Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Nature and Human Nature
Mark Sagoff
Eric S. Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome
Research, asks, “Will we adopt the image of humans as a product of
manufacture, rather than a product of nature? If we cross that fateful
threshold, I don't see how we can ever return.” In an editorial in the
New York Times
, Lander argues that humanity should stay on this side
of the boundary between what one may call “the world of born” and
“the world of made.” He concludes, “I would support a ban on modi-
fying the human genome.”
1
In his editorial, Lander reflects a view that has found its fullest
expression in the literature of theology. In the well-known 1970 topic
Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control
, theologian Paul Ramsey
similarly discussed the logical—not simply the biological—consequences
of what he labeled the “fascinating prospect of man's limitless self-
modification.” Ramsey inquired whether any conception of “human
nature” could survive “the possible future technological and biological
control and change of the human species.”
2
More recently, another theologian, Sean Fagan, argued that the bio-
logical connection between humanity and other creatures constitutes a
morally important fact that the Human Genome Project and related
projects both underscore and undermine: “One effect of gene research
has been to make us more aware of the unity of life, of our rootedness
in nature and of our belonging to a wider whole.”
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Another effect is to
suggest ways that humanity can free itself of evolutionary constraints by
purposefully manipulating the human genome.
