|
| Christian news worldwide |
 Home |
 Archives |
 Subscriptions |
 Adverts |
 Find a church |
 About us |
 Contact us |
 Site Map |
 PrintableVersion BiotechnologyThis is an edited version of the opening speech at the convention in June of the National Right to Life Committee (the main American pro-life organisation). President Bush's government is seeking a complete ban on all human cloning, for baby-making or experiments. This ban has passed the House of Representatives but been held up by procedural wrangling in the Senate. The Dolly agendaDolly the sheep was born just a few miles from my former home in Edinburgh, a great Scottish contribution to the problems facing humankind. With that announcement in February 1997, we learned that a second front had been opened in the worldwide struggle for human dignity. For we have long recognised that the firebreak between animals and humans is narrow. It may take a generation for it to be jumped, as happened with artificial insemination developing into in vitro. It may take much less. Euthanasia, of course, is a classic example of standard fare in veterinary medicine now being applied to humans. And so, as soon as Dolly the sheep was cloned, the question was: 'Is this a good thing for us?' - because at the end of the day, if you can do it in an animal, you can do it to me. The new debate: Bioethics III refer to the old debates in bioethics - the abortion debate, the euthanasia debate - as Bioethics I. Now we are into Bioethics II. This is not about whether we may take innocent human life, but about whether we may make human life; whether we may manipulate human life for our ends; whether we may have command and control mechanisms to determine human life. How do we weigh Bioethics I and Bioethics II against each other? Here we have two sets of crimes against God and man. It is by no means clear that taking human life is any worse to God than making it. To seize hold of the Creator's role and determine for yourself what life shall be like is something we have hardly begun to consider. So in our civilisation with its changing assumptions, its shifting loyalties, its ever-moving worldview that threatens to go into moral free-fall, we find the scientist and the venture capitalist coming together in a whole new project that will give us powers to do evil, as well as powers to do good. The implications of Dolly's birth will define a culture. Three phasesThere are three distinct phases in what has begun to take place. The cloning issue serves as the bridge. That is why it has such remarkable importance to us. It draws us into new questions, which address the most radical threat to human nature that the world has ever known. These three phases are all contained in Bioethics II, this second front in the war on human dignity. Phase One is a simple principle of manufacture, and that is what cloning is. Cloning is turning procreation into manufacture: the making of human beings. There are two dimensions to the cloning discussion. First there is the production of embryonic human beings to be used for laboratory vivisection, for experimentation or so-called therapy. Secondly, at the moment, everybody is saying there is no responsible support for live-born cloned babies. But that does not hold. Aside from crazy people like the Raelian cult, serious ethics people and scientists either support baby cloning or, in the case of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, have deliberately taken no view on the principle at issue (they are against it now purely because it is not safe). It doesn't take a lot to gain some historical perspective on the way things change over time. Those of us who are always accused of slippery slope arguments now find it rather easy to look back just a few years and say, 'Well, don't you think we've been sliding?' For example, an editorial in The Washington Post in the mid-90s stated that to create human embryos for experimentation, as opposed to using so-called 'spare embryos', would be unconscionable. This is a watershed question because, as goes the cloning question, so we may expect will go all the other issues on the biotechnology agenda. Phase Two lies beyond cloning. After manufacture comes design. When the results of the human genome project finally begin to show their capacity for commercial applications, we shall be set for what is most simply described as inheritable genetic changes: ways in which you can make changes in every succeeding generation; ways in which you can change the nature of a child; ways in which you can begin to redesign what it means to be 'one of us'. I was at a conference in September 2001 in Boston with the title 'Beyond Cloning' organised by some progressive bioethics people who are by no means our friends on the abortion agenda, but who are with us on cloning. The professor who began the conference said, 'Well, what if you want to have a sky blue baby? Or what if you want to have a baby with wings? These are ridiculous examples, but they are the point.' His view was that technology will be there, and how can we say it's wrong? It's a matter of time, money and marketing. So-called germline or inheritable genetic changes are different: this isn't using genetics to fix you up - the sort of micro-medicine which, little by little, makes it possible to cure your diseases genetically in a way that just deals with you. These are changes that will be inherited. There is no line you can draw between inherited disease and fundamental human traits. So what about shortness, increasingly seen in the disease category? It's all a matter of fashion, a matter of shape. Phase Three brings something which seems so far outside our imagination as to be beyond thought. Yet there are those who are now thinking hard about how the blending of man and machine, the development of machines with human-like characteristics, will blur the distinction between human life and the life of things. One of the most amazing stories in recent days is using nanotechnology implants in the brains of rats, so that rats can be used to go into burning houses with little TV monitors on their heads. You can control a rat with an implant in the rat's brain - a marriage of the mechanical and the organic. Again the films say it all. In Spielberg's A.I., which I thought a poor film with great effects, one of its themes was the blending of what are called 'mecha' and 'orga', the mechanical beings and the organic beings. This too will begin in small ways with salami-slicing, lobster-cooking opportunities for us to enhance what we can do and to determine what our children shall do and who they shall be. So it seems to me this is a three-fold, three-phase challenge: cloning, basic copy; germline genetic intervention, so you can determine the nature, the genetic structure of human beings; and then finally blending of man and machine in small ways and big. These are the challenges. And I suggest to you that cloning is the watershed issue. New BabelAnd as we move from Cain and Abel to the Tower of Babel, as we move from killing human beings to making human beings, we face the greatest moral challenge, perhaps not simply of our generation, but of any generation. Grasp the irony here. If we go down that path, the greatest achievement of humankind, the taking to ourselves of powers not just over nature around us but over our own nature - our greatest achievement will have been to turn our own kind into our own commodity. So we have a marriage of Faustian hubris, this overweening confidence in self and desire to do what we choose to do, and Frankenstein, the man-made man, the monster. And the flowering of human nature will achieve nothing more nor less than the building of a new Tower of Babel that finally will destroy this human nature that we are seeking to advance. Nigel Cameron established the first Christian bioethics journal Ethics and Medicine in 1983. He is CARE's ethics and public policy consultant and Executive Chairman of the Centre for Bioethics and Public Policy in London. He recently initiated the Council for Biotechnology Policy as an affiliate of Charles Colson's Wilberforce Forum, of which he is dean. Nigel has been at the forefront of the struggle to ban all human cloning in the US. He served as bioethics advisor on the US delegation to the United Nations meeting on human cloning in February 2002. For further info see:
|
|
