WORLD WATCH
•
Working for a Sustainable Future
A New Racism
by Nadine Gordimer
Deceptive Promises of Cures for Disease
by Sarah Sexton
The New Eugenics
by Michael Dorsey
Views from Around the World
Biopirates and the Poor
by Vandana Shiva
What Human Genetic Modification Means for Women
by Judith Levine
In Defense of Nature, Human and Non-Human
by Francis Fukuyama
The Human Rights Perspective
by Rosario Isasi
The Genome as a Commons
Tom Athanasiou and Marcy Darnovsky
The War of Words and Images
by Brian Halweil
Why Environmentalists Should Be Concerned
by Bill McKibben
Human Engineering Timeline
Excerpted from July/August 2002 WORLD WATCH magazine
© 2002 Worldwatch Institute
For more information about Worldwatch
Institute and its programs and publications, please
visit our website at www.worldwatch.org
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Nadine Gordimer
A New
Racism
Just when we thought apartheid had been banished for good.
L
ast spring World Watch interviewed South African
writer Nadine Gordimer on her concerns about
human genetic engineering.
World Watch: Last year, in Durban, you gave a speech
at the U.N. conference on racism, and you suggested
that human engineering could be the new face of
racism. Could you elaborate?
Nadine Gordimer: There are precedents for breeding
that is politically manipulated. You only have to think
of the Nazi German ideal, the blond blue-eyed German.
There’s a very big distinction between the sort of
genetic engineering that could prevent certain diseases, and the possibility of breeding a different or
separate race of people. There’s always a good that can
come out of it, but how do you control the evil?
WW: In some of your writing, you have pointed to
the possibility of a two-tiered health care system in
which the rich or mostly light-skinned people have
access to the new genetic medicine, while the poor,
mostly dark-skinned people have not.
NG: Yes. I was thinking particularly of my own
country [South Africa], and I was thinking specifically
of AIDS. Now, among people who have money to
provide themselves with the drugs that are available to
control HIV or AIDS itself, there’s a good chance to
go on living. But in the poor, mostly black majority of
our population, they simply cannot afford these drugs.
So AIDS is a death sentence for them.
WW: So, you are saying that just as the antiretroviral drugs that help treat the symptoms of AIDS
are only available to a small minority, any genetic
breakthrough that we are likely to see in the next few
decades is likely to be similarly priced and accessible
only to a few.
NG: We are looking at a terrible imbalance between
the rich and the poor of the world.
WW: Sometimes we wonder whether scientists
don’t simply do everything they can because that’s
what they are driven to do. If they are able to split the
atom, they will split it. If they are able to make clones,
they will make them. Maybe it’s a part of our hubris
that we just rush forward and build whatever we can,
and inevitably we encounter consequences we haven’t
foreseen.
NG: There is something wonderful about the con-
stant wish to discover. If you’re a writer, you are always
looking for the meaning of human life; your whole
writing life is a process of discovery, of solving the
mystery of human nature. So I can see that if you are
a scientist you have this urge to discover. But unfortunately, when you are brilliant and lucky enough to
strike on something, it may be a Pandora’s box that
you have opened, not the key to the world’s wisdom.
I know that toward the end of his life, Alfred Nobel
had many doubts about his dynamite, and what it
would be used for.
WW: Let’s go back to the concerns you raised with
the United Nations, when you suggested that genetic
engineering could lead to a “new racism.” How might
a genetic racism be manifested? Do you mean that
people might be manipulated to be more accepting of
the political regime?
NG: Or even to have memories that block out certain things.
WW: Such as…?
NG: Well, for instance, it’s come through the Truth
Commission that there were plans to use drugs for
crowd control, to make people more docile. I think it’s
possible you could torture somebody and then block
out the memory of that.
WW: Obviously we’re not talking about one technology. As our knowledge of the genome and of neurosciences expands, it opens up a whole range of
frightening scenarios—from crowd control to the
drugs that Aldous Huxley talked about, which could
numb a whole society.
NG: Yes, I suppose we have all tried in one way or
another to manipulate our consciousness—most of
us with cigarettes or alcohol or music. This is a personal choice that you make, and you’re not forcing it
upon other people. But if certain physical characteristics and mental attitudes can be genetically induced
in some way, that becomes the superiority that leads
to some people being regarded as custodians of
everybody else.
Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in Literature
for 1991. She has honorary degrees from Yale, Harvard,
Columbia, and Cambridge Universities, and the University
of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand in South Africa.
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July/August 2002
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Sarah Sexton
Deceptive Promises
Of Cures
For Disease
The great majority of the world’s diseases are caused by environmental,
not genetic, conditions. A frenzied search for genetic therapies
could steal resources from billions in order to serve only a few.
B
illions of public and private dollars are now being
poured into genetic research. Even some critics of
new human genetic technologies seem to concede
that these massive investments may be worthwhile.
The Catholic theology professor David Tracy, for
example, has said that “Opponents of human cloning
(as I am) cannot afford to ignore the benefits that
such cloning might provide for all humankind.” His
comment is easily extended to the drugs and tests that
might be realized through the new technologies. But
will the products of genetic research in fact be accessible to “all humankind”?
Probably not, because both the public and private
health services that would disseminate the new drugs
and procedures make cost-benefit decisions and value
judgements about who should get what treatment.
Many of the groups now considered to be the biggest
potential beneficiaries of genetic research, such as the
elderly and the seriously ill, are left by the wayside as
treatments are rationed. In contrast, however, health
services and insurance companies may vigorously promote some products, such as prenatal and adult gene
testing, if they believe they might save the costs of
supporting people in the long term.
Moreover, the increasing privatization of health
care services around the world means that access to
health care and medical products, including drugs and
tests, is increasingly based not on need but on ability
to pay, or to get health insurance. Private insurers tend
✦
18
Sarah Sexton works with The Corner House, a UK-based
research group focusing on social and environmental justice
issues. She is the author of The Corner House briefing “If
Cloning Is the Answer, What Was the Question? Power and
Decision-Making in the Geneticisation of Health.”
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
to select the best risks—people who tend to be healthy
anyway—and to reject those who have chronic illnesses or who cannot afford the insurance. The more
health care financing is based on insurance, the more
it will rely on assessments of individuals’ presumed
risk of ill-health—something gene testing is poised to
make enormously more complicated and supposedly
accurate.
Even without widespread gene testing, about one
in six people in the United States does not have health
insurance, while millions of others are underinsured.
With genetic screening becoming more widespread,
that number will only grow, as more people are
rejected by insurance companies or fail to keep up premium payments that will undoubtedly increase after
“susceptibilities” are discovered.
Just as private health services and insurers leave out
people who can’t pay, biotech research leaves out the
illnesses from which those people suffer. Because large
numbers of the people who can’t pay suffer from tropical diseases, those diseases are largely ignored by
researchers. While pneumonia, diarrhea, tuberculosis,
and malaria account for more than one-fifth of the
world’s disease burden, they receive less than 1 percent
of the funds devoted to health research. The private
sector is not inclined to put its own money into
researching products for “financially non-solvent” people, which is why it requires public subsidies to do so.
Public funds for health care services are also in
short supply. The International Monetary Fund has
compelled many debt-ridden countries to cut back
their public spending on health in order to be considered eligible for loans. Those public health services
that still remain in these countries have been pushed
into charging their patients “user fees.” The result?
People simply use medical services less—and some-
cures for disease
times die of easily-treatable diseases such as tuberculosis because they cannot afford the treatment.
The Philippine government now spends less than 3
percent of its budget on health—and nearly 30 percent
on servicing its debt. Half of all hospital beds are now
private, with most costs paid by patients. The insurance system covers only one-third of the population.
Just 3 percent of the World Bank’s $1.8 billion poverty
alleviation program in the Philippines goes to fund
health care. Of that, most
is for projects related to
women’s reproduction—
in so many parts of the world. The incidence of just
three leading killer diseases in the developing world—
malaria, diarrhea, and AIDS—would drop dramatically if mosquito nets, clean water, and condoms were
more accessible. Dr. Tikki Pang, Director of the
Research Policy & Cooperation Department at the
World Health Organization (WHO), warns that the
health of Africans and Asians could actually worsen as
a result of the rise of the genetic industry. While it may
be reassuring to think that sequencing the genes of the
parasite which causes malaria will lead to new drugs
and insecticides, it is likely, as Pang notes, that “any
NEW DRUGS MARKETED,
1975-1996
99 percent
1
t
en
rc
pe
Will genetic research be guided by need, or by ability to pay?
The increasing privatization of health care suggests the latter.
Despite the steep human and social costs of tropical disease
among the world’s poor nations, barely 1 percent of new drugs
marketed between 1975 and 1996 were aimed at malaria,
cholera, dengue fever, or other lethal maladies of the tropics.
Like pharmaceuticals, genetic technologies will be developed
mainly for the affluent.
Shehzad Noorani/ Peter Arnold, Inc.
in effect, “population management.” The World Bank
lends more money to turn the former U.S. naval base at
Subic Bay into a “freeport” base for corporations such
as Oriental Petroleum than it lends for Filipinos’ health.
A market-based approach to health and genetic
research not only drives up the costs of health care, but
also distracts attention from the factors that make people ill in the first place. Spurred by the growing fascination with genes, it encourages policymakers and the
public to see medicine primarily as a process of “fixing” diseased individuals, and good health as something to be bought and sold in the marketplace by
individual consumers rather than as a political goal for
society to work toward.
More genetic research will do little or nothing to
alter the conditions in which people become susceptible to many diseases. A recent proposal to research the
gene for diarrhea, for example, ignores the social and
economic conditions that make diarrhea a child-killer
such discoveries will be patented and only developed
at prices unaffordable to those who need them most.”
Similarly, studies have found that many people with
Parkinson’s disease have a history of exposure to pesticides, herbicides, or industrial solvents. Yet these
studies have evoked little interest. Instead, media
attention and legislation have been directed toward
treatments such as customised individual tissue
replacements via human embryo cloning. In the case
of diabetes, meanwhile, the WHO projects that incidence of the disease will more than double by 2025,
with up to 300 million people affected. Obviously, we
cannot all suddenly be sprouting diabetes genes, and
even if the new research were able to pinpoint all individuals genetically predisposed to the disease, this
would do nothing to address the causes of its growing
incidence.
