c. 2000 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) On the sixth day, the Bible says, God made man.
Three-and-a-half billion years later, scientists say, they have put together a book of life roughly mapping out how God accomplished that miracle.
By cracking the human genetic code, however, the line between knowing God and playing God is radically altered. For the first time in human history, scientists can look down the road to the possibility of creating human beings in their own image, rather than the image of God.
Not since Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories that led to the fundamentalist-modernist controversies that swept across the 20th century has there been a moment in time so rife with the possibilities of tension between religion and science.
“This is a crossroads moment for the human community,” said the Rev. Marvin McMickle of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland. “What I hope we don’t do is have a knee-jerk reaction that we have a great ill simply because we have the information. … If God let us have the knowledge, he’s trusting us to make good use of it.”
Yet who will make ethical decisions in this brave new world troubles theologians such as McMickle, as well as ethicists and scientists. What will happen to the weak, the handicapped and the mentally challenged in a world where science may be able to create taller, smarter human beings free of genetic defects?
Anyone who does not hear the warning of C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man” or Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” _ two works from the first half of the 20th century that foreshadowed the ominous possibilities of genetic engineering _ “just doesn’t understand the historical crossroads we find ourselves at,” said the Rev. Richard Neuhaus, director of the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York.
The discovery of the rough map did not find scientists and theologians unprepared. The National Institutes of Health, for example, has a working group on the ethical, legal and social implications of the new technology.
But just how fast developments arise was shown earlier this month, when the British government moved to ease a ban on human cloning, drawing immediate criticism from the Vatican that it was a dangerous field to enter into.
At the heart of Judeo-Christian theology is the belief that the Creator made human beings in God’s own image and gave them the ability to understand the divine will and the freedom to embrace or reject what is good.
But what does the biblical uniqueness of humanity mean now that scientists have discovered human beings and fruit flies share roughly 90 percent of the same genetic material, or that individuals have only the slightest genetic differences from one another.
In a 1994 national poll, 75 percent of respondents said salvation was important to them as a personal goal or guiding principle in their lives. How will traditional beliefs in eternal life offered by a loving God be affected if science over the next century can pinpoint how human beings arise from a single cell, function over a lifetime and die?
Against dire forecasts of genetic determinism, a lot of caution is in order, says nearly everyone involved with the Human Genome Project.
Government and commercial scientists recently finished the monumental, decadelong task of mapping where those 50,000 or more genes lie. Now they are trying to figure out what each gene does, how they work together, and how to fix the defective ones. Even the two groups that have come up with the basic code differ in their estimates of the more than 3 billion letters of DNA making up the genome by some 30 million letters.
The more fantastic scenarios of taking the gene map and genetically engineering human beings could be a century away, if such prospects ever come to pass.
“It’s a little bit like having a rough map of the globe of the Earth. It doesn’t let you get too easily from Shaker Heights to downtown Philadelphia,” said Arthur Caplan, bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Just how rough the ethical terrain can be was demonstrated Monday (Sept. 18) when Caplan, one of the nation’s most prominent ethicists on bioethical issues, was named as defendant in a lawsuit filed by the parents of a young man who died during a gene therapy experiment. Caplan allegedly provided ethical advice during the planning stages of the experiment.
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Even with the gene map, it may take decades before the human life span can be lengthened to 90 to 95 years, or that this information can be used to provide cures for cancers or diseases such as cystic fibrosis.
In the ethical realm, what is of more immediate concern is whether genetic information that already can predict Huntington’s disease and other ills for which there are no cures can be kept private from insurers and potential employers.
Several states have passed legislation prohibiting health insurers from canceling or limiting benefits based on genetic screening or testing, but while several bills have been proposed, there is no comprehensive federal law protecting genetic privacy.
Down the road, particularly in an area where private companies are funding much of the research, there are also questions over whether the technology will be used to benefit humankind by eliminating diseases in the Third World or whether resources will be devoted to potentially more profitable areas such as giving affluent children a step up in height and brainpower.
The Roman Catholic Church “is in favor of any advance that is therapeutic in nature,” but would tend to view as “frivolous” resources devoted to cosmetic enhancements, said David Byers, staff member of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Science and Human Values.
What some theologians fear is that it’s not about the ethics in a climate where billions can be made in genetic manipulation.
“Let’s get real about this and follow the money,” said Neuhaus, also the editor of the intellectual journal First Things.
If genetic decisions are informed by compassion and a desire to cure diseases such as AIDS, this can be a great moment in human history, McMickle said.
Or Orwell could be right.
“In the wrong hands,” McMickle said, “will this be a step in the breeding process where you’re not breeding out diseases, but you’re breeding out undesirables?”
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The Rev. Donald Dunson, a moral theologian at St. Mary Seminary in Wickliffe, Ohio, said “what scares the pants off me” is the prospect of using the technology to create what will be thought of as genetically superior human beings.
There is the danger, Dunson said, of forgetting the inherent dignity of human life, and cutting the ties that bind humanity to the weak and the vulnerable.
If self-sacrificing love is at the apex of humanity, one can see the value of treating every human being with equal dignity, he said.
But if the debate is viewed in purely utilitarian terms, individuals who do not measure up genetically could face discrimination, ethicists said.
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The Rev. George Murphy, who has a doctorate in physics and teaches on science and theology at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, said the development of genetic technology has the same potential for good and evil as nuclear energy, and should not be viewed either in utopian or demonic terms.
But now is the time to start talking about the ethical issues, even if much of it must be in the realm of controlled speculation, he said.
When the time comes, Murphy said, “We are not going to be able to get our ethics from our genetic knowledge.”
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