Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of initial biological, familial, and in general existential wherewithal? It
does not make sense to talk about redress here, and that it does not make
sense is disgraceful.
On the other hand, it strikes me as clearly wrong to allege, for oneself
(if born as Ben) or another (Ben's mother or pregnant Jean), that “God
did it” and is responsible, and hence must be called to account for the
offense. As Ben reflects, after donating his sperm,
What is natural? Nature is what nature does. Am I natural? Is superovulation
followed by transvaginal ultrasound-guided oocyte retrieval natural? Is
in vitro
fertilization and the growth of multiple embryos in culture, is all that natural?
Two months later ...I watched shivering spermatozoa clustering around eggs,
my
spermatozoa clustering around
her
eggs. Consummation beneath the micro-
scope. Is that natural?
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Precisely here it seems is a true scandal: as Schutz apparently appre-
ciated, we are each of us born, and in the fact of being here at all—much
less in the way and how we each are—we are initially what and who we
are thanks to a plain throw of the dice, the sheerest of chance. And this,
I think, openly displays the brazen hubris of Gilbert, Watson, and Eccles,
and their promises of control in a world governed to the contrary by the
genius of chance.
Am I Me Solely within You? Are You Solely within Me?
A way to appreciate what's so compelling about Schutz's otherwise-only-
isolated suggestions is to consider them in light of that theme du jour,
human cloning.
A cloned human infant is, of course, not the same as a being, in
Schutz's terms, “concocted . . . in retorts,” although as he apparently
used this then-common term, it probably amounts to much the same
thing. In any event, it is clear that a cloned human being hardly ceases
to be human simply because it is cloned. As even the most hard-nosed
genetic determinist knows perfectly well, moreover, in the case of cloned
individuals all that's different is that they share most (one cannot over-
look the fact of continuous chance mutations) of the same genome, by
design and deliberate plan rather than the usual delightful way—as in
the case, absent the deliberate planning, of naturally occurring identical
twins (who also, of course, share the same genome).
