The clone wars: A reason online debate

Reason, June, 2002 by Gregory Stock, Francis Fukuyama

We slow the progress of science today for all sorts of ethical reasons. Biomedicine could advance much faster if we abolished our rules on human experimentation in clinical trials, as Nazi researchers did, and allowed doctors to deliberately inject infectious substances into their subjects. Today we enforce rules permitting the therapeutic use of drugs like Ritalin, while prohibiting their use for enhancement or entertainment.

The argument that these technologies will simply move to more favorable jurisdictions if they are banned in any one country may or may not carry weight; it all depends on what they are and what the purpose of the regulation is. I regard a ban on reproductive cloning to be analogous to current legislation banning incest, which is based on a similar mix of safety and ethical considerations. The purpose of such a ban would not be undermined if a few rich people could get themselves cloned outside the country. In any event, the world seems to be moving rather rapidly toward a global ban on reproductive cloning. The fact that the Chinese may not be on board shouldn't carry much weight; the Chinese also involuntarily harvest organs from executed prisoners and are hardly an example we would want to emulate.

I don't think that a set of regulations designed to focus future biomedicine on therapeutic rather than enhancement purposes constitutes oppressive state intervention or goes so far beyond the realm of what is done today that we can declare its final failure in advance. By Greg Stock's reasoning, since rules against doping in athletic competitions don't work 100 percent of the time, we should throw them out altogether and have our athletes compete not on the basis of their natural abilities but on the basis of who has the best pharmacologist. I'd rather watch and participate in competitions of the old-fashioned kind.

Biotech Tyranny

Banning enhancement would be massively invasive

Gregory Stock

I HAVE NO PROBLEM with attempts to address serious externalities that arise from otherwise harmless personal activities. But if government does not bear a heavy burden of proof when justifying such intrusions into our lives, it can employ vague arguments about social harm to take away our basic freedoms. Francis Fukuyama would push us toward just such intrusions by erecting a powerful regulatory structure charged with ensuring the ethical and social desirability of future technologies.

Fukuyama is so suspicious of change in general and new technology in particular that he won't even acknowledge the desirability of allowing people to use safe and beneficial interventions that would almost certainly improve their lives. He will admit only that if a technology is "safe, cheap, effective, and highly desirable," government "probably [my emphasis] should not try" to stop it. If he won't even embrace technologies that meet this high threshold, he would never allow the far more problematic possibilities of the real world. But facing such possibilities is precisely what has improved our health and raised our standard of living so greatly during the last century.