Biopolitics

by Stefano Vaj

  Accordingly, the significance of such results could not be ignored, and became the subject of heated debates in media and “bioethics” committees, including in Italy, provoking noteworthy reactions also in the general public, to the point that a sweater made from Dolly’s wool was sold on auction for $25,000. Soon after, the PPL announced the birth of a second cloned sheep, Polly, who also contains a modified human gene, which contradicts predictions that this would have required another twenty years.[356]

  Brian Alexander writes:

  There has always been opposition to fiddling with nature. At the beginning of the Renaissance, clerics argued that the dissection of bodies was a sacrilege. Frankenstein was written as an argument for the supremacy of the sublime in Nature over the possibility that new electricity experiments might defy nature by “reanimating” tissue. John Hammond’s artificial insemination was held at bay by the Church of England. And, of course, there was Brave New World after Haldane. Until stem cells, Dolly, gene engineering, and the move toward turning genetic information into a commodity, these arguments were mostly academic. Electricity did not, in fact, reanimate dead tissue. Now though, science fiction did not seem so fictional.[357]

  And he adds:

  The reality of cloning and stem cells pulled bio-Luddites like Kass from the margins and galvanised a strange coalition between conservative politicians, Christian evangelists, the Catholic Church, left-wing intellectuals, and green environmentalists, all of whom realised, like the bioutopians, that gene technologies, welded to stem cells and cloning, might finally permit humans to decide their own biological future. With cloning technology it was now possible to genetically engineer a cell with some desired trait, insert that cell into an egg, and get a custom-made creature. That’s why it was invented. Stem cells made that prospect even simpler, just like they had for making customised lab mice. Those prospects drove the unlikely alliance. […] No amount of hyperbole was too much if it succeeded in scaring the bejesus of the public. Kass even equated the fight against the evils of biotechnology to the battle against international terrorism: “the future rests on our ability to steer a prudent middle course, avoiding the inhuman Osama bin Ladens on the one side and the post-human Brave New Worlders on the other.”[358]

  In fact, for the head of the President’s Council on Bioethics of Bush Jr., as for Fukuyama, we are on the verge of transforming ourselves into post-humans.

  Hence, we read in the beginning of his most well known work: “Unfortunately, we are not yet aware of the gravity of our situation. Some transforming powers are already here. The Pill. In vitro fertilisation. Bottled embryos. Surrogate wombs. Cloning. Genetic screening. Genetic manipulation. Organ harvesting. Mechanical spare parts. Chimeras. Brain implants. Ritalin for the young, Viagra for the old, Prozac for everyone. And, to leave the vale of tears, a little extra morphine accompanied by Muzak.”[359] Alexander remarks: “In the space of two pages, Kass managed to evoke every bugaboo of the twentieth century, even the Nazis.”

  In Italy second-rate imitators of Kass have in their turn found a golden opportunity to play “experts” in the struggle against transhumanism and to derive from there a “clerical power” unthinkable only a few years ago. Despite the considerable results of years of constant metapolitical campaign by the ecclesiastical hierarchy and by the Catholic University of Milan, the “bioethicist” Francesco d’Agostino even laments that it is still not enough and claims for himself and for his colleagues the role of Talmudic Sanhedrins:

  To formulate [the Italian law on IVF] I think that it would today be wise to ask the opinion of the organisation I am heading, the Comitato Nazionale per la Bioetica, which is the advisory body of the Prime Minister on ethical matters [sic]. The last statement by the Council goes back to over a decade. We could have suggested, for instance, the constitution of an Authority whose task it would be to give its opinion on and authorise certain research projects on the embryo in extreme cases in which a life-saving therapy is urgently needed.[360]

  Naturally the vulgarisation of these “battles” continues to give birth to monsters.

  In the debate on the American law on human cloning, that the Bush administration tried to extend to the entire world via the United Nations,[361] the Florida congressman Cliff Sterns brilliantly explained: “When you do a clone, there are these tentacles, part of the ovum. They remove that. There’s an actual term for that. When you clone, you don’t have an exact clone of the ova material. The tentacles are all removed… The clone would not have these and yet you and I have these when we are born. If we clone ourselves, we would not have them. We would have a category of somebody, people who did not have these tentacles and these might be superior or inferior people.”[362]

  Alexander comments:

  This was the sort of explanation that made scientists bury their faces in their hands, speechless. But such misconceptions were popular. On April 14th, 2002, pundit George Will appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos and argued that all forms of cloning, therapeutic or not, should be banned because “these are entities with a complete human genome.” In fact, just about every cell, red blood cells being one exception, has a complete genome. By Will’s logic, you could not tamper with any cell in the body, not even cancer cells.[363]

  But at that time, bio-Luddism, at least on matters of human biology, was already officially consecrated by the American government, in particular by the famous and hilarious televised speech by Bush of the 9th of August, 2001, when the president, speaking from his ranch in Texas, described the “journey” that had taken him to these conclusions, saying that he had “given this issue a great deal of thought, prayer, and considerable reflection,” and then added that “we have arrived at that Brave New World that seemed so distant in 1932 when Aldous Huxley wrote about human beings created in test tubes in what he called a hatchery,” and ended up announcing severe limitations of federal funding of new research and the creation of the (in)famous Council presided by Kass.

