Ethics and science
HUMAN CLONING AND GMOs
Interview conducted by Emmanuel
Thévenon, Journalist France
Progress is fascinating, but frightening too.
What future do human cloning, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or xenotransplantation
have in store for us, whose potential applications overturn the ethical foundations of our
societies? How can we save ourselves from this? The point of view of André Langaney, a
population geneticist.
Label France: What certainties have
been most shaken by the scientific discoveries of this century?
André Langaney: I believe
that biology has profoundly changed the way we see birth and death. Previously, an
individual's life began on leaving the mother's uterus and death occurred when his or her
heart stopped beating. Today, it has become a much more complex matter, leading to a whole
range of ethical consequences. At the present time, there is no definite beginning of a
human being's life, for it is not an event that takes place at a specific moment. For
science, this momentum does not start when a spermatozoon meets an ovum. Nor seven hours
later when the two nuclei fuse. Nor even when the egg descends and implants itself in the
uterus. This mass of identical cells is not yet a human being, since it may be split into
two to make twins or clones. This is common practice in experiments in breeding animals.
Embryonic division may occur for about two
weeks after conception. Thus, methods of contraception that act one, or even two weeks
later, do not attack individuals but clumps of cells that only have the potential to
become individuals. Moreover, women lose a large number of fertilized eggs naturally.
Where does respect for life begin?
We cannot protect all potential life. Every
day, we lose 80 hairs, and with them hair follicle cells which all contain our genetic
inheritance. On the other hand, human life must be respected. But we still need to say
exactly what this means. In some societies, children become human when they have learned
to use speech, and those without it are sometimes killed. These concepts are therefore
arbitrary, they are social and cultural conventions which can vary considerably. In Europe
today we protect children from birth, with a very few exceptions. Babies born without
brains, for example, or kept alive by a life support machine, are allowed to die. This is
not said publicly. And, in my opinion, we should do so.
Do you favour some degree of eugenic
selection?
The word "eugenics" has been
demonized since Nazism but, in fact, our society practices an unspoken "soft
negative" eugenics. The rights of the child are sometimes in competition with the
right to have children. As far as the unborn citizen is concerned, I do not believe that
we can allow artificial fertilization to be used to produce a child from a tetraplegic
father and a trisomic mother. But all this would have to be done officially to prevent any
deviation.
Can this problem be compared to that
of euthanasia?
The end of life has become as vague as its
start. So, when do we pull the plug? Who makes the decision? What do we do about a cancer
patient screaming to be put out of his or her misery? I don't think such a decision should
be taken in the secrecy of a medical consulting room. Euthanasia is a universal practice,
but never made official, with the sole exception of the Netherlands. There, the doctor and
the family make the decision together, in accordance with extremely well defined
procedures. For nor must such procedures permit the killing off of rich maiden aunts! It
would be desirable in France too, to have a law define and stipulate the limits of
euthanasia.
Human cloning and GMOs are just two
of the great ethical questions of the next century. What are your thoughts about them?
My father has a cornea problem. He needs a
graft, but there are no donors for people of his age. If, in the near or medium-term
future, as is probable, it is possible to give him back his sight by making corneal tissue
from new cells cultivated on an embryo, believe me, I'd have not the slightest hesitation.
The idea is to clone simple organs, not eyes or hearts, for therapeutic purposes. The
complete clone is a myth. "Life's limits have become more complex" Similarly, in
the matter of GMOs, I believe that nothing should prohibit them in principle, but that all
individual cases should be examined extremely carefully. Thus, I am prepared to take risks
in order to improve human health, or make the farmworker's job easier. But this should not
lead to spreading vast quantities of pesticides in the environment, or to depriving
farmers of seed for the next harvest, which is unacceptable. Just as we must not tinker
with rape genes in Europe, since there is every chance that this plant will hybridize with
wild crucifers, running the risk that certain genes will spread. If these are antibiotic
resistant genes, that's criminal.
But there will always be madmen doing crazy
experiments in unregistered laboratories. Unlike the atom bomb, biology requires little
investment, and there are a great many people with the necessary skills in the world...
Does the law make it possible to
prevent such abuses?
There is a law on bioethics in France. But it
isn't applicable. Techniques are advancing much too quickly for it to be possible to
provide a legal framework for them. Obviously such abuses must be stopped, at once, and
any government can do it by Decree, on the basis of existing laws and the principles
enshrined in the Constitution. This was how we put an end to the phenomenon of surrogate
mothers, which was beginning to look like an immoral and completely unethical trade.
