Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood

Chapter 4: The Scorned People of the Earth. Reprogenetics and The Bluest Eye

85 C H A P T E R 4 The Scorned People of the Earth Reprogenetics and The Bluest Eye The key difficulty in receiving the beauty of the world these days is that such teaching is rooted in the act of looking at the world as it is, while the dominant science is rooted in the desire to change it. —George Grant, Technology and Justice No one would deny that the biotechnological revolution has advanced with astonishing speed. DNA was discovered a mere fifty years before the human genome was completely mapped in 2003. In less than a century, corporate scientists have bioengineered a wide array of plants and animals: more nutritious golden rice, pigs with less toxic manure, cows with humanized milk. We inhabitants of the twenty-first century, as used to the daily development of new technologies as we are to the rising sun, seem barely to notice what is happening. In one generation , biology as a science has given way almost completely to biology as technology; as Gregory Stock describes it, “in one century, we have moved from observing to understanding to engineering.”1 The technology has opened as many ethical questions as it has new opportunities , so many that the average person is tempted to give up on answering 86 Posthuman Bodies them. Should we produce transgenic species of animals? Is it okay to develop the technology to grow human organs in pigs? Should athletes be allowed to enhance their performance with gene doping? Should we create headless human bodies in order to harvest organs? Few questions raise more difficulties than those that touch directly on human reproduction. The new possibilities for parents to influence the genetic inheritance of their children have grown so quickly that Lee Silver, the prestigious professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton University, has dubbed it the new science of “reprogenetics .” With advancements in reproductive biology and genetics, Silver promises that we humans have now “tamed the fire of life” and gained the power to control our destiny as a species.2 In reprogenetics, he adds, what had formerly only been the province of science fiction will become reality. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, is already relatively commonplace. PGD can be used by any prospective parents (with adequate means) who want to create embryos and then select from among them which ones to implant during the process of in vitro fertilization. Couples who carry the genes for Huntington’s disease, for example, can create multiple embryos, screen them for the disorder, implant only the ones they choose, and discard the rest. But PGD is only the beginning of the dream of reprogenetics. The ultimate goal (still far in the future) is germline genetic engineering, whereby prospective parents can pick and choose from among a variety of genetic traits for their children. The goal, as Stock insists, is “self-directed evolution.” In other words, germline genetic engineering will quickly move beyond therapy into being used primarily for enhancement.3 With the speed of these developments, one would think that caution and careful discussion would be everyone’s default position. After all, with reprogenetics we are talking about changing someone else’s life in a permanent way. Caution would seem to be especially warranted given the fact that we live in a culture in love with the glamour of technology and the promise of individual autonomy, at all times expressed in a consumer-driven marketplace. As Lauren Slater reported in 2002, for some people, the promise of technological enhancement is not just about improving intelligence or musical ability but about limitless pos- The Scorned People of the Earth 87 sibility for human change. Joe Rosen, a plastic surgeon, told her that “the body is a conduit for the soul. . . . When you change what you look like, you change who you are.”4 But caution has not proven to be Western culture’s main response to any given technology, and this one will probably be no different. Proponents of genetic enhancement technology usually use its inevitable adoption as an argument in its favor. For instance, Ronald Green writes: I believe, with near certainty, that sooner or later we will begin to modify our genes and that we will survive doing so. . . . I believe that we are capable of bringing intelligence—“design” in the best sense of the word—to our reproductive lives. I am sure that we will...