I was dumbfounded this afternoon in my reading to discover that the last mandatory sterilization in the United States happened in 1981. I was twelve years old. I look forward to tracking down and reading the actual case study, but until then, it seemed only prudent of me to remind any of us who were either too young to remember this dark spot on both science and religion or perhaps weren't even born when this occurred.
It's trendy now to bash religion as being irrational and to hold science up like a golden calf which is believed to cure all our ills. Heck, I might join the trend too if I believed that these ills only ran skin deep. The interesting thing to me about the historical (or perhaps mythological) golden calf recorded in Exodus is not the idolatry itself, but rather what the people hoped the idolatry might provide them. It was a utilitarian move on the part of Aaron to construct the calf, as well as a product of democracy, which Aaron is quick to use in his defense to his brother Moses when he returned from the mountain and threw a tirade.
So what were these democratic souls hoping to accomplish with the calf? Two things stand out in Exodus 32. First, there is the people's own admission -- "Give us a god who will go before us." Here is the basic human expression of need: to have something ahead worth following, something less ambiguous and less invisible, something more tangible than a seemingly absent Creator in the wad of indifference many have come to accept the universe to be. The second thing that seems apparent is that people wanted to do what they wanted to do. No sooner had the melted gold re-solidified than a picture emerges of a people drinking, copulating, and making merry. The gloves were off and the groove was on.
In tonight's reading, I was stumbling through not only Eugenics, but also a relatively new movement, called Neurodiversity. The earliest published use of the word according to wiki was 1998, so don't feel bad if your like me and had never heard of the word.
Neurodiversity is a term used to describe atypical neurological development (say autism) as being recognized and respected as any other human variation. That might seem like a widely and easily acceptable ideological position for most of us. Not so however in much of the scientific world, and the Pandora's Box waiting for us all to open lies hidden away in the human genome.
It's easy to look at the Eugenics movement of the past and pass moral and ethical judgment on those who refused reproductive rights to particular group based on race or disability. Even though there are a few out there who still advocate for such matters, they've been largely silenced and removed from the public sphere since around the time I was born.
Looking however at the potential for genetic markers and genetic screening of the unborn and we can perhaps see ways in which Eugenics, however unintended and however freely chosen it might be, could in short order remove neurodiversity from the planet. It wouldn't be planned out, or hatched by some mad scientist in a dark labratory with bubbling test tubes. It will be the natural result of selecting traits for future children. It will come through selective pressures from insurance companies and which babies they will cover, and which they won't cover, or at least won't cover at a reasonable price.
Human diversity is about to take a tail spin. I can't make any moral or ethical claims about what is going to happen. After all, if you knew for a fact that a simple test on 20 of your embryos would reveal that 1 of them could easily develop schizophrenia, could anyone make a ethical argument that you should take that one over the other 19? I think most likely not. Our best chance to make such a case to a parent would be pointing to some of the prodigies of the past who undoubtedly represented the upside of neurodiversity -- people like Van Gough or Emily Dickinson, each respectively "suffering" from a genetic trait that might one day be removed from our species.
Like it or not, it's coming. Something Andrew Niccol saw coming when he penned the film Gattaca. But it's not coming without a fight, and that brings me to embryonic stem cell research.
The stem cell has perhaps the greatest potential to assist humanity in overcoming disease since the discovery of penicillin. It's also the front lines of a battle which will reveal the ways in which we approach our genetic future. I'm not one to argue one way or the other for stem cell research. The science just isn't clear enough to assure me that a zygote isn't a person, nor are the religious arguments strong enough to merit a blanket refusal of the research and thereby potentially block cures to a wide variety of diseases. I'll not make a stand anywhere in this dog fight because I just don't feel like I'm capable.
Nevertheless, I feel confident enough to say that what we're fighting about now isn't just about stem cells. It's about Pandora's Box. The stem cell debate just happens to be the occasion to attempt articulation of concepts that are likely so buried in our genetic make-up that we can't adequately even communicate them to one another. So they take on various forms, including both religious and scientific catch-phrases.
I suspect that the objection to stem-cell research for some is a deeply held genetic predisposition handed down to us through natural selection. An unconscious recognition that too much tinkering, even for good reasons, is just simply bad for the species. If natural selection is true, then my suspicion is most likely true. Given the examples we have from our biological world of species habitually having to undercompensate in a given exercise for the benefit of survival, it seems plausible that such underpinnings lurk somewhere beneath the articulation of our arguments on reproductive ethics. Biology says that most all of life favors randomness and that decreased randomness doesn't usually bode well for survival of a species. Larger genetic variations in a population allow for increased survivability by allowing the species to adopt new habits, develop new skills, and lessen the chance of extinction.
While the goals of today are very noble and worthwhile, the end result of all our work will be a world in which human beings are less diverse than they were before the genome was mapped and the stem cell was opened up for discovery. That's no reason to stop what we're doing -- I'm not saying that at all -- but it does perhaps explain why some people have deep seated beliefs about the embryonic stem cell.
It's easier to blame religion than science, as I mentioned above. It's even a bit trendy. But the religious experession happens in real bodies which have undergone real genetic change and emerged from millions of years of natural selection to hold a host of unconscious feelings toward reproduction and reproductive ethics. How those unconscious feelings get articulated is extremely less important than the fact they are there at all.
Now that I've rambled on quite a bit about this topic, it seems only fitting to say that we should proceed with caution and attempt to reach homogeneous conclusions about reproductive ethics. Our species' survival might just depend on it.... it might depend on respecting the complexities of our genetic make-up as well as all our autistic, depressed, and schizophrenic brothers and sisters with whom we all share the wonder of life.
Of course we could get impatient. Instead of our necklaces and earrings, we can offer up our genetic future to the priests of science. We can mix those discoverys together in one big melting pot and prop up a golden genome god who will go before us. We can pass the bubbly and get the party started, making a new genetic calf for a brave new world, a new god for a new future:
"Genetic Purity be Thy Name."
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