  Even though there are also those who like Rahul K. Danda would like to “guide Icarus” and harmonise the purest American ideological traditions with corporate interests, “Bible and business,”[364] such a climate is obviously a wedding invitation to all the various anti-Faustian thought schools, whose manifesto is summed up in the title of a 2003 essay by Bill McKibben, Enough, where the author openly declares that from now on the issue is “to decide that in every field scientific and technological research has advanced enough and that it is not really necessary to go beyond that,” “to be capable of saying no, to be capable of remaining human,” and “to look at the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good. Good enough. […] Enough intelligence. Enough capability. Enough.”[365]

  And yet, as Ramez Naam remarks, “Throughout our history, we’ve exceeded our limits and added to our capabilities. If our limits define us, then we stopped being human a long time ago, when we invented tools and language and science that extended the powers of our minds and bodies beyond those our hunter-gatherer ancestors were born with.”[366]

  In any event, we are stuck in the meantime with the prospect of the planned mass production of selected, mutated and cloned animals, that can be induced to produce enzymes, hormones, organic compounds, milk and meat with arbitrary and strictly controlled characteristics, while others even talk of programming the growth in animals of organs compatible with xenotransplantation in humans;[367] a technology however with a future limited by the alternative of producing instead organs not only “human,” but directly cloned from the patient’s own cells, and for this reason not subject to rejection, like those donated by an identical twin.

  This goes well beyond current experiments, that consist in growing cells on a scaffold of biodegradable polymers – for instance breasts, livers or ears – and the equally promising experiments on stem cells, for instance in view of treating Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s, made so controversial today by their extraction from abandoned human embryos, which in any case wou
ld not find any other practical use.[368]

  The field of human “organs” and their mid- and long-term future is anyhow open for exploration. If today “artificial organs” and prostheses are relatively crude objects and well-distinct from the organism using them, similar in that to all the tools that have always amplified the physical, sensorial and mental capacity of human beings, a plausible future convergence exists of biomechanical technology, robotics and information technology with advances in biology, medicine, ergonomics, genetics, neuroscience, etc.

  Neural networks, nanotechnology, virtual reality, direct interfaces between the nervous system and digital devices, artificial intelligence, servomechanisms, direct stimulation of human and animal central nervous systems, self-repairing apparatuses with or without the capacity to self-replicate, biochips, emulation of higher brain functions, are all elements that converge toward an attenuation of the distinction between the “organic” sphere and the “mechanical” sphere, and toward a redefinition of the boundaries and nature of the organism and its experience.

  John Holston, one of the directors of the Genome Project, has asked himself: “How many components of a non-biological origin can we implant into a human body and continue to call it human? […] Perhaps a slightly expanded memory? Some additional processing capacity? Why not? If this is true, then perhaps some kind of immortality is potentially round the corner.”[369]

  The hypothesis for instance of being able to extract a complete set of the life experience of a human being and transfer it onto an artificial support, functioning perhaps with enhanced biotronic characteristics, of reconstituting it artificially and/or to revert it to another brain,[370] for instance, opens up some very complex prospects, such as that of radically transforming our perception-of-the-world, which derives from sensorial equipment that has basically remained the same for millions of years.

  Of course the modalities with which humans communicate or access information have already changed, and this process can be expected to continue; and there is no need to stress the part played by all this in connection with the possibility to explore and modify man’s biological reality and that of other species, for instance via gene sequencing, largely based on the use of processing power and precision technologies unthinkable only few decades ago.

  Besides, bionics, one of the areas of this convergence, can be reconnected with the already discussed topics of the alteration of man’s environment and of the selective pressures that this implies on the sociological and genetic levels. We already have monkeys capable of directing robotic arms by means of electric implants in their brains[371]. After the first pacemaker implants in 1958, today cochlear implants that restore the hearing of totally deaf individuals are common, and experimental chips implanted onto the retina provide something analogous to some congenitally blind individuals. Similarly, brain add-ons are currently being designed, models of which have been tested in simulation of some ten thousand neurons.[372]

  The purpose here is not just that of treating brain malfunction, but to extend sense experience, augment memory, allow for direct forms of communication by electromagnetic means, which it does not appear excessive to call telepathic, and allow direct and delocalised wireless access to the information and to the networks where it is located.[373]

  For a genuine integration of cerebral activity with an artificial device of a digital nature, that is, without passing through the traditional sensory and motor system, three conditions are necessary: “being able to describe neuronal electrical activity in relation to a specific faculty or behaviour; being able to translate such a description in an algorithmic form that can be integrated into a processor; building processors that are at once sufficiently small to accurately stimulate the area in question (hence the importance of the neuronal interface) and sufficiently powerful to treat the algorithm that reproduces the desired mental faculty.”[374] It is improbable that electronic processors could ever fully satisfy such conditions, and it is highly probable that some kind of bio- or nanochip will instead be involved, but in any case the living environment it will give place to will be radically altered.[375]

  It is therefore not surprising that today exhanges of cultural, financial and human resources between the sectors of information technology and biotechnology become ever closer, especially in the area of research.

