By Richard Heinberg
Suppose you could redesign the genetic makeup of any plant or animal species on Earth, including Homo sapiens, to suit your whims. Would you?
For people who lived prior to the twentieth century, this question would have made no sense. No one knew what genes were or what they did. To be sure, plant and animal breeders had been carefully altering domesticated species for millennia, but hardly anyone imagined that it would someday be possible to reach into the very cells of a cow, a pig, a maize plant, or a human being and make minute alterations that would change the organism and its offspring in fundamental--and predictable--ways.
Today the question not only makes sense, it forces itself upon us. Indeed, the genetic redesign of life on Earth is already well under way. By mixing and matching genes, agricultural scientists are already engineering new crops that grow quickly, resist pests, and store well. And animal geneticists are hard at work producing "super cows" that yield more milk, or that produce useful biochemicals in their udders.
Within decades--or perhaps only years--it may be possible for wealthy parents to create "designer children" with specific characteristics: high intelligence, artistic talent, good looks, or immunity to certain diseases and addictions. Medical biotechnologists will grow human skin, blood, and replacement organs genetically matched to their intended recipients.
The biotech revolution inspires both intense hope and great fear. The hope is that, through gene-manipulating technologies, we will eliminate the "mistakes" of nature--diseases and limitations--not only in humans, but also in food crops and domestic animals. In the short term, we will banish hunger and want; eventually we will learn to clone the unique Einsteins and Mozarts who appear among us perhaps only once in a generation or once in a millennium, and by doing so genetically enrich and uplift the entire human race.
The fear is that we will fail in our attempts and trigger a universal biological catastrophe; or that, even if we succeed, in doing so we will erode and destroy the human soul, and perhaps the very soul of nature.
Either way, the implications are enormous.
Dangerous Knowledge?
Every new technology--from the plow to the nuclear reactor--has posed unprecedented moral problems. Computers, for example, require us to think in unaccustomed ways about privacy and the social control of information. Prior to the invention of the computer, no one had to decide whether it was ethical for companies to compile and sell vast amounts of personal data (credit ratings, purchasing habits, and political views) about ordinary citizens. The invention of nuclear reactors and petrochemicals has forced upon us both practical and ethical quandaries having to do with toxic waste disposal: should toxic sites be located in poor neighborhoods where workers live or nearer to where the managers live? Who should pay the health costs entailed by increased cancer rates--investors or the community at large?
Biotechnology raises the moral stakes surrounding technological change to an entirely new plateau, but one with a kind of ancient, mythic resonance. By cloning and gene splicing, we are teasing apart and reshaping the very essence of life. And from the earliest times, human beings have believed that the acts of learning nature's secrets and of manipulating natural processes imply some kind of danger.
The creation story in Genesis tells of the first man and woman, expelled from paradise for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Other familiar myths pursue similar themes: Icarus, whose father fashioned wings for him, flies too high and is dashed to the ground; Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods on behalf of humanity, is eternally punished by Zeus; Pandora, whose curiosity leads her to open a forbidden box, unleashes plagues upon the world. An appropriate "myth" of the modern age brings the message nearly up to date: in her 1818 novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley told of a well-meaning but arrogant scientist who, in his attempt to master the forces of life, dies at the hands of the pitiful monster he has made.
Clearly, human beings both hunger for power over the natural world and at the same time distrust their own pursuit of that power. Recent advances in biotechnology are forcing us to confront this distrust as never before and to decide whether it is based in primitive superstition or primordial wisdom.
To Clone or Not to Clone?
The mythic resonance of the biotech debate is only deepened by the fact that events have brought it into sharp focus as we approach the end of one millennium and the beginning of the next.
In February 1997, the announcement of the birth of a sheep named Dolly--the world's first cloned mammal--provoked a firestorm of controversy. Could the same technique be used to make genetic copies of humans? Would the coming millennium see the realization of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World--a fictional dystopia in which batches of identical human embryos are grown in state-run "hatcheries"?
In December 1997, an eccentric physicist-turned-gene doctor named Richard Seed announced on national radio that he intended to open a human cloning clinic in the Chicago area. "Clones are going to be fun," he later blithely commented to an audience at a Chicago law school symposium on reproduction. "I can't wait to make two or three of my own self."
The prospect of human cloning immediately raised novel fears and hopes. Perhaps, said advocates, in the future people will be able to clone genetically compatible "spare parts"--hearts, livers, kidneys--in the laboratory, thus reducing the dangers and difficulties of organ transplants. Maybe infertile couples will have a new reproductive option. But critics of the idea wasted no time in summoning horrifying visions of a future inhabited by armies of identical, soulless, gene-perfect techno-humans. Cloning clinics catering to the rich could be opened offshore, and biotech insiders estimated that such clinics could be equipped for as little as half a million dollars each.
What had yet to be put in place was a systematic way of looking at the moral problems of biotech. How could fundamentally new ethical questions be approached democratically? Where should society draw the line? And whose morality should be used as a yardstick?
A Spiritual Perspective
Throughout recorded history, in every known culture, people's ideas about right and wrong have been tied to religion--to sacred texts or the revealed will of supernatural beings. But during the past century or so, religion has taken a beating. Scholars have compared the beliefs and practices of various cultures and deconstructed ancient texts, revealing universal motifs and undermining the idea that any particular religion embodies some unique and absolute truth. Astronomers, physicists, and biologists have searched for evidence of God in telescopes and microscopes and come up empty-handed: the natural world apparently operates according to laws that are uniform and humanly comprehensible. And historians have reminded us of the dark side of religious history--the killing of millions for the sake of this or that "one true faith."
