- Email: [email protected]
Big Idea: Of scary monsters and men
OPINION THE BIG IDEA
It’s alive, I tell you! From IVF to artificial wombs, why does each advance in reproductive biology or technology still conjure up visions of monsters or Hitler clones, asks Philip Ball
WHEN Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, the Vatican spokesman for bioethics, objected to IVF pioneer Robert Edwards receiving the 2010 Nobel prize for medicine, he stressed that he was speaking in a personal capacity. But opposition to assisted conception is official papal policy. In 2004, Pope John Paul II condemned IVF as “a technology that wants to substitute true paternity and maternity and therefore that does harm to the dignity of parents and children alike”. The “conjugal act”, he said, “cannot be substituted by a mere technological procedure which is devoid of human value and subject to the dictates of science and technology”. Now that more than 4 million babies globally have been conceived by IVF, this view seems seriously out of kilter with the world as most of us know it. Yet every fresh advance in technologies of “human manufacture”, from artificial wombs to sperm made from stem cells, elicits the same negative imagery as IVF initially did: references to Frankenstein, to Brave New World and the Faust legend, visions of resurrecting Adolf Hitler (or armies of Hitlers), and portrayals of the “artificial human” as a soulless creature that will ultimately supplant us. The reaction of many scientists is to lament these “science fiction” stories, to imagine that if Mary Shelley and Aldous Huxley had never committed their imaginings to paper all Profile Philip Ball studied physics at the University of Bristol, UK. He is a writer and contributor to Nature, where he previously worked as a physical sciences editor. This essay is based on his latest book Unnatural, published this month by Bodley Head
30 | NewScientist | 12 February 2011
would have been well. They fail to see that neither Shelley nor Huxley exactly invented their stories, because myths and legends of making people have always been with us, and have always spoken to deep-rooted fears and preconceptions about what this might entail – and what it would produce. Some versions of the Prometheus story of Greek mythology say that he not only gave technological knowledge to humankind but actually created human beings. And the
“When we call something unnatural... We are making a moral judgement” legendary inventor Daedalus was said to have been able to animate statues. Ancient Jewish folklore tells of the golem, a being animated from clay by magical means, while medieval alchemists were said to be able to make homunculi, little human-like forms cooked up in a sealed vessel, as later portrayed in Goethe’s telling of the Faust legend. Crucially, all these examples of peoplemaking – what I call anthropoeia – ended badly. The message was that this sort of dabbling in the work of the divine was apt to bring down speedy retribution, whether it was Prometheus suffering perpetual torment in chains, the golem-makers crushed by their wayward creatures, or Faust dragged to hell. The “manufactured being” itself was either subhuman, like the golem, or superhuman, like Goethe’s homunculus – but could never be just like us. Most significantly, it lacked a soul, the watermark of true humanity that only God could instil. Mary Shelley combined some of these mythical elements with the electrical
“galvanic” theory of physiology popular in the early 19th century, and in doing so she created a secular vision of anthropoeia in her Gothic novel. God is relegated to the wings, and it is left for the monster to deliver retribution on Victor Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus. Theatre and film insisted on their own versions, in particular refusing to grant the creature any eloquence: it was a pitiful, shambling mute in stage adaptations in London’s West End long before Boris Karloff stumbled across the screen. In the 20th century, anthropoeia left the secluded lab and entered the factory, first in Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R. in which the original robots were made of flesh and blood, from components assembled like Henry Ford’s automobiles. Just a decade or so later, Aldous Huxley imagined a better way. The hatcheries of his Brave New World were extrapolated from early experiments on tissue culture and the vision of babies gestated in artificial wombs (ectogenesis) advocated by his brother, the biologist Julian, and their friend J. B. S. Haldane. The mass-produced people designed to fill castes were the forerunners of the clone armies of Star Wars. From these stories, we have accumulated a roster of myths about reproductive technologies that now recur with dreary predictability with every new advance. Anthropoeia will be used for social engineering by dictators – or indeed to duplicate themselves; it will lead to the demise of the family; it will result in the annihilation of men (or women). We still find it hard to imagine that the clone – a term philosopher Gregory Pence considers as prejudicial as labels of racism – will, when born, be a person just like us. These fears make little sense in themselves; some invoke more or less magical thinking. But their pull is relentless. Why do we insist that this “otherness” and this intervention in procreation are only steps towards a Brave New World? Partly, I think, it is a defence against the uncomfortable notion that we can be “manufactured”. But at root, making people (or merely appearing to do so, as in IVF and reproductive cloning) is arguably the ultimate “unnatural” act. And what we generally fail to realise is that, when we call something unnatural, we are not just placing it in a different category from the “natural”. We are making a moral judgement – indeed, the same moral judgement Pope John Paul II was making about IVF. We are saying that it violates a
