Human genetics : readings on the implications of genetic engineering / [compiled by] Thomas R. Mertens.

Date:
[1975]
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Human genetics : readings on the implications of genetic engineering / [compiled by] Thomas R. Mertens. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    traits that distinguish Homo sapiens from others in the animal [world], from the primates down. Coital reproduction is therefore less human than laboratory reproduction; more fun, to be sure, but with our separation of baby-making from love-making, both become more human, because they are matters of choice, not chance. I cannot see how humanity or morality [is] served by genetic roulette.” At the opposite pole, Dr. Leon Kass, the executive director of a committee on the life sciences and social policy for the National Academy of Sciences, argues that the further reproduction is pushed into the laboratory the more it becomes sheer manufacture. “One can purchase quality control of the product only by the depersonalization of the process,” he says, going on to ask, “Is there not some wisdom in the mystery of nature that joins the pleasure of sex, the communication of love, and the desire for children in the very activity by which we continue the chain of human existence? Is not human procreation, if properly understood and practiced, itself a humanizing experience?” Dr. Kass points to the lonely depersonalized experiences old age and dying have become as a result of medical technology. The aged are kept alive but barely able to function, and they die in institutions surrounded by clacking machinery and uncaring strangers. He also believes that laboratory reproduction will deal a near fatal blow to the human family. “The family is rapidly becoming the only institution in an increasingly impersonal world where each person is loved not for what he does, or makes, but simply because he is. Destruction of the family unit would throw us, even more than we are now, on the mercy of an impersonal, lonely present.” There are some members of the scientific community who take what might be called an “amber light” approach to genetic technology: Proceed with extreme caution. Isaac Asimov, the biochemist who is also well known as a science-fiction writer, says we should be very sure what we’re about before we start tinkering with genes. “We should intervene if we have reasonable suspicion that we can do so wisely. If our choice is doing nothing or doing something without knowing, we should do nothing. But wise change is better than no change at all. It’s the same as changing the environment. Every time we build a dam there is a gain and there is a loss. What has usually happened is that we have considered the short-term gain without thinking what the long-term effect will be.” Dr. George Wald, a Nobel laureate at Harvard who has spoken out on a