(Courtesy Label France Magazine,
Embassy of France, Nepal)
Dialogue with others
Manfred Osten on the cultural history
of a borderless continent
1806: Goethe, of whom Nietzsche was to claim
that he was an "inconsequential intermediary case" in German history, noted down
the following laudable phrase in autobiographical notes he compiled under the heading
"Tag- und Jahreshefte": "Europe ... one of the rarest republics."
Years later, in the second version of his novel "Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,"
he added that relatively unknown declaration of faith in Europe which, in the year 2003,
will surely surprise all critics of "old Europe," as it is a declaration of
faith in Europe from an American point of view. One of the heroes of "Wilhelm
Meisters Wanderjahre," having spent his early life in America, decides to return to
Europe and justifies that decision in the following way: "That inestimable culture
which sprang up several thousand years ago, grew, spread, was oppressed, though never
quite suppressed, revived, was revitalised and is manifest in never-ending actions, that
inestimable culture provided him with very different ideas of the direction in which
humanity can develop."
"One of the rarest
republics"
Perhaps it was this European consciousness,
embracing thousands of years on Goethe's part, which Nietzsche so sorely missed in the
politically blinkered Germany of the Wilhelminian Empire. Had Nietzsche not already
commented that as far as he was concerned the foundation of the German Empire in 1871
amounted to nothing less than the "extirpation of the German spirit" - that
Goethean "German spirit," mind you, that had still understood Europe as the
"inestimable culture" of a borderless continent, in the sense of a global
literature. Goethe had claimed that he simply could not hate France because he owed the
greater part of his education to that nation. And two hundred years before the foundation
of the European Union, that same Goethe, a master of old Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Yiddish,
English, French and Italian, had demanded something that is only now slowly gaining access
to school curricula as an indispensable precondition for the education of a truly European
citizen: "The German should learn all languages so that he is not disconcerted by
foreigners at home and is himself at home everywhere. A person who knows no foreign
languages knows nothing of his own language."
A plural existence
The Austrian dramatist Grillparzer, who in
1828 saw Goethe, the European, as "half king, half father," already had
considerable forebodings as to what direction Europe might take if its "inestimable
culture" were to be forgotten in the process of the formation of nation states. For
he too knew that although life in Europe can be lived with an eye to the future, it can
only be really understood in retrospect, as it were, with a view to the past. Which was
the reason why Grillparzer, in 1849, penned his warning statement on the progress of more
recent (European) education, namely, "from humanity to nationality to
bestiality."
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that in
1939, on the occasion of the 190th anniversary of Goethe's birth, a decree published in
the "Zeitschriften-Dienst" of the Reich Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda
was circumspectly formulated to read: "Goethe, the European, an expression to be
avoided."
As we all know, Grillparzer's warning was not
heeded, for then as now, a retrospective understanding of Europe's "inestimable
culture" presupposed an awareness of and insight into the thousand-year-old history
of the interaction and interchange of spiritual goods in one of the truly "rarest
republics." And even then, recognizing and estimating the plurality of the thousands
and thousands of voices in that European "republic" required a plural existence,
such as Goethe personified.
For insight into that European plural
existence also presupposed the irksome recognition that Europe was founded not on one, but
on three hills, called the Acropolis, Capitoline Hill and Golgotha. Added to that the
repeatedly repressed fact that, geographically speaking, the historical realm of classical
antiquity, the wellspring of Europe, embraced three part of the globe: Asia, Africa and
south-eastern and western Europe.
In nineteenth century France, when the poet
Rimbaudprovocatively claimed that he was "an African," ("Je suis
nègre") he not only anticipated the modern research findings of hominoid evolution,
which point to Africa as the birthplace of man, and thus of the Europeans. He also evoked
that little-heeded history of give and take that links Europe with the African continent:
from the Ife culture to the history of Carthage to the influence of Africa on modern
European art. Asia too participated in the process of spiritual exchange that marked the
early history of Europe, from the possible influences of Indian wisdom on the Greek
pre-Socratics, to the influence of Greek sculpture on the Indian statues of the Gandhara
culture and the latter's influence on the Buddha figures in the Far east. To say nothing
of the synergy of Greek and the Middle Eastern cultures in the realm of Alexander the
Great and its impact on the Roman Empire.
