Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
microbial engineering, based on the creation of a “minimum genome.”
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Those issues will become far more urgent when the engineered organism
is not a stripped-down, single-cell microbe but an animal.
Living things had always been thought to be rooted in nature, no
matter how much humans might tinker with their properties. The
advance of biotechnology throws into confusion the settled distinction
between nature and artifact. The ability to change humanity through
genetic engineering likewise compels us to question the extent to which
a common history must tie humanity to the rest of the living world.
The following pages examine the influential and resilient belief that
society should maintain the place of humanity in the natural world, and
therefore proscribe the deliberate manipulation of the human genome,
except, perhaps, for the therapy of well-characterized disease.
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This view
may suppose that the manipulation of the genome could transform
people from created to manufactured or “fabricated” beings.
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This is
thought to be a bad thing. Alternatively, one could view nature as a war
of each against all—as having no moral purpose, course, or direction—
and so believe that by separating itself from nature, culturally and bio-
logically, humanity fulfills its ethical potential.
A Tale of Two Conferences
Twenty-five years ago, at the Asilomar Conference Center near Mon-
terey, California, more than a hundred biologists gathered with lawyers,
physicians, and members of the press to discuss the then-novel technol-
ogy of genetic recombination-“the most monumental power ever handed
to us,” according to David Baltimore, one of the conference organizers.
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Amid the urgency surrounding the conference—the appeals for volun-
tary moratoriums, the fears of microscopic Frankensteins—no one
questioned the assumption that genetic engineering offered scientists
unprecedented powers over nature. These new powers appeared to
require exceptional institutions, regulations, and policies. Molecular
biologists called on themselves to exert a self-discipline rarely expected
of scientists.
Scientists considered the ability to manipulate the genome to be truly
exceptional because it conferred on them a capacity, on the one hand,
apparently so general and far-reaching and, on the other, so intimate and
