Christians and the genome project

Health Progress, Jul/Aug 2002 by Verhey, Allen

Scripture Can Help Us Chart a Moral Path through the New Genetic Sciences

But where shall wisdom be found?" asks Job (Jb 28:12). His question is wonderfully pertinent to the conundrums posed by the new genetic sciences. In this article, I suggest that Scripture offers wisdom to guide Christian discernment concerning the things that should be done-and not done-in genetics so that we human beings might "glorify God in our bodies" (1 Cor 6:20) and in the human genome itself

MAPPING THE HGP CULTURALLY

GENETIC REDUCTIONISM

Before turning to Scripture, however, I want to consider what sometimes passes for wisdom in our culture. Consider the rhetoric surrounding the Human Genome Project (HGP), for example. Writers frequently describe the HGP as unlocking the "secret of life" or the "code of codes," suggesting that the mapping of the genome has made human life completely, entirely comprehensible. But this is genetic reductionism. It is the way of folly, not wisdom.

Walter Gilbert, a Nobel laureate in genetics, has plausibly predicted that someday each of us will carry a compact disk containing his or her genetic code.1 But the HGP's achievement in mapping and sequencing the genes does not give us what Gilbert called "the ultimate answer to the [ancient] commandment "know thyself.'"2 Indeed, not even the body (let alone the mind and spirit) may be reduced to genes; a genotype is not to be confused with a phenotype. Human beings have histories, not just genetic fates.

One need not read Scripture to recognize the folly of reductionism. What is it, after all, that the HGP maps? Not the human person, not the human body, not even "the human genome." There is no such thing as the human genome. The HGP's leaders themselves have reminded us that genes differ from person to person. The project's aim is to publish the average or "consensus" sequence of 200 different people. But that will provide a map neither of everyone nor of anyone in particular. "Variation," as one writer has noted, "is an inherent and integral part of the human-or indeed any-genome."3

Consider the genetic determinism that accompanies such reductionism. Its folly is displayed in the contradiction such determinism almost always invokes. On one hand, it denies human freedom, insisting that human beings are totally determined by their DNA. On the other hand, it insists that human beings are free-so free they can control their DNA, their own nature, and their evolutionary future.4

In rejecting genetic reductionism, we do not reject the study of genetics. What we reject is the claim that the map of the human genome is also a map of human significance. We acknowledge that some other map (or maps) is necessary for that. No great wisdom is required for one to reject genetic reductionism and determinism, but we cannot hope for wisdom unless we do reject them.

THE "BACONIAN PROJECT"

One possible map of human significance can be drawn from the writing of Francis Bacon, the great 17th-century thinker. Bacon agreed with Thomas Aquinas that human knowledge can be divided into the "speculative" and the "practical." However, he did not agree that both kinds were, as Aquinas said, "good."5 Bacon rejected the speculative sciences as the mere "boyhood of knowledge" and "barren of works."6 Western culture has followed Bacon in honoring practical knowledge, for which it reserves the term science.

Gerald McKenney, discussing what he calls the "Baconian Project," argues that the HGP is a practical science in that it, like Bacon, is oriented toward "the relief of human subjection to fate or necessity."7 Such a goal sounds commendable enough, and is surely commonplace in the modern world. But it is the path of folly.

The modern world agrees with Bacon that, for knowledge to be beneficial, humanity must "perfect and govern it in charity."8 Unfortunately, as Hans Jonas notes, science is "not self-sufficiently the source of that human quality that makes it beneficial."9 The modern world has forgotten what Aquinas knew: that theory (the speculative sciences) provides the wisdom necessary for using the practical sciences appropriately. Where is one to look for wisdom if the speculative sciences are jettisoned? The compassion that responds viscerally urges us to do something in response to suffering, but it will not tell us what thing to do. The Baconian confidence in technology says that to relieve suffering we should reach for the nearest tool or the latest technique. The Baconian Project arms compassion with artifice, not with wisdom. For wisdom to guide charity, science must call on something else. But on what? And how, in Bacon's account, can humanity have "knowledge" of it?

Bacon sought "practical" knowledge in the confidence that it would render humanity "capable of overcoming the difficulties and obscurities of nature" and that it would "endow the human family with new mercies."10 The Baconian Project sets humanity not only over nature but also against it. In the Baconian view, the natural order and natural processes have no value of their own; their value is reduced to their utility to humanity. And nature does not serve humanity "naturally," in the Baconian view. In fact, nature threatens to rule and ruin humanity. The fault that runs through our world and through our lives must finally, in the Baconian view, be located in nature. Nature may be-must be-mastered. Technology will be the faithful savior.