Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
meaning of a gene and the human genome, rather than on whether we
should go forward with mapping and subsequent engineering. A realis-
tic ethics of science will avoid both sociobiology as just another meta-
narrative and moral hand-wringing as juvenile self-denial. Instead, it will
address the moral, political, and material conditions of this new advance
in knowledge and its claims to power. And it will recognize that Western
humanity has been engaged in its own self-production through labor, lan-
guage, and, for some time now, genetic manipulation. While there is, of
course, a justifiable discontent with the kind of power that science has
given humans over other humans, there is a consolation, Rabinow
argues, in the recognition of both the limits of science and its role in fos-
tering our growing maturity. Indeed, herein lies a more consoling thought
than the illusory belief in a static human nature. True enlightenment,
harsh as it may be, is an authentically adult consolation. In daring to
know, Rabinow writes, science gives us real hope, not in an ultimate
technical mastery of nature but in finally arriving at the awareness that
we are not the center of existence or a higher kind of being free to wield
our immense power, without scruple, over the rest of life.
In “Genetic Engineering and Eugenics: The Uses of History,” Diane
Paul explores the ways both advocates and critics of human genetic engi-
neering turn the history of eugenics to disparate ends. Optimists and pes-
simists alike have adopted a narrative that emphasizes brutal measures
of state control, such as the compulsory sterilization of those considered
defective and the Nazi murder of mental patients. The similarity of their
narratives is not a simple reflection of fixity to historical facts. On the
contrary, much eugenics was voluntary, not coercive. “Positive” eugen-
ics, which relies on the cooperation of its subjects, is necessarily so, and
as an effort at improvement, much closer in spirit to human genetic engi-
neering, with its promise (or threat) of human enhancements, including
a wholesale transformation of human nature. Thus Paul asks, If one
looks to history for lessons, why focus on sterilization and murder to the
exclusion of other, utopian projects whose goals are much closer to
contemporary aspirations to improve humanity?
As a start toward constructing a history more germane to issues arising
from human genetic engineering, Paul analyzes the utopian strain in
eugenics, including works by Francis Galton (in some of his moods),
Alfred Russel Wallace, and such scientific socialists of the 1920s and