In the area of human reproduction, the new
genetic economy may focus on prenatal testing—while
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
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the risks of the rush
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20
neglecting the link between birth defects and, say, the
pesticides found in the fathers’ and mothers’ environment, water, and food. Yet studying that link could
have significant benefits for public health, if not for
biotech companies. European Union researchers, led
by the London School of Medicine and Tropical
Hygiene, recently studied women living near 23 toxic
landfill sites in Britain, Denmark, France, Belgium,
and Italy. They found that the risk of having a baby
with a chromosomal abnormality such as Down’s
increased by 40 percent for women who lived within
two miles of a site.
With cancer, as well, the rush to genetic solutions
continues to dangerously divert public attention. A large
majority of human cancers are influenced by carcinogens in workplaces, houses, air, water, and food. The
overall incidence of cancer has been steadily rising in
the industrialized world for the last 45 years—a rise that
cannot be explained by the increasing age of populations alone. In the United States, the overall ageadjusted cancer death rate is 40 percent higher among
black men than white, and 20 percent higher among
black women than white. “If you are a poor woman or
a black woman, your chances of contracting and dying
of either breast or cervical cancer are significantly higher
than for other women,” says health activist April J.Taylor, who has worked on health issues related to black
women for a number of years. “Many black families
live near toxic waste sites, have access to poor quality
food and poor health care, and are living in immunosuppressing conditions that can cause gene mutations.”
Combining new genetic research with a market
approach to health thus exacerbates the racist aspects
of both. In the United States, for instance, many black
women have for decades been subjected to coercive
sterilization or contraception on the grounds that they
are “unfit” or too many or do not deserve to procreate. Whether consciously or not, the products of the
new genetic research are likely to be put into the service of racist practice. Rutgers University legal scholar
Dorothy Roberts points out the danger that people
will come to accept black women “being forcibly
implanted with Norplant or jailed because they gave
birth to a child while addicted to drugs.” By the same
token, Roberts suggests, tests claiming that “certain
children are genetically predisposed to crime” may
help justify, in the public eye, racist government programs of reproductive control.
Indeed, one of the biggest concerns associated
with the new genetic research is how neatly it reinforces discourses of eugenics and overpopulation. If
the simple existence of 6 billion people (rather than
the actions of a small but privileged minority of those
people) is believed to be destroying the planet, then
reducing those numbers becomes the top priority—
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
and both consumers and policymakers will become
more interested in trying to ensure that those children
who are allowed to be born are as “perfect” as possible in the current society’s eyes.
But who determines who shall be born and who
not, and according to what criteria and what assumptions? In the nineteenth century, no one suggested
that princesses of the royal families of Europe be sterilized because they were carriers of the gene for hemophilia. Rarely mentioned in discussions about the
supposed benefits for all humanity of the new genetic
research is the power of dominant groups to decide
which diseases and conditions constitute “unacceptable” health risks, and to determine who counts as a
“legitimate” mother.
Most health inequalities cannot be attributed
either to different genetic susceptibilities or to differences in medical care, and are only partially explained
by such health-related individual behavior as smoking, drinking, diet, and exercise. They are due rather
to the effects of the different social and economic circumstances in which people live, including unemployment, poverty, poor housing, and pollution.
“Much more important than the small differences
medicine can make in survival from cancers and heart
disease are differences in the incidence of these diseases,” says British sociologist Richard Wilkinson, who
has long studied health inequalities within societies. All
the broad categories of causes of death in developed
countries—heart disease, respiratory illness, and cancer, all of which are main targets of biotech research—
are related to income distribution. “To feel depressed,
cheated, bitter, desperate, vulnerable, frightened,
angry, worried about debts or job and housing insecurity; to feel devalued, useless, helpless, uncared for,
hopeless, isolated, anxious, and a failure…. It is the
chronic stress arising from these feelings which does
the damage,” says Wilkinson.
Even those few conditions clearly linked to single
genes often cry out not so much for more genetic
research as for more attention to the environment of
the sufferers. Consider sickle-cell disease. Chuck
Adams, a social worker in a children’s hospital in
Philadelphia who deals with the social problems faced
by sickle-cell patients and their families, points out
that living in a cold, abandoned building without adequate food must heavily affect those who have sicklecell disease. “They just happen to have a chronic
genetic disorder,” he says, “but being poor was probably the first disorder that they had to deal with.”
Genetic research is yielding what is scientifically
and financially feasible, not necessarily what is needed
by sick people. Health for All, not Genes ’R
R Us, needs
to be placed at the center of public health research,
policy, and funding.
Michael Dorsey
The
New
Eugenics
It used to be forced sterilization, and the experiments of
Dr. Mengele. Now it’s genetic technology and the free market.
The people who dream of creating a superior race are back.
American
Philosoph
ical Soci
ety
O
n a not too distant horizon, advances in human
biotechnology
may
enable us to engineer the
specific genetic makeup
of our children. Only a few
months ago, the headlinemaking Italian doctor Severino Antinori claimed to
have implanted cloned
embr yos in several
women. We are already at
the stage where we can
selectively terminate our
offspring if certain
genetic criteria are not
met. Soon it may be
possible to discern, and
ultimately select for or
against, individual
traits in our children.
It is at this juncture that the promise
of biotechnology
runs head-on into
the history and the
horrors of eugenics—the quest for biological
“improvement” through reproductive control.
At the start of the 20th century, British scientist
Francis Galton coined the term eugenics, from the
Greek eugenes, for “well-born.” He later distinguished
two major kinds of eugenics, positive and negative.
“Positive eugenics” was preferential breeding of socalled “superior individuals” in order to improve the
genetic stock of the human race. “Negative eugenics”
Michael Dorsey is Thurgood Marshall Fellow in
Residence at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
He is a member of the board of directors of the Sierra
Club.
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
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the risks of the rush
meant discouraging or legally prohibiting reproduction by individuals thought to have “inferior” genes
and was to be “achieved by counseling or by sterilization, either voluntary or enforced.”1* Galton, who was
Charles Darwin’s cousin, described eugenics as “the
science of improving stock…to give the more suitable
races a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less
suitable.”2 He founded the Eugenics Society in 1907
“to spread eugenic teaching and bring human parenthood under the domination of eugenic ideals.”3
A popular social movement in support of such
ideals had arisen in the late 19th century in the United
States and Europe. This movement reached its zenith
in the 1930s, but dissolved following World War II
and the disclosure of the horrific eugenic practices of
the Nazis. Nonetheless, support for the genetic control of human beings did not disappear, and public
endorsement of eugenic ideals continued to surface.
The 1962 Ciba Foundation conference, “Man and
His Future,” is a case in point. Conference participants, including many of the leading biotechnology
researchers of that time, agreed that molecular biology
would allow “mankind” to master evolution. Some
argued that genetic modification to encourage “positive” inherited traits could be part of a broader strategy to establish a better future for humanity.4
A 1980 report by the European Commission’s
Technology Forecasting Office provides another
example. The report boldly predicted: “The coming
twenty to thirty years will, it is thought, see two major
changes: the computerization of society (and)…the
biological revolution emanating from the boom of the
‘life technologies.’…Within the relatively near future,
biotechnology could be used in a number of sectors:
we could control the development of the human
embryo, and, perhaps within twenty years, determine
its sex. We could prevent certain malfunctions.”5
Some of these forecasts have since been realized,
and several have been exceeded.6 Sex determination is
not only possible, but in some places it is quite popular—especially in cultures and nations where female
children are “less desirable.” Prenatal diagnosis and
pre-implantation diagnosis make it possible to “select”
certain embryos prior to implanting them in a woman.
Some scientists and philosophers consider such
techniques to be an unmistakable reversion to eugenic
practices. The trouble, they note, is that the logic of
eugenics—the rational management of a population
for some “higher end”—is a logic readily amenable to
other, far more sinister projects than those envisioned
by “racist” and “non-racist” eugenicists, and perhaps
by proponents of the new biotechnology. The Holocaust is but one case in point.
Some biotech proponents support these technolo✦
22
* Endnotes can be found on page 43.
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
gies because people are free to
choose them or not. The
state is not involved. David
King, editor of the Londonbased GenEthics News, calls
this the emergence of laissez-faire eugenics. Patients
are given “non-directive”
genetic counseling, or
offered opportunities to
subject themselves or their
potential children to myriad genetic tests, for a host
of illnesses. But as King
notes, such counseling is
“eugenic both in purpose
and outcome, since the
aim is clearly to reduce
the number of births of
children with congenital
and genetic disorders.”
In a 1997 survey published in the Journal of
Contemporary Health
Law and Policy, researchers found that
13 percent of English
geneticists, 50 percent of Eastern and
Southern European
geneticists, and 100
percent of Chinese
and Indian geneticists agreed with
the eugenic suggestion that “an
important goal of
genetic counseling
is to reduce the
number of deleterious genes in
the population.”
These new
methods of targeting and eliminating debilitating diseases and various
forms of inherited disabilities raise some important
ethical concerns. Few would argue against screening
embryos for major genetic disorders like Tay Sachs
disease. But accepting the logic of eugenics in one
context opens the door for justifying more controversial practices: could parents begin to screen embryos
for cosmetic traits like eye color? And what about
inheritable genetic modification, which would force
future generations to live with genetic alterations we
American Ph
ilosophical So
ciety
new eugenics
determine for them?
In addition, targeting and eliminating those that
might be born disabled also has deleterious implications for the living. “There is a growing voice in the
disability movement arguing that this (type of) genetic
research and testing fosters a climate of intolerance
toward people with disabilities,” according to the
Canada-based Advocacy Group on Erosion, Technol-
ogy, and Concentration (ETC).
A 2001 industry survey in Nature listed
361 biotech firms, more than three-quarters
of them based in the United States. These corporations are, by their very nature, guided by
their bottom line. And yet, if financial considerations are allowed to drive the development of
genetic technologies, we may see a rapid expansion of laissez-faire eugenics.
Already, the industry almost exclusively aims
to bolster the health and well being of those who
can afford its services, in spite of using tens of millions of dollars in public monies to support basic
research. And industry lobby groups work hard to
discourage any and all forms of government regulation. In the aftermath of an intense lobbying
effort in December 2001, the European Parliament
voted overwhelmingly (316 votes to 37) against
tighter restrictions on genetics and biotechnology.
A global public debate on the social implications
of biotechnologies for humanity is urgently overdue. But few individual governments or international
agencies have stepped forward to provide leadership
for such an effort, and fewer still have called for
tighter controls and regulations. The World Health
Organization has done little to promote international
regulation of biotechnology, despite the fact that two
of its four main functions are “to give worldwide guidance in the field of health” and “to develop and transfer appropriate health technology, information, and
standards.” The U.N. General Assembly has embarked
on a process to obtain a global ban on reproductive
human cloning, but its passage is not assured.
