The Wisdom of Repugnance
Engineering Life: The Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night:
…Erwin Chargaff, an eminent Columbia University biologist, called genetic engineering “an irreversible attack on the biosphere.”“The world is given to us on loan,” he warned. “We come and we go; and after a time we leave earth and air and water to others who come after us. My generation, or perhaps the one preceding mine, has been the first to engage, under the leadership of the exact sciences, in a destructive colonial warfare against nature. The future will curse us for it.”
At the same time, people warned that we were doing the unnatural, something that humans were not meant to do. “We can now transform that evolutionary tree into a network,” declared Robert Sinsheimer, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We can merge genes of most diverse origin–from plant or insect, from fungus or man as we wish.”
It was not a power that Sinsheimer thought we could handle. “We are becoming creators–makers of new forms of life–creations that we cannot undo, that will live on long after us, that will evolve according to their own destiny. What are the responsibilities of creators–for our creations and for all the living world into which we bring our inventions?”
Labels: Bioethics
Chargaff also said (from memory), re Watson and Crick, “That midgets such as these cast long shadows only shows that it is late in the day.” (Heraclitean Fire)
Do-it-yourself religions always seem so thin, don’t they?
Apparently it was a breakthrough for science, but drinking vomit seems repugnant to me.
On the bright side, if we blur the genomes of a thousand species together, after angry Gaia smites us, the first set of Intelligent Design theorists to come along will have some real science to do!
As opposed to the Judeo-Christian idea that mankind, as the steward of nature, is tasked with improving an imperfect creation.
I still fail to understand why many scientists are obsessed with ID/creationists, who are misinformed but pose little if any practical threat to science or technology; yet the same scientists ignore the massive negative impact of earth-worshippers on the technical and economic growth of human society–and on the health and welfare of the world’s poor.
Both groups are guided by religious values (non-rational awe at a supposed universal agent and source of all value). Yet the latter have effectively slowed down technologies that are desperately needed, e.g. to feed the world, while the former have merely tried (unsuccessfully) to expose schoolchildren to a pablum version of their religious views–children who are being exposed to earth-worship pablum in official curriculums from earliest childhood.
Gaia indeed. Even has a mythological personal name, in contrast to the universalized “Lord” and “God” of the Hebrew Bible. (The personal name Yhvh, relic of a pre-Biblical tribal period, is utterly taboo for Jews, and is totally ignored by 99% of Christians.)
This all makes me believe that the drive toward religion is universal. But I’d prefer to rely on Christian evangelical environmentalists, who put the welfare of the world’s poor ahead of the sanctity of species. (By the way, the latter can also be inferred in a handful of Biblical passages agaisnt mixing, which Christians ignore and Jews all but ignore.)