Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution by Ronald Bailey

Author:Ronald Bailey [Bailey, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE ENEMIES OF GENETIC ENHANCEMENT

One might be tempted to dismiss concerns about genetic enhancement as premature. However, even bioconservatives like Francis Fukuyama don't think so. "As we discover not just correlations but actual molecular pathways between genes and traits like intelligence, aggression, sexual identity. criminality, alcoholism, and the like, it will inevitably occur to people that they can make use of this knowledge for particular social ends," worries Fukuyama in his book Our Posthunuur F'uture. "This will play itself out as a series of ethical questions facing individual parents, and also as a political issue that may someday come to dominate politics."1

The prospect of a safe biotechnology that enables parents to enhance their children clearly frightens many prominent policy intellectuals on both the political Left and the Right.

The godfather of the antibiotech left is activist Jeremy Rifkin and his Foundation on Economic Trends. He is now ably assisted by environmentalist Bill McKibben. Also arguing against biotech from the left is George Annas, who proposes a global ban on reproductive cloning and all interventions in the human germline, including those aimed at curing genetic diseases.

But objections to biotech cross traditional political boundaries. As we've seen fighting against bioprogress from the right we have, most prominently, Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bioethics. He is joined by such leading conservative intellectuals as Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Francis Fukuyama.

When grappling with the fears and anxieties of biotechnophobes, we should remember that we are still in many ways arguing about potentialities, not current realities. Enabling parents to genetically enhance their children is not going to be as easy as some of us might hope, nor will it happen as soon as we might wish. Right now nascent genetic enhancement technologies are simply not safe enough for use. Any future enhancement technologies will have to be thoroughly tested in animals before they can be used to help people.

Fortunately, our quickly advancing understanding of the complex web of interactions between genes and other cellular activities is likely to dramatically reduce the risks that might accompany inserting beneficial genes. A good general benchmark is that attempts at genetic enhancement should be delayed until solid research indicates that the risk of birth defects using such technologies is at least no greater than the risks of birth defects in children produced conventionally.

However, even those who fear their arrival agree that safe genetic enhancements are just over the horizon. Bioconservatives on both the Left and the Right fear that future biotechnological progress will transform humanity so much that our descendants will become, as Fukuyama says. "posthuman." They regularly invoke the dystopian visions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and C. S. Lewis's The Abolition (?I 'Man as warnings of what a future of unleashed human biotechnology might hold. Fortunately, they are wrong.

Many opponents of human genetic engineering are either conscious or unconscious genetic determinists. They fear that the advance of biotechnological knowledge and practice will somehow undermine human freedom. In a sense, these

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