Far from halting scientific progress, as some industry groups claim, the imposition of moratoria or bans
on a couple of the most dangerous new human genetic
technologies could help strengthen the long-term viability of basic and biomedical research by compelling
its supporters to more thoroughly consider—and
more forthrightly deal with—the social and moral
implications of their work.
The 1927 Buck v. Bell decision (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote
the U.S. Supreme Court opinion excerpted here) centered on Emma
Buck, her daughter Carrie, and Carrie’s daughter Vivian. The first
two women were labeled promiscuous, although Vivian was the
outcome of Carrie’s rape; all were judged “feebleminded” and
paraded as justification for Virginia’s 1924 eugenic sterilization
law. One state expert testified that the Bucks were members of
“the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites
of the South.” Vivian Buck turned out to be an honor-roll student.
More than 7,000 people were sterilized under Virginia’s program
between 1924 and 1979. In May 2002 the state became the first of
the 30 states that ran eugenics programs to apologize for the
forced sterilizations.
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the risks of the rush
Views From
Around the World
Ethiopia
Formally, the human genetic engineering project is
expected to identify our genetic peculiarities so that
our ailment particularities can be precisely targeted.
But, as an African whose ancestors suffered for 500
years being targeted for slavery and being colonized,
and whose natural resources are now being plundered,
I find it difficult to expect peculiarities to be used positively. When I recall that the North has apologized to
the Jews for the Holocaust and even through the Pope
to the Arabs for the Crusades, and that only in 2001
the North refused to apologize to Africans in Africa
and the Diaspora for slavery and colonialism, I find it
difficult to feel so positive. Given this, do I expect the
human genome project to make life easier for the sufferer of sickle cell anemia, or killing easier for the white
supremacist who is now a major political force in the
North? I leave you to guess the answer.
Berehan Gebre Egziabher
General Manager,
Environmental Protection Agency, Ethiopia
South Africa
While for privileged people it may seem that the balance in the use of power flowing from scientific knowledge and technological achievements has been in favor
of beneficence, different perceptions prevail among
those who have been marginalized. Close links
between science, technology, the military, money, and
those with global power, and the use of power and
secrecy to protect privilege, have undermined confidence that there is any significant concern for the
future of the people of Africa.
Soloman Benatar, M.D.
South Africa
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24
slaughtered preemptively. It is this potential for genocide based on genetic difference, which I have termed
“genetic genocide,” that makes species-altering
genetic engineering a potential weapon of mass
destruction, and makes the unaccountable genetic
engineer a potential bioterrorist.
George J. Annas, Chair
Department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human
Rights, Boston University School of Public Health
Malaysia
Potential abuse of technology related to reproductive
cloning of human beings not only raises moral, religious, and ethical concerns but also poses risks [of]
developmental and bodily abnormalities to humans.
Hasmy Agam
Malaysian Ambassador, United Nations
India
The final goal of reproductive engineering appears to
be the manufacture of a human being to suit exact
specifications of physical attributes, class, caste, color,
and sex. Who will decide these specifications? We have
already seen how sex determination has resulted in
the elimination of many female fetuses. The powerless
in any society will get more disempowered with the
growth of such reproductive technologies.
Sadhana Arya, Nivedita Menon, and Jinee Lokaneeta
Saheli Women’s Resource Centre, Delhi University
North America
Human genetic manipulation that affects indigenous
peoples is an act of war on our children.
Dave Pratt, Dakota tribe
United States
United Kingdom
Given the history of mankind, it is extremely unlikely
that we will see the posthumans as equal in rights and
dignity to us, or that they will see us as equals. Instead,
it is most likely either that we will see them as a threat
to us and thus seek to imprison or simply kill them
before they kill us, [or that] the posthuman will come
to see us (the garden variety human) as an inferior
subspecies without human rights, to be enslaved or
All the developments in and around human genomics
stem from the mechanistic paradigm that still dominates western science and the global society at large….
The irony is that contemporary western science across
the disciplines is rediscovering how nature is organic,
dynamic, and interconnected. There are no linear
causal chains linking genes and the characteristics of
organisms, let alone the human condition. The dis-
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
Vandana Shiva
credited paradigm is perpetrated by a scientific establishment consciously or unconsciously serving the corporate agenda, and making even the most unethical
applications seem compelling.
Biopirates
And the Poor
Mae-Wan Ho
Institute of Science in Society, London, U.K.
China
The main potential harm of genetic engineering is
associated with artificial horizontal gene transfer experimentation. Horizontal gene transfer occurs commonly in nature. Genes can be exchanged between
different bio-species. But the frequency of these natural transfers is limited by the defense systems, i.e.
immune systems, of each bio-species. The immune
system serves to prevent invasion by harmful foreign
genes, viruses, and so forth, so that the bio-species can
maintain its characteristic traits and normal metabolism. The GE method of horizontal gene transfer
works by penetrating or weakening the immune system and using virulent genes as delivery vehicles. That
is, the gene to be transferred is combined with a virulent gene to effect penetration. This method allows
harmful virulent genes, especially those with resistance to antibiotics, to become widespread in nature….
If such virulent genes combine with the genes of
harmful viruses to form new viruses, it will be disastrous for humankind.
Yifei Zhu
Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China
Environmental NGOs
Together with proposed techniques of inheritable gene
modification, the use of cloning for reproduction
would irrevocably turn human beings into artifacts. It
would bring to an end the human species that evolved
over the millennia through natural evolution, and set
us on a new, uncontrollable trajectory of manipulation,
design, and control.
Brent Blackwelder, President, Friends of the Earth
Mark Dubois, International Coordinator,
Earth Day 2000
Randy Hayes, President, Rainforest Action Network
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President,
Waterkeeper Alliance
John A. Knox, Executive Director,
Earth Island Institute
Robert K. Musil, Executive Director,
Physicians for Social Responsibility
John Passacantando, Executive Director,
Greenpeace USA
Michele Perrault, International Vice President,
Sierra Club
Mark Ritchie, President, Institute for Agriculture
and Trade Policy
T
he promise to cure disease through human genetic
engineering has moved faster on Wall Street and in
the media than in basic scientific knowledge of
how genes work and how genetic manipulation affects
whole organisms as well as their relationships with
other organisms. Within a few weeks the “alphabet”
of the “Book of Life” shrank from 100,000 to
30,000; this is just one indicator of the ocean of
ignorance in which the island of human genetic engineering is floating.
The three major concerns arising from human
genetic engineering are biopiracy, the transformation
of socially defined traits into biologically defined ones,
and the issue of privacy.
Across the world, indigenous communities are outraged at biopiracy of genes and genetic material. The
recent case of collection of blood samples from the
Naga tribe in northeast India is just another example
of gene piracy at the human level. Such piracy can
even happen in the heart of rich industrial society, as
shown by the case in which University of California
scientists patented the genes of a cancer patient, John
Moore, without his knowledge.
What is called a deficiency—mental, physical, or
other—is socially defined. For example, the perverse
world order of globalization dictated by commerce,
greed, and profits regularly treats women, children,
and poor people as inferiors. Without strong democracy and true transparency, this kind of discrimination
can be used to justify human genetic manipulation,
manifested in eugenics programs.
Human genetic engineering also raises major issues
about the erosion of privacy and handing people’s
control over their own destiny to others, such as insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and police
states, which could combine to share genetic data
without the consent and participation of the persons
concerned.
Vandana Shiva is a physicist and environmental activist
and is director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in Uttar Pradesh, India. Her books
include Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit
(South End Press, 2002) and Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking
of the Global Food Supply (South End Press, 2000).
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July/August 2002
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25
Judith Levine
What Human Genetic
Modification Means
For Women
Supporters of the new eugenics want it framed as an issue of “choice.”
But feminists know we can support abortion rights
and still oppose eugenics.
S
educed by the medical promises of genetic science
or fearful of losing reproductive autonomy, many
feminists have been slow to oppose human genetic
engineering. But GE is a threat to women, and in
the broadest sense a feminist issue. Here’s why.
If anyone should be wary of medical techniques to
“improve” ordinary reproduction—as GE purports to
do—it’s women. History is full of such “progress,”
and its grave results. When limbless babies were born
to mothers who took thalidomide, the drug was
recalled. But the deadly results of another “pregnancyenhancing” drug, DES, showed up only years later, as
cancer in the daughters of DES mothers. The highestrogen Pill was tested first on uninformed Puerto
Rican mothers, some of whom may have died from it.
Today’s fertility industry takes in $4 billion a year,
even though in-vitro fertilization (IVF) succeeds in
only 3 of 10 cases. Virtually unregulated and highly
competitive, these fertility doctors often undertake
experimental treatments. Recently, the Institute for
Reproductive Medicine and Science at New Jersey’s
St. Barnabas Medical Center announced the success of
a new fertility “therapy” called cytoplasmic transfer, in
which some of the cellular material outside the nucleus
of one woman’s egg is transferred into the egg of
another woman who is having difficulty sustaining
embryo survival. The transferred cytoplasm contains
mitochondria (organelles that produce energy for the
cell), which have a small number of their own genes. So
the embryo produced with cytoplasmic transfer can
end up with two genetic mothers. This mixing, called
“mitochondrial heteroplasmy,” can cause life-threatening symptoms that don’t show up until later in life.
When the Public Broadcasting Service’s Nova enthusiastically reported on the procedure, complete with
footage of its cute outcome, Katy, it mentioned no
risks.
Didn’t these patients give informed consent? Yes
and no. Most read warnings and signed their names.
But with genetic therapies there’s no such thing as
“informed,” says Judy Norsigian of the Boston
Women’s Health Collective, “because the risks can’t
be known.” Adds biologist Ruth Hubbard, the deadliness of DES was discovered “only because it showed
itself in an otherwise very rare condition. If the effects
[of human genetic engineering] are delayed, and if
they are not associated with a particularly unusual
pathology, it could take quite a long time to find
out.” Or indeed, “we might never know.”
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26
Judith Levine has written on women’s issues for Ms., My Generation, New York Woman, Oxygen, and Salon, among others.
