Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Human Nature in a Post-Human Genome
Project World
Thomas A. Shannon
If anything would generally characterize our current situation, it is the
prefix “post” attached to an ever-growing number of nouns to form an
adjective describing our world, our civilization, and our relation to them.
Among the first postgeneration in more modern times was the post-
Galileo generation that experienced the decentering of the earth in its
vision of the solar system. Another postculture was that of the post-
Reformation with both the affirmation of religious freedom and the rise
of nation-states each with its own religious identity. Then came the post-
Darwinian culture with its removal of humanity from the apex of the
great Aristotelian chain of being and the striking of a near-lethal blow
to hierarchy, both biological and social. Perhaps more significant was the
consequent introduction of the concept of change into our notion of
reality. For Darwinian thought did provide a devastating, if not fatal,
blow to the tree of stability or stasis. Another contribution to the post-
civilization was that of Freudianism, which decentered our concept of
the self from both its medieval and Enlightenment position of ahistori-
cal privilege and located it in the midst of a struggle for dominance with
the forces of the id. Not only is evolution present in the species but also
within the bosom of each human. Currently, we have postmodernity with
its affirmation of process, dynamism, and the decentering of the text as
well as the self, resulting in almost boundless reconstructions of text
and self.
Given all these seismic cultural shifts, one would think we might be
entitled to a period of integration or at least recuperation from the chal-
lenge of making sense of all this. Such is not the case. We are now the
postgenomic age that will be the recipient of the fruits of the completion
of the Human Genome Project (HGP). While the current focus of the
