EDITORIAL Biotech advances raise fundamental human
questions
Perhaps no other human endeavor will
more clearly mark the break between the new millennium and what went before
than the staggering advances underway in the burgeoning life sciences industry
and how the human race responds to them.
If the century just ending provides any instruction, it is that
science will not wait for ethicists and theologians to catch up with the latest
development before proceeding, and that ethics is usually struggling to catch
up.
The developments going on in laboratories today strain our
imagination. How to even begin thinking about what one scientist has coined
reprogenetics is a daunting question. We hope that the impressive
eight-page section written by Special Projects Editor Pamela Schaeffer will
help you begin to sort out the issues.
In the past century, too often commercial opportunity and warfare,
not concern for the common good, have provided the impetus for jolting
breakthroughs in science and technology. With those breakthroughs have come, on
one hand, an unimaginable capacity for destruction through atomic warfare, the
potential to eliminate life as we know it; a degree of environmental
degradation previously unknown as our advances create pollutants in a variety
and quantity that threaten the earths survival; and an ever widening gap
between rich and poor, between the holders of natural resources and those who
consume the resources.
On the other hand, we have experienced stunning advances in
medicine, communications, the ability to understand the natural world in all
its magnificence and complexity. And we are left with imponderables. How can
all of this be happening at once? How can so much good and so much evil
coexist? And how does the Christian move about in all of this? What step does
one take next?
Where God has made angels to demonstrate splendor, animals for
innocence and plants for their simplicity, the character Thomas More says in
the play A Man for All Seasons God has made humans to serve him
wittily in the tangle of his mind.
Never before have keen wits been so necessary. The question that
was once the domain of theology and philosophy -- What does it mean to be
human? -- has been usurped, in part, by the marketplace.
Therein, perhaps, lies a central danger. Not that the marketplace
is evil.
Inevitably, the marketplace teamed with science will produce ever
more spectacular cures and ways of dealing with human frailty.
The great danger, however, is that humans -- the very idea of
humanity -- lies vulnerable to becoming one more commodity in the global
marketplace.
It is happening already. The selection process used today --
abortion for gender or to eliminate a diseased fetus -- might one day seem
technologically crude. But having come this far, is it difficult to imagine the
future scenario advanced by one biologist of two separate human species, one
genetically enriched, the other consisting of people as we know them, and
neither being able to reproduce with the other?
More frightening than the discoveries of what might be
scientifically possible is the realization that commerce and human greed may be
the driving forces behind the new developments.
The challenge will be to find the way, while being vigilant
against the dangers, to embrace and direct this new path of discovery. Space
flight and exploration allowed us to reimagine our universe and our
relationship to it.
This new adventure, this breathtaking exploration of inner space,
of the tiniest increments of creation, will undoubtedly lead to a more profound
understanding of the creative mystery and our relationship to it.
As we step from this millennium -- in all of our progress
unimaginably distant from its beginnings -- we drag into the new millennium
ageless questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the humans
place in creation?
National Catholic Reporter, October 22,
1999
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