She is the author of My Enemy, My Love: Women, Men, and
the Dilemma of Gender (Anchor Doubleday, 1993), and
Harmful to Minors: the Perils of Protecting Children From
Sex (University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
“PERFECTING” HUMAN GENETIC MODIFICATION
WOULD REQUIRE EXPERIMENTATION
ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
Scottish biologist Ian Wilmut, the “father” of the
famously first-cloned sheep Dolly, provided these sta-
women
The Role of North American Women
Mainstream American women’s and reproductive rights
organizations have been slow to understand speciesaltering technologies as their issues. This hasn’t been
true in Europe and the global South, or among indigenous women in North America. In 1992, for instance,
European Green Party women discovered a patent
application from a U.S. biotech company for a process
to synthesize nonhuman “biological active agents” in
human mammary glands, from which they’d be secreted
in milk and transmitted to nursing infants. To dramatize
the commodification of women that lurked in this idea,
the women’s propaganda featured the image of a
pregnant belly with a bar code emblazoned across it. It
was one of the first feminist campaigns against patenting
a life form, and it was successful. But if such success is
to have any chance of being parlayed into a comprehensive global ban, given the aggressive rush of U.S. industry toward this lucrative new trade, more active
intervention will be needed from Americans—and especially from American women.
When proposals to ban human cloning were
introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives a year
ago, progressive opponents of genetic engineering were
only partly pleased. The problem was, the legislation did
not come from other progressives, or their friends.
Rather, the bills were all sponsored by hard-right
Republicans like Florida Congressman David Weldon
and Pennsylvania’s James Greenwood, and the bills’
loudest supporters were anti-abortion fundamentalists.
This demanded fast and tricky politicking. The
sponsors’ sympathies, showing more tenderness toward
blastocysts than toward living women and children,
made pro-choice representatives want to run in the
other direction. “The problem with the Weldon bill was
Dave Weldon,” said Judy Norsigian, executive director
of the Boston Women’s Health Collective, after
lobbying the House on behalf of that bill. The press
fanned moderates’ misgivings by characterizing the
debate as one of science versus religion, or of medical
progress versus Luddite alarmism.
Last summer, U.S. feminists began to catch up. More
than 100 groups and individuals—from the National
Women’s Health Network to the National Latina Health
Organization, and from disability rights feminist Adrienne
Asch to anti-globalization activist Naomi Klein—signed
the Boston Women’s Health Collective petition
supporting a ban on reproductive cloning and a moratorium on embryo cloning. The leadership of the Health
Collective’s executive director was emblematic as well as
real: as the prospect of human genetic engineering looms,
the title of the feminist classic her group wrote—Our
Bodies, Ourselves—assumes more urgent meaning.
tistics in 2001: Of the 31,007 sheep, mice, pig, and
other mammal eggs that had undergone somatic cell
nuclear transfer (cloning), 9,391 viable embryos
resulted. From those embryos came 267 live-born offspring. In these animals, The New York Times reported,
“random errors” were ubiquitous—including fatal
heart and lung defects, malfunctioning immune systems, and grotesque obesity. In all, “fewer than 3 percent of all cloning efforts succeed.” Dolly may be a
victim of accelerated aging, another problem in cloned
animals. In January, it was reported that she has arthritis, at the unusually early age of five and a half. Mothers of clones are endangered too, since their bodies
have trouble supporting the abnormally large fetuses
Valhalla, is that if it works on a mouse, it is likely not
to work on a woman: “Every species presents a new set
of problems.” How might the process be perfected in
humans? In clinical trials?
“The degree of risk to be taken should never
exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment,”
reads the Nuremburg Code, drawn up after World
War II to forbid future torturous experiments of the
sort Nazi “scientists” inflicted on concentration-camp
inmates. What is the humanitarian importance of creating a faster 100-meter sprinter? Or even curing a
disease with genetic engineering when other options
are still untried? The science to find “safe” means of
that cloning often produces.
It’s likely that scientists will get better at cloning
animals, and at the more complex procedures required
to produce inheritable genetic alterations. Then, as
health activists quip, if it works on a mouse, they will
try it on a woman. The problem, warns Stuart Newman, a cell biologist at New York Medical College in
human GE, says Newman, would constitute “an
entirely experimental enterprise with little justification.” In other words, “We can’t get there from here.”
WE ARE NOT OUR GENES.
When the Human Genome Project finished its map of
our DNA, its press releases called it the “blueprint” of
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July/August 2002
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27
the risks of the rush
humanity, the very Book of Life. The newspapers had
already been filling up with reports of the discovery of
a “gene for” breast cancer, and a “gene for” gayness.
Many people had begun to believe our genes determine who we become.
This line of thinking should sound familiar to
women. Not long ago, we were told that hormones,
not sexism, explained why there has never been a U.S.
female president (she might start a nuclear war in a fit
of PMS). A decade after that came the notion that
gender is “hard-wired” into the brain. Not incidentally, these claims were made just when social movements were proving Simone de Beauvoir’s adage that
women are not born but made. Now the old determinism is raising its ugly head once again, with genetics. As “non-traditional” families finally bring
legitimacy to social parenting, proponents of inheritable genetic modification tell us not only that we can
pre-determine the natures of our children, but that
cloning is the only means by which gays and lesbians
can become real parents. “Real” parental ties, they
imply, are biological, genetic.
“Genetic determinism” is not biologically accurate. “It is very unlikely that a simple and directly
causal link between genes and most common diseases
will ever be found,” writes Richard Horton, editor of
the British medical journal The Lancet. If this is true of
disease, it is even more true of musicality, optimism, or
sexual orientation. The more complex a trait, the less
useful genetics are to explain it. Hubbard writes, “The
lens of genetics really is one of the narrowest foci to
define our biology, not to mention what our social
being is about.”
GENETIC MODIFICATION IS NOT
A REPRODUCTIVE “CHOICE.”
For feminists, one of the most galling aspects of the
debate about human genetic manipulation is the way
its proponents have hijacked the language of “choice”
to sell its products. IVF clinics and biotech research
shouldn’t be regulated, say the companies that run
them, because that would impinge on “choice” (for
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28
Thousands of cloning experiments on mammals have yielded these
results so far: for every 3.3 cloned eggs, 1 viable embryo, and for
every 35 viable embryos, 1 live-born offspring. Ratio of eggs to live
offspring: about 116 to 1. Most of the offspring suffered from grave
defects. To get better at cloning will require much more
experimentation. To get good at cloning humans, or performing other
genetic operations on them, will require experimenting on women,
men, and children—and accepting the inevitable failures.
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
the paying customers, if not for their unsuspecting
offspring). The Book of Life is becoming a “catalogue” of “consumer eugenics,” says sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman.
Some ethicists, too, have posited a reproductive
“right” to prenatal baby design. People decide
whether or not to reproduce based on an expected
“package of experiences,” wrote John Robertson, an
influential bioethicist, in 1998. “Since the makeup of
the packet will determine whether or not they reproduce…some right to choose characteristics, either by
negative exclusion or positive selection, should follow
as well.” Already, selective abortion is widely accepted
after prenatal genetic screening uncovers an “anomaly.” Although some (notably disability rights activists)
critique such “negative eugenics,” many people accept
this practice for serious medical conditions. In any
case, selecting from among a small number of embryos
is a far cry from rearranging the DNA of a future child
to achieve some preferred traits.
What feminists mean by “choice”—the ability to
control fertility with safe and legal birth control and
abortion—is far more concrete. It confers existential
equality on the female half of the human race, which
is why women worldwide have sought it for centuries.
But genetic engineering designs in inequality: it will
artificially confer heritable advantages only on those
who can afford to buy them. Performed prenatally,
moreover, it affects the new person without that person’s prior consent and possibly to her physical or
emotional detriment. “Ending an unwanted pregnancy is apples, and mucking around with genes is
oranges,” says Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for
Genetics and Society. “We support abortion rights
because we support a right to not have a child—or to
have one. But we don’t support a woman’s right to do
anything to that child once it’s alive, like abuse it or kill
it.” Ironically, as Lisa Handwerker of the National
Women’s Health Network has pointed
out, anti-choice, anti-GE forces
share with GE’s proponents
an obsessive focus
on the embryo as an independent entity, while they
both virtually ignore the pregnant woman and the
child she may bear.
BANS ON DANGEROUS GENETIC TECHNOLOGIES
DO NOT GIVE FETUSES “RIGHTS.”
Some choice advocates fear that any perceived concern
about embryos will cede territory to anti-abortionists,
women
who want full legal protection of embryos and fetuses.
U.S. Congressman Henry Waxman reflected this confusion when he said at a Congressional hearing, “I do
not believe that the Congress should prohibit potentially life-saving research on genetic cell replication
because it accords a cell—a special cell, but only a
cell—the same rights and protections as a person.”
But pro-choice opponents of cloning do not propose to give cells rights. Rather, we worry that cloned
embryos might be implanted by unscrupulous fertility
entrepreneurs into desperate women, where they’ll
grow into cloned humans. And from cloning, it is not
a big step to designing children.
For legal, political, and philosophical reasons, University of Chicago medical ethicist Mary Mahowald
proposes clarifying the pro-choice position. “It does
feminist support for abortion no good to confuse life
with personhood,” she told me. “We can admit that
the embryo is life and therefore afford it respect—the
respect, for instance, of not exchanging its genes with
those of another cell. But respecting life is not the
same as granting rights. Rights are reserved for living
persons.”
INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM MUST BE BALANCED
WITH SOCIAL JUSTICE.
“We’re against bans,” said a member of a coalition
of mainstream reproductive-rights groups, explaining
why the coalition was reluctant to join a campaign
against human cloning. This reaction is not surprising
in the United States, where defense of personal freedom can often trump the public
interest.
Women’s liberation means
more than personal freedom,
though. Rooted in
the Left,
feminism is a
critique of all
kinds of domination and therefore a vision of an egalitarian world—racially
and economically, as well as sexually.
In the case of species-altering procedures,
social justice must prevail over individual “choice.”
Arguing for an international ban on reproductive
cloning and regulation of related research, Patricia
Baird, chair of Canada’s Royal Commission on New
Reproductive Technologies, put it this way: “The
framework of individual autonomy and reproductive
choice is dangerously incomplete, because it leaves out
the effects on others and on social systems, and the
effects on the child and future generations.” The good
news is that good public policy protects individuals
too. Baird offered the example of overfishing, which
might benefit the fisherman in the short run but
deplete the fishery for everyone, including that fisherman, in the long run. Regulation sustains his and his
children’s livelihoods. “We all have a stake in the kind
of community we live in,” Baird said.
