A few news items from the first month of 2001:
“Scientists have created the first genetically modified monkey, an advance that could lead to customized primates for medical research and that brings the possibility of genetic manipulation closer than ever to humans.”
Washington Post, January 12, 2001
“Britain eased curbs on embryo research, effectively sanctioning the creation of cloned human embryos.”
Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2001
“Scientific research groups are becoming increasingly concerned that President Bush may block federal funds for research on so-called embryonic stem cells. . . . But equally alarming, some researchers say, are signals from the White House that Bush might also cut off funding for a related and much larger branch of research: studies that rely on conventional tissues retrieved from induced abortions. . . . More than 135 NIH-funded projects rely specifically on fetal tissues, and many more are believed to use those tissues incidentally. . . . Among the NIH-funded studies is one in California in which human fetal tissues have been transplanted into mice to create rodents with humanized immune systems.”
Washington Post, January 26, 2001
“A well-known Italian fertility specialist and his U.S. colleague have announced plans to clone human beings, apparently becoming the first scientists with expertise in human reproduction to publicly set such a goal.”
Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2001
“Late last year, genetic engineering watchdog groups warned that the European Union had granted a patent in December 1999 to an Australian company for a process that would allow the creation of ‘chimerical’ creatures — human/animal hybrids. . . . This patent specifically covers the possible creation of embryos made containing both ‘cells from humans and mice, sheep, pigs, cattle, goats or fish.'”
National Catholic Register, January 28, 2001
“One of the leading children’s hospitals in Britain illegally harvested hearts, brains, eyes and other organs from thousands of dead children without the consent of their parents, according to a government report published Tuesday.”
Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2001
For years, we have been “progressing” step by step down a road while averting our gaze from the road’s destination. Now it looms before us. Will we continue to sleep-walk? Or will we at least stop to consider where it is we are going — even if we cannot yet summon up the courage seriously to consider retracing some of our steps, and embarking on a new direction?
There will always be sophists — and scientists, and humanitarians — who will explain why any particular “advance” shouldn’t be stopped, or can’t be stopped, or isn’t fundamentally different from previous steps we have taken. And it’s of course true that the lines aren’t as bright as one would like between medical gene therapy and eugenics, between scientific experimentation and exploitation, between a better human world and a new inhuman world. But to fail to draw lines is passively to submit to a scientific revolution in genetics and biotechnology that threatens our liberty and our dignity.
Over half a century ago, C. S. Lewis saw it coming. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis explained what “Man’s conquest of Nature really means and especially the final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off”:
[What] we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. . . . [The] man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an incompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out posterity in what shape they please. . . . It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. . . . [They] have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.
Before this prospect, before this possibility, every other issue pales — not into insignificance, for many other issues are significant, but at least into lesser significance. The challenge of the scientific revolution in genetics and biotechnology, of scientific “progress” loosed from natural, human, or religious moorings, is the challenge we face. Isn’t it time to start drawing lines?
William Kristol
