by Stefano Vaj
[356] Gina Kolata, “Lab Yields Lamb with Human Gene,” New York Times, 25/07/1997, p. A18.
[357] Brian Alexander, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality, op. cit., p. 124
[358] Brian Alexander, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality, p. 128.
[359] Leon R. Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defence of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics, Encounter Books, San Francisco 2002, p. 5.
[360] “Il bioetico cattolico,” interview conducted by Franca Porciani in Corriere della Sera, op. cit.
[361] Cf. the United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning. It is important to stress that if the declaration of the United Nations deals with human cloning, or the Cè Law (also discussed below) with “medically assisted procreation,” both also concern entirely different things, namely issues that have a much more general, albeit less immediate, impact, from eugenics to the manipulation of germ lines.
[362] Textually reported by Brian Alexander, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality, op. cit., p. 140.
[363] Ibidem.
[364] Rahul K. Dhanda, Guiding Icarus: Merging Bioethics with Corporate Interests, Wiley-Liss 2002.
[365] Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, ult. ed. Owl Books 2004. Interesting (and converging in its conclusions, although from an opposite perspective, with those advocated in the present essay) are also the earlier works of this author, and in particular The End of Nature, although it dates from 1987 (last ed. Anchor, 1997).
[366] Ramez Naam, More than Human. Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, op. cit., p. 227.
[367] A recent hypothesis, that has raised some scandalised reactions, suggests that different human races have different degrees of compatibility with organs originating in different animal species; in particular according to some American scientists black people would be more compatible with higher apes and “Caucasians” (europoids) with pigs. Cf. Le Scienze, March 2004, no. 427 p. 32. The successful therapeutic cloning of human embryos, however, will make the issue irrelevant, since an organ cloned from the patient himself is of course the ideal solution for any transplant need.
[368] Cfr. Hervé Kempf, La révolution biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées, op. cit., p. 30. See also Lucy Sherriff, “Scientists hail stem cell breakthrough,” in The Register 20/05/2005 (although the results would later be revised).
[369] Quoted by Harriet Swaine (ed.), The Big Questions in Science, Jonathan Cape, London 2002, p. 159.
[370] This hypothesis is claimed among others in Martin Rees, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity’s Survival: Will the Human Race Survive the 21st Century? op. cit., p. 23. The topic is dealt with in-depth by Ray Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines, op. cit., The Singularity is Near, op. cit., and above all in Fantastic Voyage. Live Long Enough to Live Forever, Rodale Books, New York 2004, According to the author, someone alive today and who is really motivated might stand at least some chance to extend his existence via what he calls the three “bridges”. The first, based on today’s best knowledge of chemistry and human metabolism, as well as their integration with preventive and alternative medicine, with the aim to conserve the subject in good shape for the next thirty or forty years, more than enough to allow for the development of anti-ageing therapies based on stem cells, genetic manipulation, and if necessary on the transplantation of cloned organs. Then, this second bridge ought easily to allow him to gain an additional twenty or thirty years, that would allow for the development of nanotechnology able to repair and renew tissues and organs (or improve them). This last stage represents the third bridge that would be able to maintain the individual alive until the time when it becomes possible to realise backup copies of oneself, or be transferred to other “supports,” biological, digital or mixed, possibly virtual and “distributed” at will.
[371] Sandra Blakeslee, “Brain Signals Shown to Move a Robot Arm,” in New York Times, 16/11/2000, p. A20.
[372] Anne Eisenberg, “A Chip Mimicking Neurons Firing Up the Memory,” in New York Times, 20/06/2002, p. A7.
[373] C.Q. Macquire, “Implantable Brain Chips? Time for Debate,” in Hastings Centre Report, 01/01/1999.
[374] Hervé Kempf, La revolution biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées, op. cit., p. 144.
[375] Gregory Stock (cf. Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 19), in contrast with the many times mentioned vision of Ray Kurzweil, holds it very unlikely that the tendency will be toward a transformation of humans into cyborgs, and the substitution or integration of healthy organs with “mechanical” organs inside the body, and takes up the distinction by Alexander Chislenko between the cyborg, who permanently incorporates machines into his own body, and the fyborg (or functional cyborg) in which this fusion isn’t physical, but functional. Who would exchange his lower limbs with prostheses to be able to run at thirty miles an hour when the same goal can easily be reached with a motorcycle? Why implant an infrared visor in the cornea with an external visor is just as efficient in matters of nocturnal vision? What would be the point of having recourse to some rudimentary neural interface, when the cerebral input and programming mechanisms of our own senses have been refined by millions of years of evolution? Besides, dental fillings or an artificial hip are certainly preferable to false teeth and a crutch. Generally speaking, however, the main rival of the relatively crude techniques of human or animal enhancement by means of the incorporation of artificial devices is to obtain the exact same results through a modification of our biology. Hence the trend that is emerging points much more in the direction of replacing machines with biological, or mixed, systems that simulate certain characteristics of the living organism, than in the direction of permanently incorporating artificial devices into the human body and that of other living organisms. Besides, it is not all that certain: the explosive rise of additive plastic surgery or the so-called body modification, from nails to artificial hair up to subcutaneous implants, tattoos, branding and piercing (which by the way prolong very ancient traditions) give the impression that the prospect of aesthetic and functional modification of a healthy body after all encounters less strong opposition than what one would have imagined, at least among some people.