FEMINISTS CAN WORK ALONGSIDE
ANTI-ABORTION CONSERVATIVES AGAINST
SPECIES-ALTERING PROCEDURES.
“We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human
beings…because we intuit and we feel, immediately
and without argument, the violation of things that we
rightfully hold dear,” wrote Leon Kass, conservative
social critic and chair of President Bush’s committee to
investigate stem-cell research.
Not every feminist holds dear what Kass holds
dear: the “sanctity” of the family based in God-given,
“natural” forms of reproduction. Still, Kass sat beside
Judy Norsigian and Stuart Newman to testify
before the U.S. Congress against cloning.
The genetic engineering debate has made
strange bedfellows. But it has also rearranged
the political definitions that made those bedfellows strangers. “Social conservatives
believe [genetic engineering] is
playing God and therefore
unethical, while anti-biotech
activists [of the Left] see it
as the
first step into a
brave new world
divided by biological castes,” writes
social critic Jeremy Rifkin. “Both
oppose the emergence of a commercial eugenics civilization.” Others suggest that the new
political landscape divides differently, between
libertarians and communitarians. Whether of the
Left or the Right, the former would support an individual right to choose just about any intervention on
one’s own body or one’s offspring, whereas the latter
esteem public health and social equality and would
reject those interventions, including GE, that endanger them.
Choice activists may at first be surprised when they
find that their anti-cloning and anti-eugenics sentiments are shared by opponents of reproductive rights.
But passionate arguments for the same position from
historically sworn enemies can only make a legislator,
or any citizen, listen up. Feminists need sacrifice no
part of the defense of women’s reproductive autonomy when we champion health and social justice for
the future human community.
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
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29
Francis Fukuyama
In Defense of Nature,
Human and
Non-Human
If the problem of unintended consequences is severe in the case of
non-human ecosystems, it will be far worse in the realm of human genetics.
GMOs are ultimately only an opening shot in a larger revolution.
P
eople who have not been paying close attention
to the debate on human biotechnology might
think that the chief issue in this debate is about
abortion, since the most outspoken opponents
of cloning to date have been right-to-lifers who
oppose the destruction of embryos. But there are
important reasons why cloning and the genetic technologies that will follow upon it should be of concern
to all people, religious or secular, and above all to
those who are concerned with protecting the natural
environment. For the attempt to master human nature
through biotechnology will be even more dangerous
and consequential than the efforts of industrial societies to master non-human nature through earlier generations of technology.
If there is one thing that the environmental movement has taught us in the past couple of generations,
it is that nature is a complex whole. The different parts
of an ecosystem are mutually interdependent in ways
that we often fail to understand; human efforts to
manipulate certain parts of it will produce a host of
unintended consequences that will come back to
haunt us.
Watching one of the movies made in the 1930s
about the construction of Hoover Dam or the Tennessee Valley Authority is today a strange experience:
the films are at the same time naïve and vaguely Stalinist, celebrating the human conquest of nature and
✦
30
Francis Fukuyama is Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at The Johns Hopkins University
School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author
of The End of History (Free Press, 1992), and Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002).
boasting of the replacement of natural spaces with
steel, concrete, and electricity. This victory over
nature was short-lived: in the past generation, no
developed country has undertaken a new large hydroelectric project, precisely because we now understand
the devastating ecological and social conNUMBER OF GENES
sequences that such
Whatever the measure of
undertakings proman is, it’s not the sheer
duce. Indeed, the
number of genes. Before
environmental movethe human genome was
ment has been active
decoded, biologists
in trying to persuade
expected the gene total to
China to desist from
reach 100,000. In fact, a
pursuing the enormously destructive
Three Gorges Dam.
If the problem of
unintended consequences is severe in
the case of nonhuman ecosystems, it
will be far worse in
the realm of human
Fruit fly
genetics. The human
genome has in fact
been likened to an
ecosystem in the complex way that genes
interact and influence
one another. It is now
estimated that there
are only about 30,000
genes in the human
genome, far fewer
than the 100,000
© Taina Litwak
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
in defense of nature
believed to exist until recently. This is not terribly
many more than the 14,000 in a fruitfly or the 19,000
in a nematode, and indicates that many higher human
capabilities and behaviors are controlled by the complex interworking of multiple genes. A single gene
will have multiple effects, while in other cases several
genes need to work together to produce a single effect,
along causal pathways that will be extremely difficult
to untangle.
The first targets of genetic therapy will be relatively simple single gene disorders like Huntington’s
disease or Tay Sachs disease. Many geneticists believe
that the genetic causality of higher-order behaviors
and characteristics like personality, intelligence, or even
height is so complex that we will never be able to
manipulate it. But this is precisely where the danger
lies: we will be constantly tempted to think that we
understand this causality better than we really do, and
will face even nastier surprises than we did when we
tried to conquer the non-human natural environment.
In this case, the victim of a failed experiment will not
be an ecosystem, but a human child whose parents,
seeking to give her greater intelligence, will saddle her
with a greater propensity for cancer, or prolonged
human has only about
30,000 (the same as a
mouse). And a rice plant
has even more genes than
a human (about 40,000).
Our genes help make us
human, but their numbers
are not the whole story.
Genes per organism
Plant-parasitic
nematode
debility in old age, or some other completely unexpected side effect that may emerge only after the
experimenters have passed from the scene.
Listening to people in the biotech industry talk
about the opportunities opening up with the completion of the sequencing of the human genome is
eerily like watching those propaganda films about
Hoover Dam: there is a hubristic confidence that
biotechnology and scientific cleverness will correct
the defects of human nature, abolish disease, and perhaps even allow human beings to achieve immortality
some day. We will come out the other end a superior
species because we understand how imperfect and
limited our nature is.
I believe that human beings are, to an even greater
degree than ecosystems, complex, coherent natural
wholes, whose evolutionary provenance we do not
even begin to understand. More than that, we possess
human rights because of that specifically human
nature: as Thomas Jefferson said at the end of his life,
Americans enjoy equal political rights because nature
has not arranged for certain human beings to be born
with saddles on their backs, ready to be ridden by their
betters. A biotechnology that seeks to manipulate
human nature not only risks
unforeseen consequences, but can
undermine the very basis of equal
Rendering of man from
democratic rights as well.
plaque on Pioneer 10, first
man-made object to escape
So how do we defend human
the solar system
nature?
The tools are essentially
30,000
the same as in the case of protecting non-human nature: we try to
shape norms through discussion
and dialogue, and we use the
power of the state to regulate the
way in which technology is developed and deployed by the private
sector and the scientific research
20,000
community. Biomedicine is, of
course, heavily regulated today,
but there are huge gaps in the
jurisdiction of those federal agencies with authority over biotechnology. The U.S. Food and Drug
Administration can only regulate
food, drugs, and medical products
10,000
on the basis of safety and efficacy.
It is enjoined from making decisions on the basis of ethical considerations, and it has weak to
nonexistent jurisdiction over medical procedures like cloning,
preimplantation genetic diagnosis
(where embryos are screened for
genetic characteristics before being
0
Courtesy USDA and Florida Department of Agriculture
Courtesy NASA
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
✦
31
the risks of the rush
implanted in a womb), and germline engineering
(where an embryo’s genes are manipulated in ways
that are inherited by future generations). The National
Institutes of Health (NIH) make numerous rules covering human experimentation and other aspects of scientific research, but their authority extends only to
federally funded research and leaves unregulated the
private biotech industry. The latter, in U.S. biotech
firms alone, spends over $10 billion annually on
research, and employs some 150,000 people.
Other countries are striving to put legislation in
place to regulate human biotechnology. One of the
oldest legislative arrangements is that of Britain, which
established the Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Agency more than ten years ago to regulate experimentation with embryos. Twenty-four countries have
banned reproductive cloning, including Germany,
France, India, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa,
and the United Kingdom. In 1998, the Council of
Europe approved an Additional Protocol to its Convention on Human Rights and Dignity With Regard
to Biomedicine banning human reproductive cloning,
a document that has been signed by 24 of the council’s 43 member states. Germany and France have proposed that the United Nations draft a global
convention to ban reproductive cloning.
One of the early efforts to police a specific genetic
technology, recombinant DNA experiments, was the
1975 Asilomar Conference in California, which led to
the establishment under the NIH of the Recombinant
DNA Advisory Committee (RAC). The RAC was supposed to approve all recombinant experiments in
which genes of different individuals and sometimes
species were spliced together, initially in agricultural
biotechnology and later in areas like human gene therapy. A conference held in 2000 on the 25th anniversary
of Asilomar led to a general consensus that, whatever
the virtues of the RAC a generation ago, it had outlived its usefulness. The RAC has no enforcement
powers, does not oversee the private sector, and does
not have the institutional capability to even monitor
effectively what is happening in the U.S. biotech
industry, much less globally. Clearly, new regulatory
institutions are needed to deal with the upcoming
generation of new biotechnologies.
Anyone who feels strongly about defending nonhuman nature from technological manipulation should
feel equally strongly about defending human nature as
well. In Europe, the environmental movement is more
firmly opposed to biotechnology than is its counterpart in the United States, and has managed to stop the
proliferation of genetically modified foods there dead
in its tracks. But genetically modified organisms are
ultimately only an opening shot in a longer revolution,
and far less consequential than the human biotechnologies now coming on line. Some people believe
that, given the depredations of humans on non-human
nature, the latter deserves more vigilant protection.
But in the end, they are part of the same whole. Altering the genes of plants affects only what we eat and
grow; altering our own genes affects who we are.
Nature—both the natural environment around us, and
our own—deserves an approach based on respect and
stewardship, not domination and mastery.
Rosario Isasi
The Human Rights Perspective
G
enetic engineering could be used to “enhance”
human beings, to make them healthier, smarter,
more athletic and attractive—and probably also
taller, thinner, and lighter-skinned. Advocates enthusiastically champion a disease- and suffering-free
human being, perhaps even an immortal one. But in
this scenario, markets will supersede human rights,
supply and demand will determine the value of each
person, and economics will dictate which traits
should be adopted.
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32
Rosario Isasi is from Peru and is a health-law fellow at the
Boston University School of Public Health.
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
Conditioning lives by manipulating individuals’
genes for the sake of parental ambition contradicts the
very notion of autonomy. Genetic engineering also
assaults human dignity and universal human rights
and runs counter to democratic ideals. In 1997
UNESCO unanimously adopted the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights,
which reaffirms the fundamental principles enshrined
in the International Bill of Human Rights: “The
human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all
members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity…. It is
the heritage of humanity.”