That this spiritual exchange between Europe
and Asia did not come to a final standstill can be seen from the staunch opinion held by
Paul Valéry, who flatly described Europe as a "peninsula of Asia." This claim
was certainly not intended in deference to the feverish love of all things Chinese in the
Rococo and Baroque periods in Europe, but more with a view to the significant influence of
the multi-perspective Ukiyoe painting and woodcuts from Japan on the development of the
modern fine arts in Europe since the late nineteenth century. Moreover, homage towards
Chinese science and culture was also paid by none other than the great universal scholar
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his still much neglected essay "Novissima Sinica,"
in which he undertook the then daring and even today topical task of transforming the
European "teaching society" into a "learning society" vis-à-vis
China.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was
well-informed from the enthusiastic reports by European Jesuits on China and their
attempts to Europeanize that country in the seventeenth century, had something
revolutionary in mind for European science in his "Novissima Sinica": Not only
did he recommend Chinese as the future lingua franca of science, he also demanded the
establishment of Chinese academies in Europe with the aim of advancing European culture,
science and morals. An insight which Goethe reiterated in poetic form in 1827 in the cycle
"Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten" with a view to the wisdom,
practical morality and aesthetics of Chinese culture.
Recognition rather than tolerance
Goethe and the early Romantics invested much
effort in flinging open the doors and windows of Europe in their urgent demand for such a
learning society. Almost 200 years ago, Goethe undertook his own grand attempt to
introduce his western European readers to the spiritual world of Islam. Long before the
modern shock of September 11th, he had drawn up strategies for an intense dialogue between
Europe and Islam - a dialogue that warns, above all, against a complacent attitude of mere
western tolerance. In Goethe's view, tolerance should give rise to recognition, which was
imperative, because "to tolerate means to insult." Obviously, Goethe already
realized that for Europe too the world could get gradually smaller, and that in this
smaller world we cannot live together if we do not know more about one another. Meaning
that Europe could find itself in the situation of no longer being able to ward off the
challenges presented by other religions and cultures through spatial distance, or simply
by recommending European achievements to other cultures as an ideal. As regards Islam,
tolerance is also a poor adviser. A much more important prerequisite for genuine dialogue
is to realize and acknowledge that we owe the achievements of our culture, among other
things, to aspects of oriental culture.
Goethe's strategy of recognition through
dialogue was then taken up, above all, by his conversation partner, the travelling
researcher and last universal European scholar Alexander von Humboldt. Unfortunately, like
Goethe's "WestÖstlicher Divan," his words have received little attention. By
recalling the decisive importance of the Arabs in Spain, who not only facilitated the
European reception of Aristotelian philosophy, but also laid the foundations for the later
development of European science, Humboldt, in a work of his later years called
"Cosmos," provided an exemplary document recognizing the importance of the
Orient for the development of the history of European culture and science. Nietzsche, in
his "Menschliches Allzumenschliches," gave further expression to Humboldt's
acknowledgement, this time as regards the importance of Jewish culture for European
cultural history: "In the darkest periods of the Middle Ages ... it was Jewish
freethinkers, scholars and doctors who held up the banner of enlightenment and spiritual
independence under pain of the severest intimidation."
"The Ring of Culture"
Humboldt's concept of a "scientific
culture" based on a crossborder interdisciplinary dialogue, has been upheld in
Germany notably by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, an institution for the promotion
of science that has been pursuing this "scientific culture" since 1860, and
which was reestablished in 1953. Thanks among other things to state support, this
foundation has succeeded in establishing a community of scientists that extends far beyond
Europe.
This global "Humboldt Family"
signifies more than 23,000 research scholarship holders promoted by the foundation, and
prizewinners in all disciplines of science and scholarship in more than 130 countries,
including 34 Nobel prize laureates, so far.
Humboldt himself promoted and extended this
cross-border European-global scientific debate, among other things, by his research trips
to Latin America and Siberia. If, as Hugo von Hofmannsthal concludes in his 1915 essay
"Wir Österreicher und Deutschland," the eyes of the Germans in the Middle Ages
were on the South and later on the West, to the exclusion of the East, then like no other
European Humboldt considerably broadened that horizon. Humboldt's research expeditions to
the East questioned the concept behind the German term "Grenze" which, as it is
derived from the Slavic word granitza" for border, unfortunately seems to imply a
concept of delimitation towards the East. But not only that, as the cofounder of the
discipline of Ancient American Studies, Humboldt also neutralized that term in connection
with the ancient high cultures of Latin America.
This "Ring of Culture," which
"links" the stupendous variety of cultures in Europe, is the basis of a
spiritual wealth that is complemented by countless regional European cultures. These
regional cultures must be preserved in the interests of a diversity of intellectual and
aesthetic cultures. In doing this the principle to be adhered to is: as much unity as
necessary, as much diversity as possible. Only through such a synergy of its cultures will
Europe preserve its vitality in the sense intended by Goethe: "Bonds are everything,
bonds are life."
(Courtesy Deutschland Magazine,
Embassy of Germany, Kathmandu, Nepal) |
