Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
HGP has been its medical implications, the HGP also has implications
for our understanding of ourselves, our very human nature, and our rela-
tion to others with whom we share our genome, as well as those whose
genome differs from ours by perhaps only three or four percentage
points.
The story of the HGP began of course with the discovery in 1953 of
the structure of the DNA molecule by James Watson and Francis Crick,
and continued through the next decades with one discovery after another
almost at the proverbial warp speed introduced by the popular televi-
sion series
Star Trek
. Such discoveries also gave us the capacity, in the
words of the same show, to go where no one had gone before. Now we
are on another voyage of self-discovery, a part of which will be difficult
for it will involve leaving a comfortable harbor or at least a known
harbor. But another part of the voyage may be even more difficult—the
reconstruction of a new vision of human nature in light of our new and
ever-increasing understanding of the human genome. As the great U.S.
philosopher Woody Allen has noted, while the unexamined life may not
be worth living, the examined life is no bowl of cherries either.
Before taking some first steps on this journey, I want to make some
comments about methodology. With respect to the HGP, much of its
success, as well as the success of science in general, is due to the method
of reductionism. This method succeeds by breaking components into
ever-smaller units and examining them. The whole is explained in terms
of the parts and their interaction. This method has been and will con-
tinue to be extremely successful, and thus is not to be rejected. A point
I would stress is not to confuse the method with a philosophy. That is,
to argue that one needs to understand the workings of an organism by
understanding its parts—its genetic structure, for example—is not
necessarily to argue that an understanding of the genetic structure is a
sufficient explanation of the operations of the organism as a whole. One
can commit oneself to the use of reductionism as a method without
necessarily committing oneself to a philosophy of materialism. This point
will recur throughout this chapter, and I wanted to highlight it here.
A second point is what is referred to in the Roman Catholic tradition
as
ressourcement,
a method developed by German and French theolo-
gians in the 1950s that sought to reappropriate concepts and ideas from
the tradition and apply or use them to illuminate contemporary discus-
