Beware of Geneticists Bearing Gifts [Bob]

As we consider the ramifications and moral implications of the technological push for genetic manipulation, it is enlightening to see how proponents of the associated research view the surrounding issues. Newsweek magazine offers us indications about that topic in its recent article about James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of DNA, who recently agreed to have his entire genetic blueprint sequenced and made public. Watson, who says he was motivated to reveal his genome because he has "always wanted to be a hero," believes that his example will motivate others to do the same. The result will not only "make people healthier" by giving them information that can prevent disease, he also holds out hope that "it will make people more compassionate."

Sounds good so far. But reading a little further gives a glimpse into what Watson means when he says these things. The sound bites resonate with us all, but the implications of those sound bites, in my opinion, are chilling. Remember, Watson is the man who has previously "endorsed designer babies, genetic engineering to make 'all girls pretty,' and curing ‘stupidity’ through genetics."

With those views in mind, consider some of Watson’s other comments:

We’ll understand why people can’t do certain things … Instead of asking a child to shape up, we’ll stop having unrealistic expectations … We’ll want to help rather than be mad. If a child doesn’t finish high school, we treat that as a failure, as his fault. But knowing someone’s full genetic information will keep us from making him do things he’ll fail at.

It is no secret that Watson is a full-blown Darwinian materialist. He and his ilk believe that genes are destiny. This is the inevitable end of a pure materialist view of the world. Watson's determinism assumes that your genetic information defines: your ability to succeed or fail, your health and intelligence, your character, your talents, and your personality. It is not controversial to say that your DNA is a significant contributor to all these things. But that is not what Watson is saying. Watson is saying that genetics is the sole determinate of who your are and the boundary to what you can become.

With that in mind, Watson's quotes (above) again betray not only a thinly-veiled arrogance, but the not-very-well-disguised propensity to play god. He wants us to "understand why people can't do certain things," avoid "unrealistic expectations," and not force incompetent people into doing things that genetics will show they "can't do." In other words, James Watson considers it "compassionate" to practice what has elsewhere been referred to as "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

This is the chilling position from which totalitarians categorize and mandate the careers and fates of "laborers" whom they determine could do nothing more than what the totalitarians decide they can do. And Watson's not kidding. He has assigned himself to the position of the first guinea pig in Project Jim, the program with which Watson hopes to introduce Personal Genome Sequencing. His sequencing only cost about $1 million to accomplish. He hopes to reduce that to $1000 for the likes of you and me. The eventual goal?

A full sequence [which] can be compared to the benchmark genome—sort of an average of the genomes of the people who ponied up DNA samples for the human genome project—so if you have any misspelling at all it will be detected.

Get it?! If your genetic footprint shows "misspellings" when compared to the "benchmark genome," we won't have to waste any more time educating or training you for things you just won't be able to do anyway. And we'll call that "compassion."

There are huge problems that have been identified with trying to "benchmark" the human genome. Not the least of which is the unknown interactions and dependencies that exist within it. We can't even decipher the hidden meaning of what has previously been labeled "junk DNA," but has since been found to be anything but "junk." In short, we have no idea how messing with one area of the code -- in our misguided attempt to "fix" it -- will affect other areas. This could bring new meaning to the term "unintended consequences." This is not to say that we shouldn't seek gene therapy to prevent and cure disease. That's laudable. But, as the article points out,

gene-disease claims have a lousy track record. Of those for complex diseases involving multiple genes, notably mental illness, few have been confirmed. And when scientists have tried to validate a claim the results have been sobering. Geneticists ... recently examined 85 variants (translation: "misspellings") in 70 genes that studies had linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Exactly zero of the variants were more frequent in heart patients than in healthy patients.

That said, don't confuse gene disease therapy with what Watson proposes here -- preemptive, genetics-based segregation. Watson doesn't just want to "benchmark" to identify disease, he wants to "benchmark" to identify the measure of your value to society. But one has to wonder how, and by whom, the benchmark genome will be determined. How and, more importantly, who, will determine which of your genetic descriptors are "misspelled."

What is really telling about all this is Watson's own response to the process he is so enthusiastic about for the rest of us. You see ...

...there is one part of his genome he has asked to keep private, even from him: whether he carries gene variants associated with Alzheimer's disease. He fears that if he knew he did, he would interpret each slip of memory as impending dementia.

Watson's idea of compassion for you is to sequence and catalog your genome, categorize it as compared to some unspecified definition of "normal," then to actively treat you according to those findings. But for himself, compassion is the opposite. Watson doesn't want anyone telling him things that might artificially limit his notion of a life well-lived. This not only shows that Watson's worldview is fatally flawed because he can't live within its confines, but that he must unwittingly borrow from the very theistic worldview he claims to reject.

