Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering

8 Me and My Double Helixes

Chapter 8 me and my double Helixes “What will you have done to your newborn,”Bill McKibben (2003) asks, “when you have installed into the nucleus of every one of her billions of cells a purchased code that will pump out proteins designed to change her?” His answer is stark—and, we believe, misdirected: You will have robbed her of the last possible chance of understanding her life. Say she finds herself, at the age of sixteen, unaccountably happy. Is it her being happy—finding, perhaps , the boy she will first love—or is it the corporate product inserted within her when she was a small nest of cells, an artificial chromosome now causing her body to produce more serotonin? Don’t think she won’t wonder: at sixteen a sensitive soul questions everything. But perhaps you’ve “increased her intelligence”—and perhaps that’s why she is questioning so hard. She won’t even be sure whether the questions are hers. (47) In his book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, McKibben repeatedly comes back to this point. A lover of running, he says that “if my parents had somehow altered my body so that I could run more quickly, that fact would have robbed running of precisely the meaning I draw from it”—the meaning that comes from exertions and achievements he could call his own (48). “If you’ve been designed and programmed to run, what meaning can running hold?” (55). Likewise, noting that scientists “have pinpointed the regions of the parietal lobe that quiet down when Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks pray,” he surmises that genetic engineers will before long be able to amplify the reaction. 84 • Genes and Context As a result, the minister’s son may be even more pious than he is, but if he has any brain left to himself he will question that piety at the deepest level, wonder constantly whether it means anything or if it’s so much brainwashing. And if he doesn’t question it, if the gene transplant takes so deeply that he turns into an anchorite monk living deep in the desert, then his faith is utterly meaningless, far more meaningless than the one his medieval ancestors inherited by birthright. It would be a faith literally beyond questioning and hence no faith at all. He would be, for all intents and purposes, a robot. (48) And so, too, there’s the pianistically inclined mother who wants her child to be an even better pianist than she.But the point of piano playing lies in the meaning that is created through inclination and effort.“If the mother injects all that into her daughter’s cells, she robs her daughter forever of the chance to make music her own authentic context—or to choose something else.” The daughter would be a player piano as much as a human, “ever uncertain whether it is her skill and devotion or her catalogue proteins that move her fingers so nimbly” (48). Too Much Liberation? As happy as one might expect to be when a writer of Bill McKibben’s stature draws attention to the troubling potentials of DNA manipulation , we fear that in this book he has unwittingly sided with the manipulators . But this will take a little explaining. McKibben usefully sketches our progressive loss of human context, which is also a loss of meaning. The automobile wrenched us loose from local community; television isolated us from our immediate neighbors; divorce as a mass phenomenon cast a shadow of uncertainty over every family; and the natural world itself has been arbitrarily reshaped according to our habits and appetites, so that it no longer offers us “a doorway into a deeper world.”But don’t waste time asking whether these changes are good or bad, he advises us. They “came upon us like the weather,” before we could do anything about them. What, then, are we left with as a resource against meaninglessness? Only our individual selves. And that important truth brings McKibben to his punch line, which is that now, thanks to the genetic engineers,“we stand on the edge of disappearing even as individuals.” Of course, the Me and My Double Helixes • 85 engineers put it in slightly different terms. They “promise to complete the process of liberation, to free us or, rather, our offspring from the limitations of our DNA, just as their predecessors freed us...