Link: http://www.usnews.co...31plastic.b.htm
Our biotech bodies, ourselves
U.S. News & World Report; 5/31/2004; James Pethokoukis; ; James Pethokoukis
05-31-2004
What if, by taking a drug, you could possess an IQ of 250? Or by tinkering with your genes, have the athletic prowess of a decathlete? Or by injecting yourself with stem cells, live to be 160? Would you do it? Would these enhancements make you less human? If everyone did this, would the world become a paradise full of self-actualized superpeople? Or a dystopian Stepford society devoid of essential human values such as compassion for the less blessed?
What seems like fodder for a science fiction potboiler has become a matter of deadly serious debate among scientists and ethicists. In a speech last year before a gathering of enhancement advocates, William Sims Bainbridge, a deputy director at the National Science Foundation who studies the societal impact of technology, warned that "scientists may be forced into rebellion in order to carry out research prohibited unnecessarily by powerful institutions."
A few months later, Leon Kass, chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, was expressing the advisory panel's profound "disquiet" with a biotech-enabled, post-human future that "cheapens rather than enriches America's most cherished ideals." The council's 325-page report, "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness," takes a decidedly dim view of the impact of such issues as radical life extension, mood and intelligence-enhancing drugs, and genetic therapies.
At the core of the conflict lies a fundamental question: How far should homo sapiens be allowed to go? Nascent technologies like genetic engineering, stem-cell therapy, and neuropharmacology promise not only to cure our diseases but to enhance our bodies, even to turn us all into the Six Million Dollar Man--better, stronger, and faster.
Clash. But not everyone thinks humans should be bioengineered. "Our increasing ability to alter our biology and open up the processes of life is now fueling a new cultural war," says Gregory Stock, director of the University of California-Los Angeles's Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society and author of the proenhancement book Redesigning Humans.
Yet isn't arguing about whether mankind should transform itself into a race of superhumans a little like arguing about whether the first Mars colony should have a bicameral or unicameral legislature? Kass doesn't think so. "These topics are not futuristic," he says. "Some of these issues are already here. Choosing the sex of your children is here. The use of stimulants on children to improve performance is here. Steroid use is here. Drugs that affect mood and temperament are here. . . . There is something profound going on here that will affect our identities and the society we live in."
Indeed, there are hints that genetic engineering might be able to alter mankind in some astounding ways. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have boosted levels of a protein in mice that makes them more muscular throughout life. Southern Illinois University scientists extended one mouse's life span to nearly twice the normal length.
But governments around the world are already putting brakes on this type of research, especially as it applies to humans. President Bush famously banned the federal funding of research on new embryonic stem-cell lines in 2001. A year later, the South Korean government raided BioFusion Tech, a company backed by the Raelian religious sect, after the group announced that a Korean woman would give birth to a clone--even though cloning isn't illegal there. And at least 17 countries have banned germ-line modification, which alters reproductive cells so that genetic tweaks will be passed down to future generations.
"How we respond to these threats to enhancement today will lay the groundwork for dealing with the ones that emerge in the future," says enhancement activist James Hughes, a lecturer in health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama agrees that policies need to be shaped before these technologies fully ripen--although Fukuyama, member of the bioethics council and author of Our Posthuman Future, counts himself a bioconservative. "If you don't shake people up now, then you will get these gradual changes that are going to end up leading us to a place that we're not going to be comfortable with," he says.
Side effects. Why worry about human enhancement? After all, what's not to like about, say, doubling the average human life span? But the bioethics council wonders in its report whether we would achieve a "stretched rubber band" version of longevity in which our active, healthy years would be extended, but so would our years of decline and decay. "Having many long, productive years, with the knowledge of many more to come, would surely bring joy to many of us," says panel member William Hurlbut, a bioethicist at Stanford University. "But in the end, these techniques could also leave the individual somewhat unhinged from the life cycle. Do I want to live to be 100? Sure. But to 250 or some other dramatic extension? No."
Bioconservatives acknowledge, however, that human enhancement may be inevitable. Even Kass admits that the council's report focused on the problems of enhancement rather than its benefits because the advantages of longer lives and better brains are so obvious "they don't need articulating." It's easy to argue the "con" position, says UCLA's Stock, about issues like the use of embryonic stem cells as long as the benefits are merely theoretical. Once those benefits become tangible, though, "the debate will be over," says Stock. Indeed, the potential therapeutic value of stem-cell research has already prompted more than 200 House members and Nancy Reagan to urge Bush to alter his ban.
With the proliferation of plastic surgery, for example, or the use of Ritalin by achievement-crazed students hoping to score better on the SAT, enhancement seems to be the wave of the future. Even Bush's Department of Commerce appears to be buying into it. In a 2002 joint report with the National Science Foundation (coauthored by Bainbridge among others), the agency recommended a national research-and-development effort to enhance humanity in order to create a world where human brains communicate directly with machines, and scientists "control the genetics of humans" to make bodies "more durable, healthier . . . and more resistant to many kinds of stress, biological threats, and aging processes." If successful, the effort will "create a golden age that would be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life."
Or not. Science could render all this high-flying rhetoric just that. Stem-cell and protein therapies, after all, have yet to spawn any successful treatments for disease, much less provide the catalyst for launching a new stage of human evolution. In 2000, researchers used gene therapy to cure two French boys of an inherited immune-system disorder but in the process gave them leukemia. Who knows what other dangerous side effects these new therapies will bring? It is, as they say, too early to tell--but judging by the intensity of the debate, not any too early to fight.