Tom Athanasiou and Marcy Darnovsky
The Genome
as a
Commons
Through all the trials and tribulations of human history,
what binds us in the end is our common humanity.
T
he atmosphere. The oceans
and fresh waters. The land
itself, and the fruits and
grains our forebears bred
and cultivated upon it. The
broadcast spectrum. The attention spans of our children.
Does such a list adequately
evoke “the commons,” and the
stakes we face in trying to save
it—both for itself and as the
foundation of our common future?
Or must we add yet another, more shocking example? Perhaps we must put the human genome itself on
this endangered commons list, and note that if this
genetic commons too is lost to partition and privatization, if it too becomes the privilege of the affluent,
then none of us on either side of the divide can be sure
of retaining the “humanity” we like to think we’ve
achieved.
The biotech boosters, of course, don’t see things
this way. Many of them insist that any conceivable
application of human genetic engineering is essential
to medical progress, and that the possibilities, no matter how speculative, trump all other considerations.
Thus they shrug off the likely outcome of embryo
cloning—that it will sooner or later lead to reproductive cloning, and then jump-start both the technologies and justifications of inheritable genetic
modification.
Some of them are even enthusiastically promoting
“designer babies” and “post-humans” as the next new
things.1* Indeed, the techno-eugenic hard school is
now promising that, within a generation, “enhanced”
babies will be born with increased resistance to dis* Endnotes can be found on page 43.
eases, optimized height and
weight, and increased intelligence. Farther off, but within
the lifetimes of today’s children,
they foresee the ability to adjust
personality, design new body
forms, extend life expectancy,
and endow hyper-intelligence.
Some actually predict splicing
traits from other species into
human children: in late 1999,
for example, a Ted Koppel/ABC Nightline special on
cloning speculated that genetic engineers will eventually design children with “night vision from an owl”
and “supersensitive hearing cloned from a dog.”
There are dark portents here in profusion, and
many of them will seem familiar to environmentalists.
But consider first the fundamental point: our patently
inadequate ability to protect the resources of the
global commons, to do them justice, to make them (in
reality as well as in United Nations rhetoric) “the common heritage of humankind.” Consider, through this
lens, the likely fate of the human genome—the script
which unites us as a biological species—as it too goes
on the auction block.
And attend to this chilling bit of futurology from
Lee Silver, a Princeton professor and self-appointed
champion of the new techno-eugenics:
Tom Athanasiou is the author of Divided Planet: The
Ecology of Rich and Poor (Little, Brown, 1996). Marcy
Darnovsky is Associate Executive Director of the Center for
Genetics and Society, and was editor (with Barbara Epstein
and Richard Flacks) of Cultural Politics and Social
Movements (Temple University Press, 1995).
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“[In a few hundred years] the GenRich—who
account for 10 percent of the American population—
[will] all carry synthetic genes…. All aspects of the
economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and
the knowledge industry [will be] controlled by members of the GenRich class…. Naturals [will] work as
low-paid service providers or as laborers…. [Eventually] the GenRich class
and the Natural class will
become…entirely separate
species with no ability to crossbreed, and with as much
romantic interest in each other
as a current human would have
for a chimpanzee.”2
Silver’s predictions, in case
this isn’t clear, are not voiced
in opposition to a eugenically
engineered future. Here and
elsewhere, his tone alternates
between frank advocacy of a
new market-based eugenics
and disengaged acceptance of
its inevitability.
Is such a future likely? We
hope not, and we take some
comfort in the possibility that
scenarios like these may long
remain beyond technical reach.
Notwithstanding the fleshand-blood accomplishments of
genetic scientists—glow-inthe-dark rabbits and goats that
lactate spider silk—artificial
genes and chromosomes may never work as reliably as
advertised. Transgenic designer babies may be too riddled with unpredictability or malfunction to ever
become a popular option.
Still, both the technological drift and the strength of
ideological feeling among proponents compel us to take
the prospect of a techno-eugenic future seriously. Some
surprisingly influential figures—including controversial
celebrities like Nobel laureate James Watson and
philosopher-provocateur Peter Singer, as well as mainstream academicians like Daniel Koshland of U.C.
Berkeley and John Robertson of the University of
Texas—are publicly endorsing visions similar to Silver’s.
These boosters frankly acknowledge that designerbaby techniques would be very expensive and that
most cloned or genetically “enhanced” children would
be born to the well-off. They concede that the technologies of human genetic redesign would therefore
significantly exacerbate socio-economic inequality, and
they speculate about a future in which a genetic elite
acquires the attributes of a separate species. But they
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do not find in any of these possibilities reason to
forego eugenic engineering. In Children of Choice, for
example, John Robertson writes that genetic enhancements for the affluent are “simply another instance in
which wealth gives advantages.”3
So ask not if the techno-eugenic agenda will come
true anytime soon. Ask instead why it’s getting so
much air time, and why Silver
and the others have not been
taken even mildly to task, either
by their scientific colleagues or
by liberal and progressive intellectuals who might be expected
to muster a bit of angst over
such crass eugenic visions.
And they are crass. Note the
coarse neoliberalism that
underlies Silver’s certainty
about the eugenic future:
“There is no doubt about it,”
he writes, “whether we like it or
not, the global marketplace will
reign supreme.”4 Moreover: “If
the cost of reprogenetic technology follows the downward
path taken by other advanced
technologies like computers
and electronics, it could
become affordable to the
majority of members of the
middle class in Western societies…. And the already wide
gap between wealthy and poor
nations could widen further
and further with each generation until all common
heritage is gone. A severed humanity could very well
be the ultimate legacy of unfettered global capitalism.” 5
The techno-eugenic vision carries with it a deep
ideological message. It urges us, in case we still harbor
vague dreams of human equality and solidarity, to get
over them. It tells us that science, once (and sometimes still) the instrument of enlightenment and emancipation, may bequeath us instead a world in which
class divisions harden into genetic castes, and that
there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. The
story of an “enhanced” humanity panders to some of
the least attractive tendencies of our time: techno-scientific curiosity unbounded by care for social consequence, economic culture in which we cannot draw
lines of any kind, hopes for our children wrought into
consumerism, and deep denial of our own mortality.
This last theme, the one that brings our life
expectancies and bodily functions to center stage, is a
powerful one. Its driver is medical biotech, and the
commons
market niche for it is clearly waiting: all those aging
boomers now avidly dropping Viagra and DHEA and
Human Growth Hormone are the natural constituency of the techno-eugenicists. Tell them that
they’ll live longer, and they’ll follow you anywhere. As
James Watson put it in a conversation about how to
convince the public that eugenic manipulation of
future children is
acceptable, “We can
talk principles forever, but what the
public actually wants
is not to be sick. And
if we help them not
be sick they’ll be on
our side.”6
Watson, unfortunately, is tuned to the
zeitgeist of the welloff and the wellfunded. Those of
us disinclined to
embrace
eugenic
engineering will have
to work harder to be
heard above the din
of wildly exaggerated
biomedical claims. It
won’t be easy, but the bottom line is clear enough: we
have to distinguish genetic techniques that are plausible and appropriate from those that are likely to be
unsafe, ineffective, unjust, and pernicious.
The history of environmentalism is instructive
here. Advocates of ecological sanity have for decades
expended oceans of sweat and tears to show the need
for caution in the face of powerful new technologies—
nuclear power plants, large dams, Green Revolutions.
To be sure, the precautionary principle is generally
swatted aside by powerful political and economic
interests, but many people, and a few courageous policy makers, have accepted its key assumption: that
technologies shape lives and societies and thus are
appropriate matters for both careful forethought and
democratic oversight.
This elementary precautionary lesson, however, is
seldom applied to medical technologies. Even those
desensitized to the sirens’ song of triumphant technical progress may find themselves dreaming of new
therapies, fountains of youth, and genetically enhanced
memories. We may nurse, if only in the backs of our
minds, the comforting assurance that this is all moving
too quickly to be stopped.
The near-exemption of biomedical technologies
from the principles of precaution may help explain the
sudden emergence of embryo cloning as a national
issue and the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of the
debate about it: the out-on-a-limb promises of nearterm cures (would that Christopher Reeve, a
spokesman for therapeutic cloning, could be Superman again); the overblown claims of research breakthroughs (those cloned human embryos? Actually,
they stopped dividing at six cells); the loose talk of
treating millions of
sufferers with “therapeutic” cloning (after,
of course, finding the
women to “donate”
millions of eggs).
Biomedicine’s dispensation from the
precautionary principle may also shed
light on another oddity. Pundits in the
United States, noting
that both pro-choice
liberals and conservatives are now voicing caution about
embryo cloning, are
suddenly fixated on
the “strange bedfellows” that make up
the anti-cloning lobby. Yet they’ve entirely overlooked
the more disturbing lapses that still characterize so
much of the liberal/progressive reaction to the
prospect of unrestricted human biotechnology.
What, for example, are we to make of a recent
comment (made in an off-the-record meeting of a
national progressive organization) that “we don’t ban
things—bad guys ban things”? What about ozonedepleting chemicals, above-ground nuclear testing,
and medical experimentation on inadequately
informed women in the global South? And what of a
new eugenics based on high-tech reproduction, consumer preferences, and market dynamics? If we don’t
ban these things, who will?
And what are we to think when a columnist in an
intelligent liberal journal like The American Prospect
opines that “humans are part of the natural world and
all their activities, science, cloning, and otherwise, are
therefore hardly unnatural, even if they may be
unprecedented.”7 Surely environmentalists have been
adequately warned against the naturalistic fallacy and
are well aware that appeals to “Nature” can be made
to justify anything. So aren’t we entitled to a similar
level of sophistication from those inclined to see “Luddites” behind every bioengineered bush? Surely even
liberals who staunchly maintain their faith in the
onward march of science can see the political dangers
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of conflating categories, of erasing the difference
between the products of millions of years of evolution
and the products of commerce and fashion.
When liberals throw in their lot with libertarians,
there is danger near. The tension between personal liberty and social justice is a necessary one, and should
not be collapsed into uncritical support for individual
(or corporate!) rights. Commitments to solidarity and
fairness must not be allowed to wither and die. The
right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is very different than the “right” to modify the genetic makeup
of future children. Biomedical researchers and fertility
doctors have no “right” to develop species-altering
technologies in their petri dishes. And despite the
eagerness of venture capitalists and the willingness of
the patent office, they certainly have no “right” to
send them out into the world.
