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Scientific miracle should be free to heal personal injury
The idea that the scopes of human consciousness, mortality and intellectual capacity will soon be increased by snowballing scientific advances is at once deeply exciting and deeply unsettling to our shared vanity. Each of us likes to feel that our experience of existence and its exaltations and despairs is as real and felt as that of anyone else. It underpins our earliest narcissistic conceptions of self and lingers long into later life as a useful tool of identity and self-affirmation.
Although it might seem like a notion more easily belonging to the pages of science fiction, it is entirely realistic that future generations, with extended lifespans and advantageously altered genes will come to look back on us as among the last of organic and relatively unaltered generations of the human race. Such a notion has the power to leave us feeling as with we are flailing hopelessly at the end of a comparatively innocent era.
It can call into question the validity of our own experience, negating even our confidence in many of humanity's greatest works of art. If we one day have a pantheon of genetically enhanced super-artists, does it mean that will Picasso be reduced to being something comparable to a cave-painting curiosity of early humanity? What of Joyce, will he just be seen as a lesson in the whimsical limitations of the human consciousness?
The scientific community have already begun the process of identifying the genes central to our intelligence and wider cognitive abilities. Just last year the linking of the gene dysbindin-1 with heightened cognitive ability led to many religious-conservative commentators calling for a moratorium on further research. It is easy to understand how their argument can seem persuasive: stop interfering with God's creation before we end up with Frankenstein-like sacrilege. Like the vanity argument, it appeals to our ideals of our unique place in creation.
Obviously, there is a problem here and it is not one that we should seek to resolve hastily. As science's potential explodes exponentially with each new advance it would be a shame if the debates about what we do with it were conducted at the same furious pace. Let's face it, once we make changes there will be little hope of turning back.
The religious viewpoint is not entirely one-sided. One of America's most respected and independently minded Christian commentators recently asked the following question: if genetic enhancement would allow our descendants the opportunity of greater enlightenment and increased quality of life, should we deny it to them?
The question only comes to mind because the same speech, entitled "My Blessings for the Scientific Miracle", actually concerned something rather different. Although he toyed with the idea of scientific enhancement of intelligence being reconcilable with a creationist God, the speaker was careful to make the distinction between this scenario and the rather more pressing needs of his own community who he believes might be jeopardising its own lives by opposing life-saving scientific advances.
All this was prompted by discussion of a landmark compensation claim currently running through the US courts. It is being made by the widow of a man whose strict religious beliefs led to him refusing a blood transfusion which, doctors agree, "would have saved his life". It is a complex, tragic and sensitive case and the insurers of the deceased man's employers cannot be blamed for denying liability. They may be liable for his work injury, but can they really be liable for his death if he refused the treatment that would have saved his life?
Although ultimately the case may be a matter for the widow's personal injury lawyer, the court and the defendants to decide, the compensation claim raises some important issues, such as whether it can any more be considered realistic to exclude the possibilities of science on the grounds of creed.
While the use of human stem cells for anything remotely nefarious or confusable with the terms of eugenics surely needs weighty debate and consideration, a near future where doctors are able to regenerate human limbs and spinal nerve cells should be embraced.
I may be as vain as the rest and do not want to have my place in history trivialised by anyone who supersedes me, but I am also vain enough to know that if I lost an arm or a finger I would want it back.
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