Over the past year or so, debate has waxed and waned about issues of political interference in the field of human genetics – stem cell research, bans on cloning. I covered it in March with these thoughts prompted by criticism of Bush appointments to the President’s Council on Bioethics.
A William Saletin column from Friday, in Slate, provides sobering evidence that there may be a very real need for checks and balances, if this commentary is representative of some of the mindsets in the research community.
Eric Juengst, a jovial bioethicist with a puffy white beard, takes the stage after lunch. He looks like Santa Claus and sounds like an elf. But the gift he brings isn’t for children. It’s a caustic wit aimed at anti-biotech hysteria. Juengst says human nature has been changing all along and will keep changing. He calls up a picture of an imaginary creature, half human and half cheetah. “Cheetah Man,” he jokes�or as the creature’s track-meet competitors might call him, “Cheater Man.” Next comes a drawing of a half-ape humanoid designed to fight wars, followed by a Weekly Standard article warning that the cloning of pigs to grow organs for humans will lead to “pig-men.” Juengst reads from the article in the hammed-up voice of a guy narrating a horror-movie trailer. The whole audience laughs.
Well, almost the whole audience. After Juengst finishes, Richard Hayes, the director of the Center for Genetics and Society, rebukes his “mocking, sarcastic” dismissal of people’s fears. Juengst replies that the pig-man article is funny. Hayes says it isn’t. The next questioner, biotech enthusiast Lee Silver of Princeton University, agrees with Juengst that humanity is always evolving. He asks whether popular belief in the sanctity of our species is religious and irrational. He cites the argument of his Princeton colleague, Peter Singer, that humans aren’t much more valuable than chimps.