Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ization of consciousness inherent in any reduction of our humanness
to DNA. Here, he concludes, theory and practice will inevitably
reinforce one another in a downward spiral into the nightmare of
nihilism.
Underlying these moral and political consequences is the even more
difficult problem of human identity, of “whether there is a self at all” or
simply “genetic information encoded in and on strands of DNA/RNA
nestled within any individual's body cells.” In wrestling with this ques-
tion, Zaner appeals to the attempt by the twentieth-century phenome-
nologist Alfred Schutz to ground our humanity in our sociality, and to
further ground that sociality in the “primal . . . we-relationship” of
mother and fetus and the experience shared by all human beings of being
born. Zaner interprets Schutz to mean here that humanness is a gift,
perhaps the “originary gift,” since we are brought into this world
through the love of a woman and not through any choice of our own.
The very mystery of being born—and hence, the lack of any apparent
reason for our existence—returns Zaner's meditation on embodiment to
Ben's dilemma and the threat genetic control poses to that mystery, that
is, to the gratuitous character of our being as the very source of our
humanity. Zaner is thus led to the conclusion that one's uniqueness as a
person, grounded in the accident of birth and in particular birth by a
woman, has been placed in question by both the control promised by
the imminent technology of human cloning and the bewildering choices
it now presents to us. To be sure, Zaner admits, this technique is in
essence no different than in vitro fertilization. Thus, the real question
becomes whether the cloned embryo is implanted in an actual human
womb or an artificial uterus. The issue of our humanness, in other words,
is one of development: “to be human is to become human.” And that
means to be socialized by the primal other—one's mother. Clearly, for
Zaner, socialization (and by implication humanization) is primordially a
bodily experience. To contravene this biological attachment of the fetus
to its mother is to thwart the givenness of who and what we are. Sig-
nificantly, it is only on these grounds that Zaner parts company with
thinkers like Elshtain and their blanket rejection of human cloning. The
danger of this looming technology is thus not so much to the uniqueness
of the clone but more profoundly to its biological link to a primal other
constitutive of its identity as a person.
