Biotechnology: How far should researchers go?

Ever since it was discovered that yeast could turn dough into bread, people have toyed with biotechnology to improve their lives.

But much more profound uses of that technology lie on the immediate horizon. These include drugs that could selectively delete painful or shameful memories; various techniques that could greatly lengthen the average life span; computer chips that could interact directly with the human brain, increasing mental abilities; and human bodies that operate more like "tools," altered to suit an individual's needs and tastes.

While biotechnology can be a force for good, it raises important religious, moral, and philosophical issues when it offers the possibilities of something "better than well," concludes a report issued in October by the President's Council on Bioethics in Washington. "[W]ith our very humanity in the balance, it would be foolish to avert our gaze and trust to fortune."

Here are brief excerpts from a recent Monitor telephone interview with the chairman of that council, Leon Kass:

What is the greatest fear people have about biotechnology?

It's hard to say. Some, mostly religious people, worry about usurping God's powers. There are people more on the left who are inclined to worry about the use of these powers by some people over other people, the pacification of populations producing a certain kind of conformity. There are other people who don't so much worry about the technologies themselves but worry about unequal access to the benefits.

Does the report debunk some fears about biotechnology as illegitimate?

There is a lot of hype and fear - exaggerated promises and exaggerated dangers - and one of the things this report is able to say with some confidence is that this much-talked-about prospect of "designer babies," in which parents can determine in advance the precise genetic makeup of their children, is scientifically unfeasible [now] and unfeasible for the future. This is way down the road.... The virtual impossibility of engineering the precise changes you want means that genetically engineered designer babies are something that we should relax about.

What's so harmful about drugs that create a sense of satisfaction?

It is somewhat worrisome now with an enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies to parents and children offering them a kind of instantaneous solution to their problems. Lots of people are going to accept these partial solutions to their difficulties that might come at the cost of ... not trying to do something about the difficulties themselves [and] producing a kind of spurious contentment or satisfaction....

Lack and aspiration are twins. If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness that might in fact get in the way of those kinds of richer pursuits that we pursue as a result of the things that we are missing. That's part of the problem of a pharmaceutical approach to esteem and self-contentment.

Do we need to slow down scientific research in biotechnology to allow ethics to catch up?

I wouldn't put it that way. Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.... If the questions we raise strike the reader as raising something of a cautionary note, he or she shouldn't mistake this as hostility toward biotechnology or to its many desirable uses.

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