In response to these developments, most modern societies have mutated in a secular direction. Whether oriented toward a market economy or a socialist system of wealth distribution, all but a few have tended to reject religion as their basis for judging human behavior. At the end of the millennium, with socialism in retreat and the free market reigning triumphant, most people find it difficult to avoid the perception that everything is for sale and nothing is sacred. Efforts to forge a secular, humanistic system of ethics to replace traditional religion-based morality have met with limited success.
However, despite the apparent triumph of secularism, polls continue to show that an overwhelming majority of people still believe in God. While they may define or characterize God in different ways, depending on their religious backgrounds or affiliations, most poll respondents report belief in a reality beyond ordinary human experience, a reality characterized both by overwhelming power and inherent goodness, a source of love, truth, and beauty.
The public's religious expressions appear to be channeled increasingly along one of two routes: religious traditionalism, and what many regard as a new spirituality. These two approaches in turn yield a wide range of ethical standards relevant to the biotech debates.
By religious traditionalism, I refer to mainstream, orthodox, or fundamentalist movements associated with the great world religions--Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism--and also with the indigenous spiritual traditions of native peoples around the globe. Traditional religious leaders are not united in any given ethical stance toward biotech, and of course not everyone within any given religion or movement agrees with its leaders.
It is possible, therefore, that the new spirituality may provide a more promising avenue for moral evaluation of biotech than traditional religions. By new spirituality, I refer to a transdenominational movement stemming from three main sources. First is a growing public awareness of the history of religion (traceable in turn to recent New Testament scholarship and a widespread interest among Americans and Europeans--flourishing especially since the late 1960s--in Buddhism, Hinduism, and the shamanic religions of indigenous peoples such as the Native Americans).
A second source arises from Jungian-related forms of psychology that regard the realm of the "sacred" not as a figment of human imagination but as an authentic and primary category of human experience. The last is the so-called New Age movement, which itself embraces a wide spectrum of interests. Proponents of spirituality say that they are seeking to avoid religious dogmatism while at the same time honoring the innate human longing for meaning and for connection with some great, overarching pattern or force that transcends the purely material aspects of existence.
The new spirituality is evidently popular, as it is now the basis for an immensely successful literary genre typified by several of the best-selling books of the 1990s. However, while it has many leaders, none speaks authoritatively for the movement as a whole. This is because the new spirituality is not a monolithic--or even an easily definable--entity. If the spirituality movement could be said to have a core of universally agreed-upon tenets, that core might be the "perennial philosophy"--a phrase coined by Leibniz and used by Aldous Huxley as the title for a book published in 1944. The perennial philosophy, according to Huxley, centers on the realization that there is more to us than just our physical bodies (with their genetic predispositions) and our environmental conditioning and that life has meaning. According to this philosophy, each human being is a particularized expression of a universal sacred reality that we each strive to embody and express--a reality whose qualities are identifiable as compassion, justice, truth, and love.
The past quarter-century, during which the spirituality movement has burgeoned, has also been a time of widespread concern about environmental problems. And so the movement has mutated accordingly. Today most people sympathetic to the new spirituality would agree that all of nature is sacred, that it is foolish arrogance to think we can own the earth, and that we are all responsible for maintaining the integrity of the web of life.
These attitudes are directly relevant to the genetic engineering debate and strike a cautionary note. The human body is not a commodity or a collection of spare parts. All organisms belong to the integrity of nature, and we have no right to redesign them for our own profit or convenience.
However, as is the case with traditional religion, spirituality sometimes offers a mixed or uncertain moral assessment of biotechnology. Much of New Age philosophy is about self-improvement and about taking charge of our own spiritual growth. Many writers on spirituality say that humankind is evolving toward godhood, and that the development of new technologies is merely the outer reflection of this inner process. How better to accelerate our maturation as a species than to take charge of the biological process of evolution? The spiritual-evolution cosmological model (traceable to the Catholic theologian and palentologist Teilhard de Chardin, often described as one of the godfathers of the New Age movement) maintains that all of nature is seeking to perfect itself and that humans have a special godlike role to play in this process. Could it be that we are destined to reshape nature, to perfect it, and to perfect ourselves in the process?
Suppose we could somehow produce a race of enlightened beings. Suppose we could isolate the genes that make people creative, intelligent, and compassionate. Suppose we could clone the Buddha. Wouldn't it be our spiritual duty to do so? Wouldn't our refusal be an act of evolutionary cowardice and failure?
The reverential and Promethean brands of spiritual thinking could not be more different in basis and outcome. One emphasizes respect for creation as it is; the other promotes a vision of the purposeful transformation of ourselves and our world. Both have roots that reach far back in time. Today, the ethical dilemmas posed by biotechnology force us to decide: Is Promethean spirituality an authentic revelation about our role in the cosmic scheme or the result of confusing greed-based technological proliferation with a real evolutionary process? And does reverential spirituality offer a reminder of the human need for humility before higher powers or a superstitious brake on the attainment of our divine destiny?
And so, inevitably, the moral discussion that biotechnological developments force upon us is not only about biotech, but also about the meaning and future of spirituality.
Richard Heinberg is the publisher of MuseLetter, a monthly broadside on emerging issues, named by the Utne Reader as a top "Alternative Newsletter" in 1995. He is the author of A New Covenant with Nature (Quest Books, 1996). This article is from his new book Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology (Quest Books, 1999).