For more opinion articles and to add your comments, visit www.NewScientist.com/opinion
hulton/getty
Frankenstein’s monster was stripped of his intelligence in film and theatre versions
perceived “natural order”, which in theological terms is associated with a purpose for all things designated by God, and which must therefore be intrinsically “good”. According to this view, the natural “purpose” of sexual intercourse is procreation, and so a new human life cannot morally begin without it. Today’s accusations of unnaturalness, and even of playing God, are likely to come from a secular perspective that has merely replaced God with a reified nature. The preconceptions and prejudices, derived from the cultural history of anthropoeia, that now surround reproductive technologies are still shaping the discourse. This was all too evident in the debates about human cloning and embryo research conducted by George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, which supported the administration’s decision to block federal funds for stem-cell research. At a meeting in 2002, one member, Charles Krauthammer, claimed that cloning would enable “some people” to “manufacture extremely intelligent, extremely powerful, extremely resistant people” – nothing less, he said, than a “super-race”. The council’s chair, bioethicist Leon Kass, had warned back in 1971 that new reproductive technologies might lead to the “asexual reproduction of 10,000 Mao Tse-tungs”, and he has used mythical images to oppose such technologies every step of the way. Kass feels that our instinctive aversion to some of these developments “is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it” – something he calls the “wisdom of repugnance”. This notion should not be dismissed out of hand: for example, rational arguments for why it is not immoral to create headless, cloned embryos for spare parts surely can’t be the sole arbiter of whether that is a good idea. Our instinctive unease about making babies by human cloning cannot be ruled out in grappling with that possibility. So how will we know when to heed repugnance and when not? There is no simple moral calculus. I believe the first question for new reproductive technologies should not be whether it is “right” in some timeless, absolute moral sense, but why we might want to do it. Not until we examine and acknowledge the roles that people-making myths, both ancient and modern, play in shaping our fears about these techniques can we have a grown-up debate about whether we want them. n 12 February 2011 | NewScientist | 31
It’s alive, I tell you! From IVF to artificial wombs, why does each advance in reproductive biology or technology still conjure up visions of monsters or Hitler clones, asks Philip Ball
WHEN Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, the Vatican spokesman for bioethics, objected to IVF pioneer Robert Edwards receiving the 2010 Nobel prize for medicine, he stressed that he was speaking in a personal capacity. But opposition to assisted conception is official papal policy. In 2004, Pope John Paul II condemned IVF as “a technology that wants to substitute true paternity and maternity and therefore that does harm to the dignity of parents and children alike”. The “conjugal act”, he said, “cannot be substituted by a mere technological procedure which is devoid of human value and subject to the dictates of science and technology”. Now that more than 4 million babies globally have been conceived by IVF, this view seems seriously out of kilter with the world as most of us know it. Yet every fresh advance in technologies of “human manufacture”, from artificial wombs to sperm made from stem cells, elicits the same negative imagery as IVF initially did: references to Frankenstein, to Brave New World and the Faust legend, visions of resurrecting Adolf Hitler (or armies of Hitlers), and portrayals of the “artificial human” as a soulless creature that will ultimately supplant us. The reaction of many scientists is to lament these “science fiction” stories, to imagine that if Mary Shelley and Aldous Huxley had never committed their imaginings to paper all Profile Philip Ball studied physics at the University of Bristol, UK. He is a writer and contributor to Nature, where he previously worked as a physical sciences editor. This essay is based on his latest book Unnatural, published this month by Bodley Head
30 | NewScientist | 12 February 2011
would have been well. They fail to see that neither Shelley nor Huxley exactly invented their stories, because myths and legends of making people have always been with us, and have always spoken to deep-rooted fears and preconceptions about what this might entail – and what it would produce. Some versions of the Prometheus story of Greek mythology say that he not only gave technological knowledge to humankind but actually created human beings. And the
