Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In opposition to popular concerns about a Frankensteinian future,
scholars argued that the causal connection between genetic characteris-
tics and phenotypic traits remained too obscure, complex, and case spe-
cific to warrant any general conclusions—and certainly too contested to
justify any large-scale initiatives in law and public policy.
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If there was
a special danger in genetic research and technology, scholars contended,
it lay in reinforcing the mystique of the genome. The sequencing of the
human genome would not lead to technocratic dystopias; a danger arose,
however, from the growing public belief that it might do so. Critics of
genetic exceptionalism argued that the principal thing we have to fear is
the fear of genetic research itself—a fear born of false assumptions about
the centrality of DNA in determining the character and the course of
our lives.
The critique of genetic exceptionalism has debunked myths about
genetic technology—for example, that our genetic composition, more
than many environmental conditions, determines our prospects, charac-
ter, and actions. The critique of genetic essentialism, though, has not
addressed one of the deep convictions about the human genome that lies
behind the resistance to bioengineering. According to this widely held
view, even if the human genome plays a more contingent, variable, and
limited role in directing human traits than analogies to blueprints
suggest, it nevertheless connects human beings as individuals and a
species to a natural evolutionary and ecological order. One need not
favor nature over nurture to believe, with Ramsey and other critics, that
the concepts of nature and the natural play a critical role in guiding our
moral intuitions.
Many of those who invoke the concept of nature and the natural in
this context—such as Lander—are well aware of the complex, oblique,
and limited role genes play in producing phenotypic characteristics.
These critics need not appeal to discarded metaphors about the genetic
blueprint to argue that genetic engineering, by separating people from
the course of evolution, threatens to turn them into artifacts. Without
being a genetic determinist or essentialist, one can worry that genetic
techniques, if used extensively to alter germ lines, would remove a cru-
cially important link that ties human beings to a common evolutionary
heritage and other species in the natural world.
