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13. THE AGE OF A "REVOLUTIONIZED HUMAN BODY" AND THE RIGHT TO DIE
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13 The Age of a “Revolutionized Human Body” and the Right to Die Yoshihiko Komatsu Entering a New Era Over the last twenty-¤ve years the most active front in scienti¤c and technological advancement was no longer in the physical sciences but in the biological ones. Among these advances, those within the ¤eld of medicine—a ¤eld intimately bound up with being born, being ill, aging, and dying—have rapidly increased the pace of their development, beginning with the complete mapping of the human genome at the turn of the century and the establishment of human embryonic stem cells. Tailor-made medical pharmacogenomics and regenerative medicines have been heralded worldwide as “the medicine of our dreams,” and, accordingly, nations and corporations have been investing exorbitant sums into their research and development. Not only is it clear that “biotechnology ” has already become the central focus of twenty-¤rst-century science and technology, but we have entered into what can be called, I suggest, an era of “corporeal revolution.”1 The main characteristic of this corporeal revolution is that the human has become not merely the subject in this revolution but its object as well. In other words, we, the actors in this revolution, have made the human body its direct target by taking our own bodies as the material for research and development. This certainly has not been a characteristic of any of our other, earlier, “revolutions .” Today, while there is a tendency to emphasize the silver lining of such technology, it should also be realized that revolutionizing the human body and the way we exist in this world essentially is something that has the power to decide the fate of all civilization and culture. This new revolution may be the biggest development since the theories of Copernicus and Darwin. However, it must be pointed out that the changes in the world brought about by biological science are on a qualitatively different level from those in the past. In contrast to the problems of Copernican and Darwinian theory, which involved realizing truths in nature that lay beyond man’s ability to alter them, the problems of biological science today involve intervention into, manipulation of, and control over both nature and the human body. Our reach now extends all the way to the genetic level, touching the most fundamental elements of the human body. At such a crucial moment in human history, it seems that while there has certainly been some debate, much of it has been limited in both scope and depth. Our discussion has been unable to reach the crux of this issue. Discussing things in terms of the “dignity of life” or according to the principle of a “right to self-determination” (or “autonomy”) has become almost pointless. As citizens of a global community, we owe it to ourselves to expand the horizons of this debate. With that in mind, I offer a few personal observations and re®ections, critically examining past debates and assessing the coming corporeal revolution. From the “Dignity of Life” to the “Dignity of the Human Body” The Unassailability of “Bio-Manipulation” Shock waves circled the globe when Dr. Severino Antinori, an Italian, announced in April 2002 that a cloned human would be born within the year. Although there is probably a need to examine thoroughly the real reason why, out of all the various aspects of the “corporeal revolution,” we have a particularly strong aversion to cloning human beings, it is a fact that the idea of cloning humans is repugnant to most people.2 We need to point out, however, that by focusing so intently on the prospect of a cloned human, we risk overlooking something terribly important. This is that cloning’s putative value will lie not merely in the creation of a cloned human but, more importantly, in the creation of a cloned human embryo (Kayukawa 2003). Such an embryo (made by replacing the genetic code of a human embryo with the genetic code of a patient to create embryonic stem cells that might then be induced to differentiate into a necessary organ) will make it possible, in theory, to replace “organ transplantation” with “regenerative medicine.” Some claim that even immuno-rejection can thus be avoided. Importantly, though, the decisive difference between the traditional method of organ transplantation and the cloned-embryo method lies in the vast pro¤t potential of the latter. This is precisely the reason why corporations and governments are investing enormous sums in it. Put bluntly...