[376] Rodney Brooks, “The Merger of Flesh and Machines,” in John Brockman, The Next Fifty Years, op. cit., p. 186-7.
[377] Quoted in Brian Alexander, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality, op. cit., p. 231. One of the founders of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, has moreover adopted a totally opposite position in a famous article (“Why the future doesn’t need us” in Wired, April 2000). Joy shares Kurzweil’s and Moravec’s positions with respect to “GNR” (genetics, nanotechnology, robotics), but this is precisely why he thinks that governments ought to enforce what he euphemistically calls “relinquishment,” that is, not just giving up any idea of using GNR, but “limit the development of technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge,” by way of intrusive, preventive and rigidly centralised regulation, to be entrusted primarily to the US government (!). What is unusual about such a standpoint is that it was published in a review devoted to technology and by an entrepreneur of one of the biggest information companies in the world.
[378] Rick Weiss, “Human Chromosome Transplanted into Mice,” Washington Post, 30/05/1997, p. A1.
[379] Rick Weiss, “Artificial Human Chromosome That Replicates Developed in Lab,” Washington Post, 01/04/1997, p. A1.
[380] Such a technology can sound esoteric, but it has been hypothesised that viruses are or have been responsible also in nature for certain genetic mutations in unrelated species (by definition not inter-fecund) and that such a phenomenon has played a non-negligible rol
e in the process of evolution.
[381] Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century, op. cit., p. 28. Remember that this book was written in 1998!
[382] Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 76.
[383] Especially for Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea, Tay-Sachs syndrome and sickle-cell anaemia.
[384] The conference, called “Engineering the Human Germ Line,” was organised on March 20th 1998 by the Program on Science, Technology and Society, and hosted by the UCLA Centre for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, that also published a summary report the following June.
[385] Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 12.
[386] Daryl Macer et al, “International Perceptions and Approval of Gene Therapy,” in Human Gene Therapy no.6, pp. 791-803. With respect to the gap between Israeli and Indian figures, it is difficult to disregard the significant influence of the cultural and religious context in both countries, with the latter still today dominated by a polytheism going back to its remote Indo-European source, and of the vision of man that such a context fosters.
[387] Ramez Naam, More than Human. Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, p. 39. Today’s society displays in any case a totally schizophrenic panorama with respect to “safety” and “results”. We have already stressed that the paranoid attitude towards experiments on humans has ideological roots, with respect to which the obsessive concerns over “safety” (so that in order to bring a new active ingredient onto the bench of drugstores requires more than five years and an investment of at least $20 million) are themselves secondary; it is additionally the case that according to what Bill McKibben reports in Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, p. 4, in a survey conducted by the Olympic team over whom would be ready to take a drug that would lead to certain death, but this after five consecutive years of victories with no risk of disqualification, 50% (!) of the subjects said they would be tempted to take it.
[388] Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 130.
[389] We refer in particular to those aimed at inserting specific genes, for instance those required for the production of a particular enzyme in the cell of a grown-up. Such insertions have obviously no consequences on the patient’s offspring, but reveal themselves particularly hard in connection with the need to find methods that enable one to accurately target and reach the wanted tissues and organs, and to modify their functioning by activating the gene in situ. Besides, another field of research that no one would dare to prohibit and that has almost immediate repercussions on humans is that of the above-mentioned interventions that are already taking place on the germlines of other mammals and on higher animals in general.
[390] The gallery of horrors with a genetic origin, and that are not produced by some obscure combination of hundreds of factors and perhaps their interaction with environmental factors, but known to be the totally deterministic result of a single aberrant gene, of an entirely elucidated working, is very large. Recall, referring back to the chapter on dysgenic risks, the Lesch-Nyan syndrome (juvenile gout), that leads to mental retardation and self-mutilation, the Tay-Sachs syndrome, that carries with it neural degeneration and death in early infancy, and that of Werner that leads to very rapid and irreversible ageing of the affected child.
[391] And further: “The degree of people’s openness to somatic therapy is clear from Micheal Blaese’s gene-therapy trials on Amish and Mennonite children with Crigler-Najjar syndrome, a potentially fatal disease in which the liver enzyme that breaks down bilirubin, a product of red-blood-cell cycling, is missing. No group is more cautious than the Amish about embracing new technologies, but though they may shun television and use horses and buggies, they are welcoming the possibilities of gene therapy.” (Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit. p. 39). See also Denise Grady, “At Gene Therapy’s Frontier: The Amish Build a Clinic,” New York Times, 29th June 1999.
