Bad dream walking

Bad Dream Walking

BY NIGEL M. DE S. CAMERON

Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture

By Jon Turney

Yale University Press, 1998

276 pp., 16 pp. of illustrations

$30.00, cloth, ISBN: 0-300-07417-4

The image of Frankenstein hovers over the biotechnology of our day, and we gaze fascinated, horrified, and yet, excited.

For we are now within striking distance of attaining what was once merely a disturbing dream. In C.S. Lewis's prophetic words, man's final triumph over nature is upon us: his triumph over his own nature.

Turney's book gives us a history of the imaginative hold of Frankenstein down two centuries of popular engagement with science, a science that is only in our own day on the verge of being able to deliver what Mary Shelley distantly perceived. And it is an interesting tale, interwoven with the discoveries that, at point after point, have reminded us of Frankenstein along the way.

So we have "the baby of the century," Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, herald of our new capacity to control our procreative process, which has been appropriately relabeled "reproduction" (the copyshop word). We have "gene wars," as recombinant DNA technology has exploded and confronted public policy with extraordinary challenges. We have the cloning of mammals, with its ready application to humanity. And, as we all know, this is just for starters.

Of course, the connections of fiction and science and policy are not incidental. In a democracy, the popular imagination is finally the arbiter of the parameters of science. Science fictionof which Frankenstein is, of course, an early case-has presented the questions and given us time to reflect, long before the announcements on page 1 of the Washington Post. Brave New World with its vision of the in vitro society, and Gattaca with its genetic determinism, have thrown down the gauntlet, following in the example of Frankenstein, the quintessential warning of what science will do unless we determine otherwise.

However, as we look around us, the situation is far from encouraging. The fascination with the possibilities of technologyeven if it begins as the fascination of the horrible-is exerting its own most potent influence on the mind of our day.

Indeed, the huge social and human cost of some of the possibilities is discounted with a depressing ease. Human cloning offers the best and quite the most depressing example.

Turney summarizes the discussion of spring '97 as editorialists and scientists alike raised their hands in horror at the prospect of applying this technology to human beings. Yet here we are, eighteen months later, and in the United States we are as far as we could be from a measured public policy response.

Popular opinion and most political opinion want a ban on this scourge before one human clone is born. But biotech lobbying has seriously impeded congressional action, and the bioethics industry has engaged in its usual delaying tactics, arguing for a moratorium rather than a ban, and a moratorium on the birth of clone babies rather than on clone human embryos, and so on-essentially to allow the scientists to do what they want, and palliate public opinion while, as it surely will, it softens.

It is interesting to note that in Europesecular Europe, as we tend to think-an altogether more robust approach has been taken, with the Council of Europe's bioethics treaty amended to prevent cloning, and several nations (led by Germany) enacting statutory bans.

Which raises the deep-seated problems of a society cut loose from its moral moorings, fascinated by both technology and choice, and yet beset with anxiety. All in all, a chilling prospect. For while we don't want Frankenstein and his heirs, neither can we face telling the scientists there really are things we shall not let them do-for fear we might limit our choices and impair our sense of choice-centered dignity, which is all this secular society seems to be leaving us.

Turney's book ends with the suggestion that things may be helped by a greater sense that we can discriminate-that instead of saying "Yes" or "No" to Frankenstein, we can embrace the benefits of the technological cornucopia while saying "No thank you" to it burdens.

For those who think like that, the cloning case is not encouraging. It we cannot summon the will to say no to the photocopying of human beings, it is hard to have any confidence that there is anything that the biosciences can serve up that we shall be in any position to decline, Frankenstein himself included.

Mr. Cameron distinguished professor of theology and culture and senior vice president for university affairs at Trinity International University, is also chairman of the Bannockburn Institute and author of The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Sep 25, 1998
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