After the Genome: A Language for Our Biotechnological Future

5. Crossing Frontiers of Science: Trespassing into a Godless Space or Fulfilling Our Manifest Destiny?

83 Leah Ceccarelli crossinG frontiers of science Trespassing into a Godless Space or Fulfilling Our Manifest Destiny? 5 in their introductory essay, the editors of this volume turn our attention to the way President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics characterized a conflict between science and religion, with the pioneers of biotechnology pushing limits to cross thresholds, while a religiously oriented ethics constrains the Promethean project by asking us to appreciate the giftedness of life as we accept and even celebrate natural limitations. This antithesis between an adventurous science and a restraining religion is a commonplace of contemporary American thought. As nobel Prize–winning physicist and public intellectual Richard Feynman put it, Western civilization “stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure—the adventure into the unknown. . . . The other great heritage is Christian ethics —the basis of action on love.” in Feynman’s opinion, it is unfortunate that we have maintained “one or the other of these consistent heritages in a way which attacks the values of the other,” but he knows of no way to avoid the conflict.1 in this essay, i analyze the rhetorical contours of this conflict as it takes place around the figure of the “frontier,” that ubiquitous metaphor for the limits of knowledge. First, i examine the public discourse of President Bush on stem cell research to illustrate how science and religion are characterized as being in opposition regarding the proper limits of research on the frontiers of science. Then i show that another perspective is available to scientists like Feynman who want to integrate science and religion but who find it difficult to imagine a way of doing so. This alternative perspective is found in the public discourse of genome scientist and national institutes of 84 g After the Genome Health director Francis Collins. Recognizing how the relationship between religious tradition and the “frontier of science” is depicted differently in the public discourse of Bush and Collins, we get a better sense for the inventional possibilities available to rhetors today as they speak the language of our biotechnological future. Before undertaking this comparison, though, a short review of the history of the frontier of science metaphor is in order. the frontier of science The English word frontier, originating in a European context, has long signified the boundary between one nation and another. in an American context, though, the term has come to take on another meaning, namely “that part of a settled, civilized country which lies next to an unexplored or undeveloped region” or “the developing, often uncivilized or lawless, region of a country .”2 it was from this Americanism that a new metaphoric meaning of the term arose in the twentieth century, allowing us to talk about a “frontier” as an undeveloped intellectual rather than literal space, a not-yet-fully-explored region of knowledge that scientists might enter to make new discoveries.3 The entailments of this culturetypal metaphor made it an especially effective rhetorical tool for Americans wanting to justify government funding for scientific research. As early as 1910, Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian whose “frontier thesis” had persuaded Americans that their character had been uniquely shaped by a pioneering spirit, argued that universities and research laboratories would be the new testing ground for that spirit. To “conserve what was best in pioneer ideals” at a time when geographical frontiers no longer existed in the continental United States, “scientific experiment and construction by chemist, physicist, biologist and engineer must be applied to all of nature’s forces in our complex modern society. The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than the ax and rifle in this new ideal of conquest.”4 By 1945 Vannevar Bush, director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, would use the metaphor to portray scientists as new frontiersmen, who if properly funded by the government would open a flow of new resources to the nation. “it has been basic United States policy that Government should foster the opening of new frontiers. it opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers. Although these frontiers have more or less disappeared, the frontier of science remains. it is in keeping with the American tradition— one which has made the United States great—that new frontiers shall be made accessible for development by all American citizens.”5 This vision of a crossinG frontiers of science...