  Rodney Brooks writes:

  At MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory I am directing I see signs of this change every day. We have torn out clean rooms where we used to make silicon chips and installed wet labs in their place, where we compile programs into DNA sequences that we splice into genomes in order to breed bacterial robots. Our thirty-year goal is to have such exquisite control over the genetics of living systems that instead of growing a tree, cutting it down, and building a table out of it, we will ultimately be able to grow a table. We have turned labs where we used to assemble silicon and steel robots into labs were we assemble robots from silicon, steel, and living cells. We cultivate muscle cells and use them as actuators in these simple devices, the precursors of prostheses that will be installed seamlessly into disabled human bodies. Some AI Lab faculty who study how to make machines learn have stopped building better Web search engines and begun inventing programs that can learn correlations in the human genome and thereby make predictions about the genetic causes of disease.[376]

  Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and for a while, before the burst of the dotcom bubble in late 2000, said to be the second or third richest man in the world, has established the Ellison Medical Foundation to study human biology with particular regard to the genes governing ageing, and had the opportunity to declare to Business Week: “If I were twenty one years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.”[377]

  Another crucial milestone was reached in 1997 when the Japanese research laboratory, sponsored by the pharmaceutical division of Kirin beer, for the first time successfully transplanted an entire human chromosome into the genetic make up of a guinea pig, for some an unrealisable undertaking. Until then only small pieces of DNA had been transferred, fifty times inferior in size to the chromosome. The chromosome that was transplanted is the one which in man codes for the production of antibodies, and effectively, in the guinea pigs, the insertion of the protein induced the production of these antibodies.[378]

  At the same time, in the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, one announced that one had for the first time created an artificial human chromosome.[379]

  Rifkin comments:

  What makes the human artificial chromosome so potentially valuable, both as a medical technology and commercial product, is that it brings with it the kind of predictability that has, in the past, escaped scientists working in the fledgling field of gene therapy. Until now, scientists have had to insert individual genes into a virus and then use the virus as a vector to insert the gene into the cell’s chromosomes.[380] With this “shotgun” method, scientists can never know which chromosome will get the added gene or where the gene will locate along the chromosome once it arrives. There is no way to target the gene to the precise location desired. With artificial chromosomes, the process is more akin to inserting a whole genetic cassette into the body. Each gene is already in place on its own chromosome, eliminating the random nature of existing gene therapy techniques. Artificial chromosomes open up unlimited possibilities for modifying gene structure, both in somatic and germ line cells. Customising genetic changes in a child, either before conception in the sex cells, just after conception in the embryonic cells, or during foetal development, is likely to become a reality within the next ten years.[381]

  Gregory Stock agrees on the critical role of artificial chromosomes, which should delay for a very long time the need for biotechnology to “mess about” with the unbelievable complexity of existing chromosomes, a complexity that, as far as plant and animal species are concerned, is today dealt with merely by selecting and refining, via progressive approximations, the more or less random products of
attempts that involve a huge number of gametes and embryos.

  One or more artificial chromosomes might in particular serve as vectors for a number of added genes, which could be independently developed, capable of being deactivated on demand and with a minimum of undesired interactions:

  Imagine that a future father gives his baby daughter chromosome 47, version 2.0, the top-of-the-line-model with a dozen therapeutic gene modules. By the time she grows up and has a child of her own, she finds 2.0 downright primitive. Her three-gene anticancer module pales beside the eight-gene cluster of the new version 5.9, which better regulates gene expression, targets additional cancers, and has fewer side effects. The anti-obesity module is pretty much the same in both versions, but the 5.9 features a whopping nineteen antivirus modules instead of the four she had and an anti-ageing module that can maintain juvenile hormone levels for an extra decade and retain immune function for longer too. The daughter may be too conservative to opt for some of the more experimental modules for her son, but she cannot imagine giving him her antique chromosome and force him to take the drugs she uses to compensate for its shortcomings. As far as reverting to the pre-therapy, natural state of 23 chromosome pairs, well, only fanatical Luddites would do that to their kids.[382]

  We have already discussed the completion of the Human Genome Project, which is the starting point not only to identify the genes responsible for the about 4000 known genetic diseases, but also to understand how genes work, their switching on and off, as well as their interaction with both the epigenetic environment and the more general environment in which the organism is going to deploy itself. If screening tests for some of the more common genetic diseases are already easily accessible and in regular use[383], the road is also open to the study of the complex polygenetic determinants that influence morphological traits, as well as personality, character, behaviour, attitudes, intelligence, etc.; and consequently to the manipulation of all features that have any kind of genetic component in plant and animal species, humans included.