Must Reading The Bush presidency has been so eventful, it’s easy to forget that its first major public-policy crisis involved biotechnology. Despite the heat it generated, that debate over federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research was actually only a skirmish in a much-larger struggle about the uses of modern science.
The biotechnologists–and the ideologues who support the unfettered crafting of a post-human future–have dominated academic and professional discourse on the topic. But now, reinforcements for those defending humankind have arrived, in the form of a new quarterly journal published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Called the New Atlantis, the journal is edited by WEEKLY STANDARD contributor Eric Cohen. Named after Francis Bacon’s fable “of a society living with the benefits and challenges of advanced science and technology,” it’s dedicated to applying cogent intellectual analysis to the urgent bioethical issues of our time. (To subscribe, call 866-440-6916.)
The premier issue is top notch. The lead article, by Leon Kass, the chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, explores “biotechnology and the pursuit of perfection.” Other articles include “Does Bioethics Have a Future?”–together with “Liberty, Privacy, and DNA Databases” and “Military Technology and American Culture.” The authors are the likes of Gilbert Meilaender, Christine Rosen, and Victor Davis Hanson.
The perspectives presented in the New Atlantis have, for far too long, received short shrift in the intellectual discourse that rages out of public view in professional and academic journals. But the authors and prose of the New Atlantis demonstrate conclusively that this imbalance has not been because the best thinkers and writers support the creation of the Brave New World of eugenic biotechnology, but because there have been too few outlets in which the intellectual countercurrent could be expressed.
Biotechnology should not be stopped. It must, however, be channeled. Establishing appropriate checks and balances over biotechnology will take intellectual rigor, hard work, and unceasing activism–and the New Atlantis is must reading for those who will play crucial parts in this endeavor.
–Wesley J. Smith
Books in Brief
A French Country Murder by Peter Steiner (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 246 pp., $23.95). Peter Steiner’s first novel is very different from the satirical cartoons he draws for the WEEKLY STANDARD, the New Yorker, and the Washington Times. It’s rather more like an oil painting, with multiple layers of color. The novel concerns its hero’s ponderings on the meaning of life and his relationship with his estranged children as much as his effort finally to vanquish an old enemy.
As the book opens, Louis Morgon, a sixtyish American living in rural France, devotes his time to gardening and painting, leaving the “sordid world” of his mysteriously truncated career in the State Department behind. But when he finds a dead body at his front door, he reasons that his troubled past is coming back to haunt him.
“A French Country Murder” won’t appeal to every reader. Some of the wild plot contrasts so much with the realistically drawn characters and milieu, they seem to belong in another book. Though the title suggests an Agatha Christie-style whodunit, the real genre is the thriller, but it’s atypical there, too. A compulsive pigeon-holer might call it an espionage cozy. If your preference runs to Ian Fleming, you probably won’t like it. If John le Carré is more to your taste–in literary terms, not necessarily political–you probably will. If you relish a slow, atmospheric, flashback-filled build-up to a mystery that heats up in the second half, with genuine menace afoot but nearly all the actual violence performed off-stage, this certainly is your book.
–Jon L. Breen
