"The advent of new biotechnical powers is for many people a cause for concern."

October / November 2004 Volume 2 Number 5

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The President's Council on Bioethics, created in 2002, has published numerous reports including Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, from which this essay has been excerpted. In presenting the report in 2003, Leon Kass, M.D., chairman of the council, wrote:

"In enjoying the benefits of biotechnology, we will need to hold fast to an account of the human being, seen not in material or mechanistic or medical terms but in psychic and moral and spiritual ones. As we note in the conclusion, we need to see the human person in more than therapeutic terms:

" —€˜—€¦As a creature "in-between," neither god nor beast, neither dumb body nor disembodied soul, but as a puzzling, upward-pointing unity of psyche and soma whose precise limitations are the source of its—€”our—€”loftiest aspirations, whose weaknesses are the source of its—€”our—€”keenest attachments, and whose natural gifts may be, if we do not squander or destroy them, exactly what we need to flourish and perfect ourselves—€”as human beings.'"

By all accounts, we have entered upon a golden age for biology, medicine, and biotechnology. With the completion of the DNA sequencing phase of the Human Genome Project and the emergence of stem cell research, we can look forward to major insights into human development, normal and abnormal, as well as novel and more precisely selected treatments for human diseases. Advances in neuroscience hold out the promise of powerful new understandings of mental processes and behavior, as well as remedies for devastating mental illnesses. Ingenious nanotechnological devices, implantable into the human body and brain, raise hopes for overcoming blindness and deafness, and, more generally, of enhancing native human capacities of awareness and action. Research on the biology of aging and senescence suggests the possibility of slowing down age-related declines in bodies and minds, and perhaps even expanding the maximum human lifespan. In myriad ways, the discoveries of biologists and the inventions of biotechnologists are steadily increasing our power ever more precisely to intervene into the workings of our bodies and minds and to alter them by rational design.

For the most part, there is great excitement over and enthusiasm for these developments. Even before coming to the practical benefits, we look forward to greatly enriched knowledge of how our minds and bodies work. But it is the promised medical benefits that especially excite our admiration. Vast numbers of people and their families ardently await cures for many devastating diseases and eagerly anticipate relief from much human misery. We will surely welcome, as we have in the past, new technological measures that can bring us healthier bodies, decreased pain and suffering, peace of mind, and longer life.

At the same time, however, the advent of new biotechnical powers is for many people a cause for concern. First, the scientific findings themselves raise challenges to human self-understanding: people wonder, for example, what new knowledge of brain function and behavior will do to our notions of free will and personal moral responsibility formed before the advent of such knowledge.
Second, the prospect of genetic engineering, though welcomed for treatment of inherited genetic diseases, raises for some people fears of eugenics or worries about "designer babies." Psychotropic drugs, though welcomed for treatment of depression or schizophrenia, raise fears of behavior control and worries about diminished autonomy or confused personal identity. Precisely because the new knowledge and the new powers impinge directly upon the human person, and in ways that may affect our very humanity, a certain vague disquiet hovers over the entire enterprise. Notwithstanding the fact that almost everyone, on balance, is on the side of further progress, the new age of biotechnology will bring with it novel, and very likely momentous, challenges.

While its leading benefits and blessings are readily identified, the ethical and social concerns raised by the march of biotechnology are not easily articulated.
They go beyond the familiar issues of bioethics, such as informed consent for human subjects of research, equitable access to the fruits of medical research, or, as with embryo research, the morality of the means used to pursue worthy ends. Indeed, they seem to be more directly connected to the ends themselves, to the uses to which biotechnological powers will be put. Generally speaking, these broader concerns attach especially to those uses of biotechnology that go "beyond therapy," beyond the usual domain of medicine and the goals of healing, uses that range from the advantageous to the frivolous to the pernicious.
Biotechnologies are already available as instruments of bioterrorism (for example, genetically engineered super-pathogens or drugs that can destroy the immune system or erase memory), as agents of social control (for example, tranquilizers for the unruly or fertility-blockers for the impoverished), and as means to improve or perfect our bodies and minds and those of our children (steroids for body-building or stimulants for taking exams). In the first two cases, there are concerns about what others might do to us, or what some people, including governments, might do to other people. In the last case, there are concerns about what we might voluntarily do to ourselves or to our society.
People worry both that our society might be harmed and that we ourselves might be diminished in ways that could undermine the highest and richest possibilities for human life.

Truth to tell, not everyone who has considered these prospects is worried. On the contrary, some celebrate the perfection-seeking direction in which biotechnology may be taking us. Indeed, some scientists and biotechnologists have not been shy about prophesying a better-than-currently-human world to come, available with the aid of genetic engineering, nanotechnologies, and psychotropic drugs. "At this unique moment in the history of technical achievement," declares a recent report of the National Science Foundation, "improvement of human performance becomes possible," and such improvement, if pursued with vigor, "could achieve a golden age that would be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life." "Future humans—€”whoever or whatever they may be—€”will look back on our era as a challenging, difficult, traumatic moment," writes a scientist observing present trends. "They will likely see it as a strange and primitive time when people lived only seventy or eighty years, died of awful diseases, and conceived their children outside a laboratory by a random, unpredictable meeting of sperm and egg." James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, put the matter as a simple question: "If we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?"

Yet the very insouciance of some of these predictions and the confidence that the changes they endorse will make for a better world actually serve to increase public unease. Not everyone cheers a summons to a "post-human" future. Not everyone likes the idea of "remaking Eden" or of "man playing God." Not everyone agrees that this prophesied new world will be better than our own. Some suspect it could rather resemble the humanly diminished world portrayed in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, whose technologically enhanced inhabitants live cheerfully, without disappointment or regret, "enjoying" flat, empty lives devoid of love and longing, filled with only trivial pursuits and shallow attachments.