This entire discussion takes us beyond the ethical questions involved in Watson's endorsement of "designer babies, genetic engineering to make ‘all girls pretty," and curing ‘stupidity’ through genetics." It goes beyond the questionable ambition to promote the athletic, aesthetic or academic goals of personal "enhancement." It goes beyond the pro-life objections to eugenically motivated parenting or the feminist objections to genetic-based female discrimination.

This discussion reveals some foundational issues inherent in two completely different views of the world. Those of us who view life as a gift are content to be thankful for it and revel in the uniqueness, and varying talents, that make people, and therefore life, so interesting. We believe it would be boring to watch a baseball game wherein every chemically enhanced player hit a home run every time they came to the plate. We believe the distinctiveness of each human being marks them as a unique reflection of God's image and is therefore something with inherent dignity for which we should be grateful.

We believe in real compassion -- a concept that stems from the Latin com, which means "with" and pati which means "to suffer." Compassion is not some detached claim to show concern for another by placing artificial limits on their human freedom. Compassion is an action word that demands a sense of unity with the sufferer.

This seems to be a concept with which James Watson is unfamiliar. Watson wants no part in shared suffering and shows no hint of gratitude for the gift of life. What Watson seeks is mastery -- the highest expression of the materialist worldview. For those who see genetics as the deterministic measuring stick of life, there can be no higher aspiration than to master the code that defines that life. For them compassion is not to "suffer with," it is to control and conquer nature itself. C.S. Lewis warned us that such people ...

reduce things to mere Nature in order that [they] may 'conquer' them ... Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men ... Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.

Like the pigs in Animal Farm, materialist geneticists see themselves as a little more equal than the rest of us. For all the grand hopes and plans they claim for implementing a high-tech utopia for you and me, they aren't willing to foist the implications of their dream on themselves. As Herbert Schlossberg puts it in Idols for Destruction, "the greater the pretensions to righteousness, it sometimes seems, the greater the potential for evil."

So beware of the "compassion" of the new geneticists. It comes at an enormous cost -- one they are unwilling to pay themselves. And it leads to a destination that is anything but actually compassionate.

If You Are a Politician, Don't Ever Tell Me Again [SK]

...that legislation restricting abortion is too controversial and lacks public support--thus, we cannot make any incremental moves until we change the hearts of the people.

Consider this: The U.S. Senate is poised to pass a sweeping immigration bill that grants amnesty to millions of Mexicans who flagrantly break U.S. laws. The public outcry against the bill is gargantuan and yet key GOP senators are either determined to partner with Teddy Kennedy and push the bill through anyway or else they remain non-committal by voting for cloture. I'm talking about Senators like Lott, Bond, Burr, Coleman, Gregg, Cochran, Ensign, and Hatch, to name just a few.

(To see how pathetic these Senators are, you just gotta see THIS video clip!)

I'm going to remember this moment, Senators, next time we need your help passing a pro-life bill.

Pesty Media Problem Nothing New [SK]

Some journalists have a history second-guessing real men, as Ralph at Thick Blue Cloud explains.

(The Sherman quote is priceless!)

Are they Lying or Uninformed? [Jay]

President Bush vetoed the current bill put before him by congress that would lift some of the restrictions on the ability of research groups to compete for federal funding to conduct human embryonic stem cell experiments. That is all that happened. Here are a couple of more facts. The federal government currently awards taxpayer money for the purpose of experimenting with embryonic stem cells from humans. Many states including but not limited to California, Connecticut and Maryland also award taxpayer money for the same purpose. Knowing those facts to be true please explain the following statement by New Jersey Assemblyman Neil Cohen:

"We realize that sick and injured New Jersey residents cannot afford to wait and suffer because of failed presidential leadership on this issue," said Assemblyman Neil Cohen, D-Union, who has long pushed state-funded stem cell research.

New Jersey is in the process of borrowing $450,000,000.00 to invest in stem cell research over the next ten years. The funds will go to research in both adult and embryonic stem cell lines. As is the norm these days, the rhetoric is flat misleading. New Jersey has been honest in admitting that this is not just altruistic borrowing and that they hope to draw in business and ultimately profit the state from this investment. That is what makes this nonsense from Cohen all the more distasteful.