“When we call something unnatural... We are making a moral judgement” legendary inventor Daedalus was said to have been able to animate statues. Ancient Jewish folklore tells of the golem, a being animated from clay by magical means, while medieval alchemists were said to be able to make homunculi, little human-like forms cooked up in a sealed vessel, as later portrayed in Goethe’s telling of the Faust legend. Crucially, all these examples of peoplemaking – what I call anthropoeia – ended badly. The message was that this sort of dabbling in the work of the divine was apt to bring down speedy retribution, whether it was Prometheus suffering perpetual torment in chains, the golem-makers crushed by their wayward creatures, or Faust dragged to hell. The “manufactured being” itself was either subhuman, like the golem, or superhuman, like Goethe’s homunculus – but could never be just like us. Most significantly, it lacked a soul, the watermark of true humanity that only God could instil. Mary Shelley combined some of these mythical elements with the electrical
“galvanic” theory of physiology popular in the early 19th century, and in doing so she created a secular vision of anthropoeia in her Gothic novel. God is relegated to the wings, and it is left for the monster to deliver retribution on Victor Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus. Theatre and film insisted on their own versions, in particular refusing to grant the creature any eloquence: it was a pitiful, shambling mute in stage adaptations in London’s West End long before Boris Karloff stumbled across the screen. In the 20th century, anthropoeia left the secluded lab and entered the factory, first in Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R. in which the original robots were made of flesh and blood, from components assembled like Henry Ford’s automobiles. Just a decade or so later, Aldous Huxley imagined a better way. The hatcheries of his Brave New World were extrapolated from early experiments on tissue culture and the vision of babies gestated in artificial wombs (ectogenesis) advocated by his brother, the biologist Julian, and their friend J. B. S. Haldane. The mass-produced people designed to fill castes were the forerunners of the clone armies of Star Wars. From these stories, we have accumulated a roster of myths about reproductive technologies that now recur with dreary predictability with every new advance. Anthropoeia will be used for social engineering by dictators – or indeed to duplicate themselves; it will lead to the demise of the family; it will result in the annihilation of men (or women). We still find it hard to imagine that the clone – a term philosopher Gregory Pence considers as prejudicial as labels of racism – will, when born, be a person just like us. These fears make little sense in themselves; some invoke more or less magical thinking. But their pull is relentless. Why do we insist that this “otherness” and this intervention in procreation are only steps towards a Brave New World? Partly, I think, it is a defence against the uncomfortable notion that we can be “manufactured”. But at root, making people (or merely appearing to do so, as in IVF and reproductive cloning) is arguably the ultimate “unnatural” act. And what we generally fail to realise is that, when we call something unnatural, we are not just placing it in a different category from the “natural”. We are making a moral judgement – indeed, the same moral judgement Pope John Paul II was making about IVF. We are saying that it violates a
For more opinion articles and to add your comments, visit www.NewScientist.com/opinion
hulton/getty
Frankenstein’s monster was stripped of his intelligence in film and theatre versions
perceived “natural order”, which in theological terms is associated with a purpose for all things designated by God, and which must therefore be intrinsically “good”. According to this view, the natural “purpose” of sexual intercourse is procreation, and so a new human life cannot morally begin without it. Today’s accusations of unnaturalness, and even of playing God, are likely to come from a secular perspective that has merely replaced God with a reified nature. The preconceptions and prejudices, derived from the cultural history of anthropoeia, that now surround reproductive technologies are still shaping the discourse. This was all too evident in the debates about human cloning and embryo research conducted by George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, which supported the administration’s decision to block federal funds for stem-cell research. At a meeting in 2002, one member, Charles Krauthammer, claimed that cloning would enable “some people” to “manufacture extremely intelligent, extremely powerful, extremely resistant people” – nothing less, he said, than a “super-race”. The council’s chair, bioethicist Leon Kass, had warned back in 1971 that new reproductive technologies might lead to the “asexual reproduction of 10,000 Mao Tse-tungs”, and he has used mythical images to oppose such technologies every step of the way. Kass feels that our instinctive aversion to some of these developments “is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it” – something he calls the “wisdom of repugnance”. This notion should not be dismissed out of hand: for example, rational arguments for why it is not immoral to create headless, cloned embryos for spare parts surely can’t be the sole arbiter of whether that is a good idea. Our instinctive unease about making babies by human cloning cannot be ruled out in grappling with that possibility. So how will we know when to heed repugnance and when not? There is no simple moral calculus. I believe the first question for new reproductive technologies should not be whether it is “right” in some timeless, absolute moral sense, but why we might want to do it. Not until we examine and acknowledge the roles that people-making myths, both ancient and modern, play in shaping our fears about these techniques can we have a grown-up debate about whether we want them. n 12 February 2011 | NewScientist | 31