Which brings us back to the rich and the poor,
and their respective claims on the various global commons. Any serious vision of the future must address
this issue, and clearly. Remember Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World ? It was, first of all, a world of caste.
All the rest—the meaningless drug-optimized sex, the
soma, the feelies, even the bottled babies—was secondary, just more bricks in the wall.
The emerging human genetic and reproductive
technologies are a turning point. Unless we harness
our moral intelligence and political will to shape them,
they will conform to the existing social divides and to
the inadequacies of our democracy, and they will exacerbate both. Until the designer babies and “posthumans” begin to populate the planet, until we allow
inequality to be inscribed in the human genome, we’re
all in this together.
Frank Moore, Digital Divide, 2000, gouache, oil and mixed media on paper, 19 1/2 x 24 1/4" (49.5 x 61.6 cm), SW 01127.
Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York.
THE ART OF FRANK MOORE
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36
“The human genome project, cloning, stem-cell research are
all amazing and exciting—and fraught with danger,” said
painter, AIDS activist, and naturalist Frank Moore in an
interview only weeks before his death in April 2002. “They are
marred by the same negative motivations that often plague
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human activities, but also ennobled by the higher motivations
that accompany human enterprise.” Moore lived with the HIV
virus for nearly two decades, and was acutely aware that his
life depended on scientifically engineered medications. And yet
many of his works explicitly confront the threats posed by new
technologies, including genetic engineering.
Brian Halweil
The War of
Words and Images
Some of civilization’s most powerful art has sprung
from humanity’s most anguishing crises, and the pending crisis
of human genetic modification is no exception.
I
nvestment analysts are raving about a company on
the verge of going public. This firm (whose name
cannot yet be released) plans to help other companies improve the ability of their employees to work
long hours, help employees better conform physically and mentally to their workstations, and even
reduce the desire of employees to go home and spend
time with their families. The firm draws its inspiration
from Fredrick Taylor, a contemporary of Henry Ford,
whose principles of “scientific management” helped
justify the modern assembly line as a way to maximize
the efficiency of the workforce.
The firm’s humble slogan is “We think of things
that Mother Nature never could.” Interest in the company’s ser vices has intensified since the recent
announcement of several other of the company’s
planned projects: engineering people who have irresistible cravings for certain food products, and people
who are strongly attracted to the corridors of malls.
If you find this company’s plans disturbing, you
might draw some reassurance from the fact that the
company does not yet exist, except in the minds of an
anonymous collaborative of guerrilla artists who go by
the name ®™Ark. Several years ago, the group produced a 30-minute promotional Microsoft powerpoint
presentation of their fictitious firm—complete with
multi-color graphics of projected profits—as part of
“Paradise Now,” a collection of artists’ renditions of
the biotech future which first opened two years ago at
Exit Art in SoHo, New York.
The ®™Ark presentation left me wondering: are
there any laws preventing such a company—once its
product is technically viable—from going right into
business? If this kind of engineering has already
become routine to help farm animals conform to the
harsh conditions of a feedlot (it has), why not help
humans conform to their stressful 9-to-5 lives?
“Art can be seen as a social laboratory,” says
Eduardo Kac, a Brazilian-born artist whose work was
shown in the exhibit. One installation, for example,
suggested what a made-to-order baby company might
look like. Another offered brochures for Gene Genies
Worldwide, a company which, as the artists envisioned
it, planned to harvest and collect the genes of the
world’s most creative individuals—the likes of physicist
Stephen Hawking, architect I.M. Pei, author Michael
Crichton. As I studied this piece while looking over
the shoulders of an elderly couple, the husband turned
to his wife and whispered in a strong Brooklyn accent,
“It’s just like Hitler.”
It was unlikely, of course, that the couple had
gained whatever they knew about biotechnology from
reading scientific papers or having discussions with
experts. If they were like most people, they’d gotten
most of their information about the subject from mass
entertainment. For at least the past several years,
movies, TV shows, novels, and other forms of popular culture had been integrating biotech themes into
their stories with growing frequency. For millions,
such once-fantastic phenomena as cyborgs, clones,
bionic powers, and biowarfare have become as familiar as popcorn.
“Dark Angel,” for example, is a current TV action
drama featuring a transgenic, crime-fighting heroine
Brian Halweil is a research associate at the Worldwatch
Institute, where he studies the ecological and social impacts of
biotechnology. His writing has appeared in The Christian
Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Los Angeles
Times, The International Herald Tribune, Orion, and World
Watch, and he was coauthor of State of the World 2002.
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the risks of the rush
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named Max. It takes place in
“a time not so far from now”
in a Blade Runner-esque
United States rocked by “terrorist attack.” Max, an
escapee from a secret government lab that makes genetically engineered soldiers, is
continually pursued by her
creators, who are in turn preoccupied with keeping quiet
government efforts to grow
souped-up soldiers in test
tubes.
The show’s writers and
producers don’t attempt to
address serious ethical issues
associated with genetically
engineered humans, such as
would be posed by the capability of biotechnology to transform the way we fight
wars. (The Sunshine Project, an international organization exploring the dangers of new types of warfare
stemming from advances in biotechnology, documents
just a few of the potential biotech applications already
being considered by First World militaries, including
enhancing the abilities of soldiers to withstand sleep
deprivation, thirst, hunger, and other forms of stress;
using sophisticated neuro-pharmacology to develop
“calmatives” and “malodorants” for use in crowd control or to incapacitate enemy forces; and developing
novel bioweapons.)
Millions of people, we can presume, have gotten
their first exposure to the concept of genetically engineered people through this show. Jessica Alba, who
plays Max, was named one of the “25 Hottest Stars
Under 25” by Teen People, and the show is attracting
teen audiences around the world. Before long, any
ethical quandaries raised by the prospect of transgenics like Max may be moot. Transgenics will simply be
“cool.” (“Cool” was one of the common refrains—
along with “gross,” “yuck,” “scary,” and “no way!”—
I heard from my fellow spectators as I navigated the
corridors of “Paradise Now.”)
It would be unrealistic to expect popular culture to
offer serious criticism of something as momentous and
complex as the biological alterations of humans—yet
the premises featured in sit-coms and movie dramas
are easily interpreted as reality. As the gap between science fiction and fact narrows, we are caught up in a
whirlwind of new discovery that obscures many of the
implications of the new genetic technologies. Only a
year ago, for example, a new movie called “The Sixth
Day” featured Arnold Schwarzenneger as a distraught
pet owner struggling to decide whether to take the
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July/August 2002
remains of the family dog to “RePet Inc.” and have it
cloned before his young daughter gets home from
school and is heartbroken. Just a few months after the
movie came out, scientists at Texas A&M University
announced that they had cloned the world’s first cat,
a calico named “CC,” as part of “Operation Copycat.”
The effort was funded by Genetic Savings and Clone,
a company set up to clone beloved pets and to rescue
endangered species.
As the boundaries between science and science fiction become ever more blurred, we may tend to react
to new developments in technology with the same
bemused detachment with which we habitually regard
science fiction. In fact, our vigilance may be all the
more diminished by the fact that the advances of real
science rarely come with the same dramatic tensions
and visual effects we’re accustomed to in our entertainment. As a society, we run the risk of beginning to
accept the new technologies as our new reality even
before they hit the market—a desensitization that could
torpedo any public debate on these technologies.
But widespread public involvement in making
decisions about how to use technology is alien to
much of the world. “In the United States, the nation
driving innovations in biotech, technological pathways
are [often] decided solely by industry,” explains Dick
Sclove, founder of the Loka Institute, which studies
how societies choose technologies. “At best, things are
decided by the balance of power of industry and other
major interest groups, none of whom are likely to discuss the hard cultural, economic, and political issues.”
The most democratic method of making public
decisions about technology, says Sclove, may be that of
the Danish Consensus Conference. A typical Conference is called when the Danish government is about to
words and images
Frank Moore, Release, 1999, oil on canvas over wood panel, 22 5/8 x 95" (57.5 x 241.3 cm), SW 99280. Private Collection. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.
debate a technological issue that might have substantial public impact. The Conference usually consists of
15 ordinary citizens—excluding experts or representatives of trade associations, scientists, or other interest groups—who are treated to expert testimony and
briefings on the topic at hand. After the Conference,
members cross-examine experts and request any other
information they deem necessary, then prepare a document outlining what they see as the major issues to be
considered by society. The report is presented to the
Parliament and disseminated to the national public,
with discussions often following at the local level. (In
recent years, the Danish have scored very high on
international surveys of public understanding of technology, technology policy, and support of national
technology policy.)
Because of the diversity in this process, and the
absence of dominant special interests, the groups are
less likely to make mistakes or to pursue elitist goals,
and are more likely to serve a broad public’s interest.
Sclove compares a study of the implications of the
Human Genome Project conducted by the now
defunct U.S. Office for Technology Assessment
(OTA) in 1988 and a Danish Consensus Conference
on the same topic the following year. In its 200-page
report, OTA wrote that that “the core issue” is how to
divide up resources so that genome research is balanced against other kinds of biomedical and biological
research. A much shorter report from the Danish Conference recalled the eugenic programs of the 1930s
and worried that “the possibility of diagnosing fetuses
earlier and earlier in pregnancy in order to find
‘genetic defects’ creates the risk of an unacceptable
perception of man—a perception according to which
we aspire to be perfect.”
In most nations, there is little if any democratic discussion of technology (see the editorial on page 2 of
this issue), and whatever discussion does occur generally comes way too late, after the technology has
already been developed, commercialized, and committed to particular applications. Only when societies
choose to have such discussions early in the process,
when the technology is still plastic, can the uses of the
technology be molded for social benefits. (The relationship between human genetic engineering and
democracy is more intimate still, since human genetic
engineering has the potential to create genetic castes
and other forms of severe inequity which would
undermine the foundations of a democracy.)
I left “Paradise Now” thinking that art could in
some ways be quite effective in catalyzing public
debate—helping to draw a line between those uses of
biotech that would leave us with a better world and
those that would turn us into compliant servants of
some corporate-run, techno-eugenic future. In contrast, the debate on the new human genetic technologies has to date mostly consisted of a discussion among
scientists on various technical points—whether something is possible or economically feasible.
“Science has so dominated the discourse on
genetic engineering that the public feels left out,”
according to Frank Moore, another artist featured in
“Paradise Now,” whose paintings often contain horizons, buildings, and other structures assembled from
DNA double-helices. “Artists can help ensure that just
because the average person doesn’t have a biotech
background, he doesn’t have to completely miss the
biotech discussion.”
