Brave New Worlds:
Staying Human in the Genetic Future by Bryan Appleyard HarperCollins 188pp, £16.99 in UK
ARE there some things it would be better not to know? How to split the atom, for example, or how to engineer better babies, or races of babies? The author thinks so, but doesn't know what to do about it. Bryan Appleyard is one of the sharpest social critics in the business and this lucid, absorbing and provocative essay on the social consequences of the new science of molecular biology will advance this reputation. His account of the history of eugenics cleverly shows that genetic engineering of human foetuses does not have to be under state control to have eugenic consequences.
In a privatised, consumer-driven era, the standard of "normality" on which the fears of expectant parents are founded will be defined and redefined by the spin-doctors of the corporations which feed off the labours of the scientists. The promise of consumer choice may please the individual parent, but it threatens to make Jews and Gypsies of any of us who deviate from an elusive "norm" in the womb. It is in the womb that the vaunted promise of genetics to alleviate disease finds its principal application. Abortion is currently the only sure treatment it offers.
Appleyard is by no means an absolutist on abortion - indeed, he has little to say on the subject except in the context of its potential as an instrument for designer babies as the indirect, but predictable, consequence of advances in molecular biology. "Not my fault", the geneticist will say, whose research has contributed to the precise identification of the unwanted gene. "It's a free country. I provide the knowledge; parents choose the abortion." But it is still eugenics, argues Appleyard, and he has a point. Blaming society for choices that are engineered by the combined forces of science and the free market is like blaming the anorexic for fashion.
Scientists dismiss the link between genetics and eugenics on the basis that eugenics was based on "bad science". But all science is potentially "bad" in that sense. It is fundamental to the canons of scientific inquiry that scientific truth is provisional on later experiment and review. The problem is that its technological products make it appear to be right at the time, hiding from scrutiny the errors in the wider theoretical scheme which later science exposes - too late for some. Appleyard is not an ideologue, plucking the strings of Luddism and popular prejudice against the new technology. On the contrary, he quotes with approval the director of the Human Genome Project in Maryland: "The notion of not pursuing genetic research is unthinkable. It would be unethical to delay it." Genetics offers the promise of getting to the root of life, providing certainty in place of lottery, giving us control over our bodies - to cure them of disease, refine them by foetal tests, add on bits which are missing or clone the lot in an orgy of egoism.
We have been manipulating genes in dogs and horses, plants and humans, on a hit-or-miss principle for centuries. What is the moral difference now that we can see what we are doing, touch the gene and alter its design to more precise human purpose? The difference, for Appleyard, is the social consequences of that precision within a free-market system which can exploit the fears and gullibility of individuals encouraged to take advantage of it. It is our fear of disease and abnormality, not the thirst for knowledge, which drives the genetic train, packed with corporate funds and technological wizardry, to its unknowable destination. There is more to worry about. The advances in science have placed genetics at the service of a new breed of scientists who make astonishing claims about the purpose of life on the basis of negligible findings. These are the evolutionary psychologists who, for American philosopher Daniel Dennett, have struck a fundamental blow at the last refuge of popular belief: "the mind as an inner sanctum that science cannot reach". From the stuff of life in DNA, genetics has taken control of the meaning of life. Sucks to religion and poetry! Are ethical sensibility and the search for meaning like the peacock's tail - an evolutionary ornament which encourages the delusion of uniqueness and moral grandeur?
"There is no meaning; there is only knowing," as Appleyard puts it? He discusses the consequences of this view for our appreciation of art and human suffering, but he offers no solution. "The truth is that we have no language with which to mock this new god." Throughout this stimulating, but not unflawed, polemic, there is a mix of awe, admiration and despair at the achievements of a science whose hubristic claims to have uncovered the meaning of life cannot be convincingly falsified. Appleyard is rather too concerned to meet the scientists on their own ground of falsification. Hubris is better ridiculed.
In two key areas Appleyard fails to convince. He is too much in thrall to evolutionary psychology when its theoretical poverty makes it a sitting target for mockery. And in not addressing the moral responsibility of individual geneticists, he leaves accountability where the scientists like it - in the consumer society where "it's a free country". Individual geneticists are decent human beings trying to find things out, get a PhD, make a reputation, win a research grant. If pressed for wider significance, they believe their labours will contribute to human welfare. That is what geneticists are doing. But what is genetics doing? If scientists want credit for the potential benefits of genetics, how can they disclaim responsibility for its potential evils also? On the other hand, if they claim - as Lewis Wolpert does - that knowledge is value free, should they not distance themselves from the corporations who obviously think otherwise and who hire them for that reason?