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Genetic Engineering and its Malcontents
Yitzchok Adlerstein

Genetic Engineering and its Malcontents

Yitzchok Adlerstein

A Brave New World is coming soon to a medical genetics emporium in your neighborhood. And it will end life as we know it.

Leon Kass always makes us think, but his latest contribution is downright painful. "The Moral Meaning of Genetic Technology" (Commentary, Sept. ’99) is not only enlightening, but humbling to many of us who have danced around the periphery of the problem. We discover that we have all missed the boat of sound thinking. The problems, he shows, are far more serious than we realized.

Kass frames the issues in a series of questions and answers. How is genetic technology different from conventional medical intervention? The first way is obvious. Genetic engineering will, for the first time, make changes that will be transmissible to all future generations. Moreover, it will create new human capacities, which will directly lead, he predicts, to "new norms of health and fitness."

New knowledge arrives in a regular torrent as the Human Genome Project nears completion. What, you might ask, could be wrong with more knowledge?

There is quite an argument, Kass proposes, for a freedom from knowledge. Recently, a father insisted that his ten-year-old daughter be given an ovariectomy and mastectomy, because she happened to carry the BRCA-1 gene for breast cancer. How important is it to know that we carry a gene that predisposes us to Alzheimer’s, or tells us that we are walking time-bombs for some incurable disease or personality disorder? How will such knowledge affect the quality of our lives? Prometheus, he tells us, may be best remembered as the god who gave Man fire and the arts, but he also gave him the gift of "blind hopes." Are we fully human without it?

Researchers have insisted that their work is morally blind. They simply facilitate the choices that the rest of us make. Is this really true, Kass ponders?

Not really. Choices to date have not been made by the public, but by scientists themselves, as in their selecting which genes to target for testing. Some clinical practitioners insist upon a commitment to abort in case of a negative finding, as a precondition to prenatal screening. In 1971, the incoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science cheerfully announced "the right of every child to be born with a sound physical and mental constitution, based on a sound genotype." Where rights exist, responsibilities cannot trail too far behind. Bentley Glass continued: "No parents will in that future time have a right to burden society with a malformed or a mentally incompetent child." Thanks for sharing, Dr. Glass.

Kass worries most about human dignity, and how much will survive. He voices four concerns.

First, there is the playing at G-d. Men are both creating life (in vitro, cloning) and passing judgment on the worthiness to live (abortion and genetic screening). Chillingly, the author tells us of a remark made by a physician in his own university to a group of medical students standing over the bed of an intelligent, otherwise normal ten-year-old boy with spina bifida. "Were he to have been conceived today, he would have been aborted." Kass warns ominously: "If scientists are seen in this god-like role of creator, judge, and savior, the rest of us must stand before them as supplicating, tainted creatures. That is worry enough."

Next, he observes that the production of souped-up babies will require extra trips to the medical technology shop to monitor and fine-tune. This means "the transfer of procreation from the home to the laboratory. Increasing control over the product can only be purchased by the increasing depersonalization of the entire process and its coincident transformation into manufacture." Procreation, once the most personal and intimate of activities, will become just another form of production.

He then considers a third objection. While advocates for free-reined research tantalize us with the benefits to human health, Kass warns that the very notion of health will become "imperial and vague." Asymptomatic people will likely not see themselves as healthy if they carry any genes predisposing them to any of a variety of maladies, physical and behavioral. And when more of a desirable trait (e.g. strength, intelligence) can be sent out for like so much pizza, who will consider himself healthy without going for the genetic gold – at least for his offspring?

Thus, the allure of still more heroic genetic intervention will prove to be irresistible. Practitioners with more modest goals of simply relieving suffering will find themselves pushed to the rear of the bus. Moral discretion will quite likely be steam-rollered into submission, as we clamor to push the envelope towards greater human perfection. We will quickly find ways to justify a host of procedures dredged from the murkiness of moral ambiguity: "growing human embryos for experimentation, revising the definition of death to facilitate organ transplantation, growing human body parts in the peritoneal cavities of animals, [and] perfusing newly dead bodies as factories for useful biological substances."

A 1977 report of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on Cloning Human Beings ominously portends the future. While it did recommend a ban on the practice, it could only muster a single moral objection – that cloning "is not safe to use in humans at this time." We are drunk on the wine of success before the grapes have even been squeezed. Like most fallen into inebriated bliss, we cannot appreciate how bad the hangover will be.

Just how bad it will be is Kass’ final point. Simply put, winning every medical battle will itself dictate that we lose the war to find significance for the human condition. As we get better at technological manipulation of our physical selves, the soul will be an early casualty.

Reductionist views of human life are hardly new. Since classical times, some have championed the position that absolutely everything – including the human spirit – can be reduced to material, whose shape and behavior are rigidly determined. What is new, however, is that scientific advances will seem to play right into the hands of advocates of this position.

A 1977 statement by the cognoscenti of the International Academy of Humanism (among whose signatories you will recognize names like Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, and Isaiah Berlin) is revelatory:

"Some world religions teach that human beings are fundamentally different from other mammals – that human beings have been imbued by a deity with immortal souls, giving them a value that cannot be compared to that of other living things…As far as the scientific enterprise can determine, [however], human capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind…Views of human nature rooted in humanity’s tribal past ought not to be our primary criterion for making moral decisions about cloning…The potential benefits of cloning may be so immense that it would be a tragedy if ancient theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning."

Kass frames his response as an agonized question. "Is there any elevated view of human life and human goodness that is proof against the belief, trumpeted by contemporary biology’s most public and prophetic voices, that man is just a collection of molecules, an accident on the stage of evolution…fundamentally no different from other living – or even nonliving – things? What chance have our treasured ideas of freedom and dignity against the teachings of biological determinism in behavior, the reductive notion of the "selfish gene" (or for that matter of "genes for altruism"), the belief that DNA is the essence of life, and the credo that the only natural concerns of living beings are survival and reproductive success?"

Moral freedom, Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch teaches, is almost a sine qua non of Jewish life. Without it "the whole Divine Law of morality with its demand for the most free-willed devotion of all one’s existence and purposes…is an ununderstandable proposition (Commentary to Bamidbar 19:22)." Hovering over this sense of freedom is the awesome specter of death, overwhelming not only in its certainty, but in its snuffing out of our sense of control of our essential selves. How free are we, if we ultimately lack even the freedom to simply be? Pithily, he wrote: "nowhere is there place for the moral "thou shalt" next to the physical "thou must."

Ironically, as modern Man gains ground in the struggle with "thou must," we discover new threats to the single idea that set us apart from the lesser elements of this world, the notion that makes us special. As surely as we refuse to concede defeat in our struggle against our mortality, death obstinately refuses to give ground in its determination to reduce us to soul-less material. Several mitzvos (tumah and taharah; mikvah; parah adumah) remind us of our mandate as Torah Jews to raise the banner of moral freedom aloft, to forever insist upon the specialness of a being who cannot be reduced to mere substance. Our dogged loyalty to mitzvos proclaims to the world that within the soul of every Man is an irreducible spark of Divinity, which gives him his capacity to choose.

As Jews, then, we can detect a special challenge in the changes that are quickly coming upon us. More so than ever, we must be the ones to fight for the nobility of Man, within our community and outside. If we do less, Mankind might win the battle with weakness and infirmity, while losing the war with the banality of existence.


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