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39
Bill McKibben
Why
Environmentalists
Should Be Concerned
Humans have dangerously destabilized the Earth’s ecological system.
If we now begin altering our evolved interdependence with nature,
we will only accelerate the destabilization.
I
t’s not as if environmentalists really need something
new to worry about. The planet’s temperature is set
to rise four or five degrees—every glacial system is
already in rapid retreat, and icebergs measured in
units of U.S. states (the size of Rhode Island!) are
calving off the Antarctic. Species disappear daily; acid
rain; and you know the whole damn litany. We could
be forgiven for wanting to take a pass on human
genetic engineering.
And yet I think it may turn into the single greatest
battle environmentalists have ever fought, the one for
which the Grand Canyon and the African elephants
and Amazon deforestation and Love Canal were
preparing us. The real test.
Some of the reasons for thinking so are pragmatic.
Changing the human germline is an almost preposterous override of the precautionary principle, the idea
that if you don’t know something’s safe you shouldn’t
do it. We have rushed with blinding speed through the
first phases of the biotechnological revolution—what
was experimental a decade ago now grows in half the
corn and soybean fields on this continent. Now we
seem bent on going just as fast with our plans to tweak
the human genetic code that until now we have hailed
as nature’s finest achievement—already teams are competing to produce the first human clone, a precursor
of genetic enhancement. The ideas come thick and
fast, from visionaries who foresee improving the intelligence of our offspring, or increasing their muscle
mass, or bettering their character. In the words of
James Watson, the first director of the Human
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40
Bill McKibben is a former staff writer for The New Yorker.
His books include The End of Nature; The Age of Missing
Information; and Hope, Human and Wild.
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Genome Project and co-discoverer of the double helix,
“If we could make better human beings by knowing
how to add genes, why shouldn’t we? What’s wrong
with it?”
For environmentalists with a sense of history, such
words recall earlier promises of grand utopias: power
“too cheap to meter” from nuclear plants. What we
know about how human genetics works is dwarfed by
what we don’t know—and experimenting on our own
genetic heritage seems unwise to say the least. If history is any guide, the experiment will come with dubious side effects, likely to be visited upon the weakest
and poorest parts of society. If internal combustion, a
century later, yields global warming, then what does
this crash course in scientific breeding promise? At the
very least, the demand that we exploit this technology
immediately seems suspect (except to the venture capitalists who have made the investments). Which is not
to say the scientific progress need grind to a halt.
There’s plenty of work to be done this side of tampering with the germline—almost everyone concedes,
for instance, that using gene therapy to help existing
human beings with existing problems makes perfect
sense.
But where engineers and many environmentalists
part company is precisely on this question of trying to
“improve” the species. And they disagree, I think, in
large measure for emotional reasons as well as pragmatic ones. The human instinct that looks at a freeflowing river and sees something that could be
dammed to make power (or money) collides with the
human instinct that values, deeply and sometimes at a
level almost beyond words, the very free-flowingness
of that water. The engineering impulse to tinker, bend,
twist, patent, sell comes up against the environmental
impulse to appreciate, preserve, protect, cherish. And
environmentalists
that impulse, on both sides,
extends to the human
genome as surely as it does
to the Colorado River, the
Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge, the grassland
savannas of Africa.
At first glance, a human
being seems an unlikely
candidate for wilderness
designation. We are shaped
by a thousand different
forces—in a consumer society those forces grow ever
cleverer, often overriding
even the desperate attempts
of our parents to shape
who we are. And yet, so far,
there is something irreducibly wild about each of
us, the result of that particular assortment of DNA
that we ended up with. Not
random—but not defined,
either. We are, as yet,
unprogrammed. Or, at
least, the programming is
weak enough (our friends,
our schools, our origins)
that we can, albeit at some
cost, override it. Or not.
That’s what life is often
about, that choice.
And if the improvers
have their way, then life will
be about something else:
about the cells of our bodies expressing the particular combination of proteins
that someone believes will
produce a particular result.
And no change, not even
the climatic havoc we are
now wreaking on the
planet, will be as large
as that. If, as Thoreau
insisted, we are rich in
accordance with how much
we can afford to leave
alone, then this will be the
ultimate test of whether
we’re rich enough. For
conservationists, the final
frontier lies, literally, right
beneath our fingertips.
Frank Moore, The Green Fuse II (milkweed), 2000, oil on canvas over featherboard, 39 x 20" (99x50.8 cm), SW 00308.
Collection of Gian Enzo Sperone, New York. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.
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the risks of the rush
Human Engineering
Timeline
1953 James Watson and Francis Crick determine
the “double helix” structure of DNA. This
discovery is a major breakthrough in the
study of genetics and reinforces the idea that
an organism’s DNA is the primary and dominant determinant of its inherited traits.
1973 Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer create a
transgenic organism using recombinant DNA
technology, which allows the manipulation
and transfer of pieces of DNA from one
species to another.
1976 The first genetic engineering/biotech
company, Genentech, is founded by Boyer
and Robert Swanson. It is the beginning of
the commercial use of genetic engineering
technology, an industry which by 2002 is
generating revenues of $25 billion a year in
the U.S. alone. Within two years scientists at
Genentech splice the human gene for insulin
production into E. coli bacteria, which then
synthesize human insulin.
replicates DNA sequences. This process of
gene amplification makes gene mapping and
forensics easier and cheaper.
1990 Human Genome Project is begun by an international consortium of scientists, with most
of the funding coming from the U.S.
National Institutes of Health and the
Wellcome Trust, a medical philanthropic
organization based in London.
1996 A sheep named Dolly, the first mammal to be
cloned from adult cells, is born at Scotland’s
Roslin Institute. Previously, cloning had only
been carried out with embryo cells.
1998 Dr. James A. Thomson (University of
Wisconsin) and colleagues are the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells, which have
the potential to develop into almost any type
of tissue. This innovation opens up
the possibility of
1978 Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby” (in
vitro baby) is born in England, demonstrating
the feasibility of growing embryos outside of
the womb. In vitro fertilization is done by
putting sperm and an egg together in a lab
dish, where chemicals facilitate fertilization,
and then implanting the embryo into a
woman’s uterus.
1980 U.S. Supreme Court rules that
genetically engineered
microorganisms can be
patented (Diamond v.
Chakrabarty), setting
a precedent for
patents on
lifeforms.
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42
1983 Kary Mullis
devises the
Polymerase
Chain Reaction (PCR)
technique,
which rapidly
WORLD•WATCH
July/August 2002
STEPS IN MENTAL DEVELOPMENT
From an article describing a “clearinghouse
for mental defectives” established in 1913 by
the New York Department of Public Charities.
This sort of analysis often accompanied early
efforts to improve the human gene pool, and
still remains a part of the thinking behind
some 21st-century genetic research.
American Philosophical Society
timeline
harvesting stem cells for use in treating
human diseases.
2000 In June, scientists at both Celera Genomics
(a private company formed in 1998) and the
publicly funded Human Genome Project
announce that they have completed a draft of
the human genome. The announcement
evokes hopes about medical advancements
based on understanding of the genome, as
well as controversy about the issue of public
access to the information.
2001 In February, scientists at Celera Genomics
and at the Human Genome Project report
that the number of human genes is probably
about 30,000, only about twice as many as
the number of genes in a fruit fly and far less
than the long-standing textbook estimate of
100,000.
2002 As reports circulate that some scientists may
have already begun to implant cloned
embryos in women, the U.N. begins work on
a global ban on cloning.
—compiled by Vanessa Larson
E NDNOTES
Making Well People “Better” (pages 13-15)
Pat Mooney
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the
Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 86.
Courtwright, 105.
Courtwright, 89.
United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2001 – Making New Technologies Work for
Human Development (New York and Oxford:
UNDP/Oxford University Press, 2001), 13.
UNDP, 3.
Pat Roy Mooney, “The Parts of Life – Agricultural Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge and the Role of the
Third System,” Development Dialogue: A Journal of
International Development Cooperation, 1996: 1-2: 82.
Karla Harby, et al. “Beta Blockers and Performance
Anxiety in Musicians.” A Report by the beta blocker
study committee of FLUTE, March 17, 1997.
Deborah L. Stull, “Better Mouse Memory Comes at a
Price,” The Scientist 15(7), April 2, 2001, 21.
Sarah Lueck, “U.S. Says 16 Million Have ‘Pre-Diabetes’,”
Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2002, B8.
5
6
7
The Genome as a Commons (pages 33-36)
Tom Athanasiou and Marcy Darnovsky
1
2
3
4
5
The New Eugenics (pages 21-23)
Michael Dorsey
1
2
3
4
A. Rogers and D. de Bousingen, Bioethics in Europe
(Strasbourg: Council of Europe Press, 1995), 17. See
also D. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Francis Galton, Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its
Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), 25.
———, Memories of My Life (London: Melhuen
Publishers, 1908), 10.
G. Wolstenholme, (ed.) Man and His Future (Boston:
Little Brown, 1963).
Commission of the European Communities, European
File. Tomorrow’s Bio-Society. (Brussels: EC Technology
Forecasting Office, 1980).
Time, January 11, 1999, “Special Issue: The Future of
Medicine: The Biotech Century.”
Rogers and de Bousingen, 17.
6
7
See, for example, Gregory Stock and John Campbell,
eds. Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration
of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to
Our Children (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000).
Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a
Brave New World (New York: Avon Books, 1997),
4,6,7.
John A. Robertson, Children of Choice: Freedom and the
New Reproductive Technologies (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), 166.
Silver, 11.
Silver, “Reprogenetics: How Do a Scientist’s Own
Ethical Deliberations Enter into the Process?” Humans
and Genetic Engineering in the New Millennium
(Copenhagen: Danish Council of Ethics, 2000),
http://www.etiskraad.dk/publikationer/genethics/ren.
htm.
Stock and Campbell, 86. See also http://research.mednet.ucla.edu/pmts/Germline/panel.htm.
Chris Mooney, “Idea Log: Oh no! Bill McKibben’s said
too much. He’s said it all.” The American Prospect
Online, March 28, 2002, http://www.prospect.org/
webfeatures/2002/03/mooney-c-03-28.html.
See also Bill McKibben, “Unlikely Allies Against
Cloning,” The New York Times, March 27, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/27/opinion/27
MCKI.html.
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