JivinJehoshaphat has a great post highlighting some Hillary quotes on ESCR. He comments that it is amazing how ignorant people continue to be about the facts of stem cell research. Wesley Smith recently commented on how impressive the scientific community has been in finding alternatives to embryo destructive research to free themselves from the restrictions of the Bush administration. All of this makes the party line from the pro-embryonic research camp so difficult to comprehend. If pluripotent cells can be acquired without destroying embryonic human beings, what possible motivation could anyone have for wanting to destroy human beings? If researchers continue to demonstrate that they are creatively addressing the ethical restrictions and yielding promising results, what possible reason could we have to push headlong and recklessly into one area of research over another in a field that is entirely based on the promise of possible future benefits?

I talked to a scientist that told me that Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s would be the last to benefit from this research because they are breakdowns that occur over multiple systems. They are not isolated to the eye for example. He told me that the “cures” are possibly decades away. The language of many supporters of embryonic stem cell research would have us believe that the cures themselves are ready to be implemented and the only thing that is lacking is the Presidential OK to fund them.

I have no problem with people articulating arguments that disagree with the pro-life position, but let us be clear. When I say that traditional human embryonic stem cell research destroys the embryos used as a source for the stem cells I am making a statement of incontrovertible fact. When I claim that the human embryo being destroyed is a whole, distinct, living human being with natural rights including the right to not be destroyed for research purposes I am making a truth claim about the nature of the unborn. When I say that unecessarily killing innocent life to benefit others is morally reprehensible I am making a moral claim. When proponents of embryonic stem cell research say there is a ban on this research, that people will be healed of terrible diseases if Bush would pass the legislation, and that there are no alternative methods of producing beneficial stem cells to treat people they are either lying or grossly uninformed.

Links [SK]

Clarke Forsythe on why Colorado Right to Life, Judie Brown, et al, need a crash course in legal history before publishing their next full page ad attacking James Dobson. (I've already argued elsewhere that Dobson has not embraced relativism or legal positivism.) HT: Jill Stanek

For fun, read Thick Blue Cloud on Spurgeon and Chesterton

Melinda Penner on why atheist Richard Dawkins can't argue for his position without assuming the very theistic worldview he so despises

Ed Whelan on why President Bush may yet have an opportunity to appoint a strong conservative justice

Bloomberg is Scared that I'm Still a Doctor [Serge]

At least that's how I read these comments:

Mr. Bloomberg's freewheeling question-and-answer session was peppered with the kind of provocative, blunt talk that could appeal to some voters while alienating others. "It's probably because of our bad educational system, but the percentage of people who believe in creationalism is really scary for a country that's going to have to compete in a world where science and medicine require a better understanding," he said in one such foray.

I'm sure that the "bad educational system" that I endured at the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and the Detroit Medical Center is responsible for my failure to blindly accept the naturalistic view of the universe.

No More "Need " for Cloning? [Serge]

The recent news that Japanese investigators have found a way to make pluripotent stem cells without either destroying human embryos or using cloned embryos is hard to overemphasize, if it pans out. The best article I found on the new research is this one at TCSDaily, which has not been very favorable to our point of view in the past. This article gets it right. read the whole thing, but here are some great excerpts:

Only a few days ago an article in the leading journal Nature brought amazing news. A Japanese team at Kyoto University has discovered how to reprogram skin cells so that they "dedifferentiate" into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell. From this they can be morphed, theoretically, into any cell in the body, a property called pluripotency. It could be the Holy Grail of stem cell science: a technique that is both feasible and unambiguously ethical.

"Neither eggs nor embryos are necessary. I've never worked with either," says Shinya Yamanaka. The first instalment of his research appeared a year ago -- and was greeted with polite scepticism by his colleagues. At the time they were mesmerised by dreams of cloning embryos and dissecting them for their stem cells.

They say that the reprogrammed cells meet all the tests of pluripotent cells -- they form colonies, propagate continuously and form cancerous growths called teratomas, as well as producing chimaeras. "Its unbelievable, just amazing," says Hans Schöler, a German stem cell expert. "For me, it's like Dolly. It's that type of an accomplishment."...

With an ethical solution looking quite plausible, the pressure will be on scientists to explain why therapeutic cloning deserves to be legalised and funded. Two years ago, Dr Janet D. Rowley, an Australian working in the US who is an implacable foe of the Bush Administration's policy, dismissed ethical solutions like Yamanaka's. "We have extremely limited research dollars, and to use them to study these alternatives is wrong," she declared. "That money should be available for actual research." But now stem cells derived from embryos are starting to look like dead-end "alternatives."

Don't expect supporters of embryonic stem cell research to respond rationally, not in the short term, at least. The other day, Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel told the US House of Representatives as he voted to overturn the Bush policy: "It is ironic that every time we vote on this legislation, all of a sudden there is a major scientific discovery that basically says, 'You don't have to do [embryonic] stem cell research.' "

Connect the dots, Mr Emanuel. Maybe you don't have to.