Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
warming), they are no longer the sole, or even the main, basis for
restraint. Rather, environmentalists have presented several other kinds of
arguments for preserving nature that do not rely on the adverse effects
of destroying it. Nature may be useful, but more important, it is
majestic, beautiful, and sacred, either because of its randomness and
spontaneity or its intricate design and balance. Destroying nature, for
example, by causing the extinction of species, may be imprudent, but it
is also, and not necessarily for that reason, presumptuous, arrogant, and
vulgar.
Similarly, the early critics of recombinant DNA research focused on
its potential harms, arguing for restraint as a matter of prudence. These
fears still have credibility, but they have been joined by the more
principled concern that in engaging in the unrestricted engineering of
the (human) genome, we will contaminate something precious or sacred,
and that our attempts to do so display presumption, arrogance, and
vulgarity.
Conceptions of nature and the natural at work in controversies over
genetic engineering in food and the environment closely resemble those
that motivate controversies concerning manipulation of the human
genome. In all of these contexts, critics often draw a distinction between
the natural and the artificial; they associate the artificial with the instru-
mental, the commercial, and the commodified; and they draw conclu-
sions concerning the inappropriateness and often the risk of genetic
technologies.
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If policy choices could turn simply on risk assessment—
if the contentions were consequentialist at bottom—then arguments over
genetic engineering would not differ from those that pertain to any
medical or environmental technology.
Popular concerns over genetic engineering in agriculture often rest on
notions of nature or the natural, as do animadversions on human germ
line alteration. Titles of popular articles on agricultural biotechnology
appeal to the same metaphors—Frankenstein, playing God—as similar
essays about engineering the human genome. Thus, a
New York Times
Sunday Magazine
cover article carried the title “Playing God in the
Garden,” and a
Newsweek
essay covered the topic as “Frankenstein
Foods?”
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The Prince of Wales, in a famous tirade against biotechnol-
ogy, invoked the idea that genetic technologies are not harmonious with
