Return Redesigning Humans - Gregory Stock
COVER REVIEW. Los Angeles Times Review of Books. Sunday, May 5, 2002
Homo perfectus
REDESIGNING HUMANS: Our Inevitable Genetic Future,
By Gregory Stock, Houghton Mifflin: 277 pp. $24. OUR POSTHUMAN
FUTURE: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution,
By Francis Fukuyama, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 272 pp., $25
Whether we worship it in the marketplace for its ability to
create wealth or as the purest expression of human endeavor, science is a god of
unintended consequences. Not since the innovations of astronomy during the
Renaissance have unexpected technical advances spurred so many arguments over
the meaning of life and our place in the universe.
Legislators today routinely grapple with human cloning, genome sequencing and
embryonic stem cells. Advances on the horizon in neuroscience and genetics
promise even more control over human biology and behavior. Congress is only at
the beginning of a debate over how much freedom people should have to alter not
only their own progeny but also the fundamental biological character of the
human species.
Imagine a world in which human embryos are tailored for desirable hereditary
traits, one in which children are customized with packets of genetic aptitudes
and talents that can be switched on or off at the age of consent. Imagine a time
when even normal variations in behavior become conditions to be treated
medically by mind-altering drugs: the more sophisticated descendants of today's
Prozac and Ritalin. Imagine as well a world in which people use computer chips
implanted in the brain to boost mental abilities. This is a future in which we
may become something more and something less than we are. This revolution in
biology is no less worrisome because it is uncertain. No one can know where
innovation will lead. Could any futurist have predicted that the internal
combustion engine would result in suburbs and shopping malls or that antibiotics
would eventually make diseases harder to cure?
Today, as always, progress moves well in advance of wisdom. Scientists bridle at
any legal limits on their curiosity. Reams of expert testimony document the
special pleadings of medical entrepreneurs, their desperate patients and
researchers who wish to be left to their own devices. They offer little guidance
on how society should safely navigate this maze of possibilities, and
legislators instinctively reach for the brakes.
In weighing the political consequences of scientific advances, two of the
clearest voices belong to Johns Hopkins University social philosopher Francis
Fukuyama--who was recently appointed to President Bush's Council on
Bioethics--and UCLA futurist Gregory Stock. As authors of incisive new books on
biopolitics, Fukuyama and Stock take opposite sides of the controversies over
biotechnology. One prods us to press ahead. The other urges caution. If only we
could be more certain which of them was right. Theirs is an argument at the
confluence of possibility and political choice.
Fukuyama, author of "Our Post- human Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution," is convinced that only a powerful new government agency can safely
channel what he considers an assault on the biological foundations of human
nature.
"We appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous periods of
technological advance in history," Fukuyama writes. "These developments will be
hugely controversial because they will challenge dearly held notions of human
equality and the capacity for moral choice; they will give societies new
techniques for controlling the behavior of their citizens; they will change our
understanding of human personality and identity; they will upend existing social
hierarchies and affect the rate of intellectual, material and political
progress; and they will affect the nature of global politics."
For those who would look before they leap, Fukuyama has written an invaluable
prescription for government regulation. Rarely has someone entering the policy
arena so eloquently and precisely laid out the case for political control of
emerging technology.
By contrast, Stock, author of "Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic
Future," is certain that nothing can check the impulse to manipulate human
heredity, even if it ultimately means turning humanity itself into something
unrecognizable. Stock relishes the prospect.
"Remaking ourselves is the ultimate expression and realization of our humanity,"
he writes. "We are beginning an extraordinary adventure that we cannot avoid,
because, judging from our past, whether we like it or not this is human
destiny." Resistance, he argues, is futile. "If there is a window of opportunity
for government to influence the path of these technologies, it is unlikely to
last for long."
Indeed that window may already be closing. Even as Congress debates bills to ban
human cloning, other unsettling bioengineering experiments are moving ahead.
Medical experts are debating whether they should attempt to cure hereditary
diseases by making genetic changes in human embryos that can be inherited by
succeeding generations, even though many biomedical ethics experts, religious
leaders and researchers contend that such genetic changes are technically
uncertain and morally perilous.
Stock, however, envisions a kinder, gentler eugenics. In his vision of things to
come, reproductive control will remain, in spite of government efforts, a matter
for parents. The love for a child is a powerful incentive to innovate,
especially if the child suffers from an inherited disease. If science gives
doting parents the opportunity, Stock argues, they inevitably will stylize their
children's genetic makeup, at first only to cure illness but soon enough to
insert new talents or excise undesirable traits. Call it genetic cosmetic
surgery. But Stock recognizes the peril: Driven by parental fads and fashion,
humanity could unintentionally transform itself into hereditary castes of
genetic haves and have-nots, like the Eloi and Morlocks imagined by H.G. Wells.
But, as Fukuyama and Stock recognize, though the possibilities may be limitless,
our political vocabulary is not. For decades, the debate over advances in the
technology of human reproduction has been couched in terms of abortion politics
and how much control people have over their bodies. How then to fit clockwork
chromosomes, designer genes and customized neurochemistry into a frame defined
solely by a woman's right to choose and the right to life? The debate so far
over cloning and stem cells has centered more on the troubling source of these
tissues--human embryos--than on where the technology may lead us. Here, the
worry is how we may alter the biology our children inherit. Perhaps we have a
birthright to an unaltered existence.
This drive to perfect the human condition--is it really anything less?--touches
more than one raw cultural nerve. In the 24 years since the birth of the first
test-tube baby, at least 85 national bioethics and law reform commissions in 25
countries have debated the reproductive technologies developed as a result of
embryo research. At least 24 countries have banned human reproductive cloning.
William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Eric Cohen, a fellow at the
New America Foundation, understand this apprehension. In their anthology, "The
Future Is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics," they have assembled 60 years
of second thoughts about modern biology's dark side. For those with an archival
interest in the history of this debate, there may be no more useful primer to
conservative arguments over human nature and the limits of science.
On one thing Stock and Fukuyama agree: Ultimately, nothing less than the
character of the human species is at stake. They share a touching, almost
Victorian faith in the power of science and the inevitable march of progress.
Much of what they treat as science is still speculation. In the end, this is not
a debate about science so much as it is about hubris and half-knowledge. For
science can do far less than politicians fear, patients hope or scientists today
claim. When it comes to supplanting sex and procreation, even the simplest in
vitro fertilization procedures are painful, expensive, fraught with failure and
often emotionally devastating. Even so, thousands of healthy newborns are
delivered every year who began life as sperm and eggs in a petri dish or embryos
frozen in a tank of liquid nitrogen, without undermining verities of love and
the human family.
To be sure, the advances debated today may never fulfill their promise. Even
apparently healthy clones may harbor unpredictable genetic flaws that can cause
premature death or abnormalities. Stem cells are surprisingly unstable. For all
our newfound ability to sequence the genes that code for humankind, we still
have little understanding of the biochemical text we read there.
Moreover, genes rarely behave in the simplistic way that political debate
demands. The proteins they make are infinitely more complex. The people they
code for are no less unpredictable, for the influence of the world around us
orchestrates the life and death of brain cells in ways that genetic imperialists
are reluctant to acknowledge.
We should take comfort in this uncertainty. As members of a species defined by
curiosity, we always are poised at the edge of the abyss of the future. Our next
step is forever an act of faith.