[392] Coinciding with the biotechnical and information technical, for the first time cognitive science and neuropsychology are really moving closer to integrating and achieving our millenarian empirical notions of in matters of perception, learning, training, memory etc. This would, among other things, enable a deeper and repeatable understanding of the techniques that allow one to go beyond the “ordinary limits” of human physiology and psychology, and/or activate altered states of consciousness, from hypnosis to the Zen, Ch’an and Tantra experience to Yoga to arrive at martial or mystical trances or to the capacity of “idiots savants” well known also in the European tradition. Such acquisitions converge with the goals already mentioned of “neuro-linguistic programming,” human ethology, modern linguistics, applied psychology, in the design of yet another vector in the qualitative leap relative to “man’s power over himself” that represents the very essence of the possible advent of the “third man” discussed in this essay.
[393] Both quotations are reported by Brian Alexander, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality, op. cit., p. 244.
[394] See among others, “Annuncio choc dagli Stati Uniti: ‘Ecco la vita in laboratorio’. Il progetto è di creare un organismo artificiale in grado di sopravvivere e riprodursi,” La Repubblica, 21/11/2002; Luigi Dell’Aglio, “Il microbo di Faust. Craig Venter annuncia: dopo la decifrazione del Dna stiamo puntando a produrre un microorganismo in laboratorio” in Avvenire, 22/11/2002; “Craig Venter will‘neue Form von Leben’ erzeugen,” in 3sat, 25/11/2002.
[395] According to this objection, the characteristics and medical history of Beethoven’s parents would have advised them to refrain from having children on the basis of any conceivable criterion, a choice that would have entailed the irremediable loss of his work for future generations.
[396] Hervé Kempf, La revolution biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées, op. cit., p. 236.
[397] Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 63.
[398] Ibid. p. 135.
[399] Brian Alexander, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality, op. cit., p. 149.
[400] Gregory Stock remarks “Most of the ethical objections have been pulverised by one million IVF (in vitro fertilisation) babies and two thousand PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis)” (in Redesigning Humans).
[401] Even the very catholic Ogino-Kaus method has some efficiency, at least statistically, and its subjective “cost” does not exceed a few days abstinence per month during the period of female ovulation, which can today be identified via many methods that are both accurate and easy to use, both to favour and to prevent conception (even though the former practice is deemed for unclear reasons immoral by the orthodox view).
[402] In fact, even the Bush administration dropped a project to abolish legal abortion. However, the mere conceivability of such a program shows that this idea has come a long way in the US mid-West.
[403] For example, given that a simple ultrasound scan allows one to assess the sex of the foetus, abortion has enabled the emergence of a new form of gender selection at birth, replacing the selective infanticide or exposure of newborns traditionally practiced by some cultures. “A study in Bombay reported that an astounding 7997 out of 8000 aborted foetuses were female, and in South Korea such abortions have become so widespread that some 65% of third-born children are boys, presumably because couples are unwilling to have yet a third girl…In a recent poll, only 32% of doctors in the United States thought that the practice should be illegal. Support for a ban ranged from 100% in Portugal to 22% in China. Although we may be uncomfortable with the idea of a woman aborting her foetus because of its gender, a culture that allows abortion at a woman’s sole discretion would require a major contortion to ban this sex selection” (Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 14), not to mention the unenforceability of such a ban, as it would require impossible investigations into the psychological motives behind the de
cision to terminate the pregnancy. In the same way, no anti-discrimination law in the world could prevent a mother from deliberately aborting a foetus of mixed race, whose birth in many cases would among other things reveal his conception outside the community and/or legitimate couple.
[404] See for instance, once more taking for example the self-appointed homeland of democracy and human rights, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, Artificial Insemination Practice in the United States, summary of a 1987 survey-background paper, OTA-BP-BA-48, Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 1988. With the absurd Italian Law on IVF, the selection of the characteristics of the donor of the sperm – fortunately still allowed if the woman is inseminated in the …traditional way – would no longer seem legally permissible in the country.
[405] Chiara Valentini, La fecondazione proibita, op. cit., p. 13.
[406] Apparently the first attempt to fertilise a human egg in the lab was that of John Rock and Miriam Menkin, who were both considered out of their mind. Furthermore, Chiara Valentini remarks (ibidem, p. 26): “It was in 1944, in the middle of world war against Nazism, and it was easy to suspect experiments like these to be eugenicist. Many scientists went as far as accusing the poor Miriam Menkin of ‘test tube rape’.”
[407] For more on this, see Leslie and John Brown, Our Miracle Called Louise. A Parents’ Story, Paddington Press, New York, 1979. Despite the very rudimentary state of the technique at the time, Leslie Brown had another daughter soon after, Natalie, by the same method.