness that each of us
is already at birth. As I think about Ben, it seems to me outrageous
that he was, choicelessly, saddled with being
him
; it seems altogether
