The Promise and Peril of the New Genetics
Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.—Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Perhaps it was simply a matter of chance, a random throw of the molecular dice. Perhaps some greater, transcendent force was at work in the earth's primeval seas. Yet from the moment of its miraculous genesis three billion years ago, life has been continually renewing and remaking itself, an evolutionary process that has led to the appearance of a unique creature quite unlike any of those before him. Thinking, feeling, striving, man is what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called "the ascending arrow of the great biological synthesis."
Now, only some 35,000 years after the birth of modern man—a brief interval on the evolutionary time scale—the arrow is pointing in a dramatic new direction. Not only has man begun to unlock the most fundamental life processes, but he may soon be able to manipulate and alter them—curing such killer diseases as cancer, correcting the genetic defects that account for perhaps 50% of all human ailments, lessening the ravages of old age, expanding the prowess of his mind and body. Says Caltech's Robert Sinsheimer, one of the architects of the biological revolution: "For the first time in all time, a living creature understands its origin and can undertake to design its future."
To an extent, man has already altered himself and his planet. Scientists can only guess at the genetic toll from radioactive fallout, chemical contamination and other assaults on the environment. Even man's noblest impulses are apt to offend against nature. While improved medical care assures the survival and reproduction of those with genetically caused mental and physical defects, it also ensures that an increasingly larger percentage of the population will be heir to these illnesses in years to come. Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky succinctly expresses the ethical dilemma. "If we enable the weak and the deformed to live and to propagate their kind," he says, "we face the prospect of a genetic twilight. But if we let them die or suffer when we can save or help them, we face the certainty of a moral twilight."
The biological revolution could make some of the choices easier. In the future, defective genes may be excised by pinpoint laser beams and replaced by viruses acting as man's genetic messengers in the body. Anguished man may also find his mental burdens lightened, as he turns to anti-aggression and knowledge pills, or learns to stimulate his brain's pleasure centers with electrodes.