Abstract
Much has happened in the years since I wrote much of the previous Chapters, especially in the world of health care, medicine in particular but even more in medical and bio-medical research. The latter, indeed, is substantially responsible for many of the significant changes in clinical practice, diagnosis and prognosis in recent times. On reflection, it remains somewhat unclear to me that these changes, such as they may be, will also alter the moral themes and basic approach of the preceding Chapters. But since so much has in fact happened, it seemed to me only appropriate to include the following reflections on what had come to be known early in the past two decades as the ‘new genetics’ (Zaner RM, Visions and re-visions: life and the accident of birth. In: Baillie HW, Casey TK (eds) Is human nature obsolete? Genetics, bioengineering, and the future of the human condition. MIT Press, Boston, pp 177–207, 2004).
This Chapter, first developed as a presentation for the University of Scranton conference, ‘Genetic Engineering and the Future of Human Nature,’ April 6–8, 2001, was later revised and published. The present version is a revision of those papers.
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Notes
- 1.
Langdon Winner, “Resistance is Futile: the Posthuman Condition and Its Advocates.” In Harold W. Baillie and Timothy K. Casey (Eds.). Is Human Nature Obsolete? Genetics, Bioengineering, and the Future of the Human Condition. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2004, pp. 385–310.
- 2.
In 1986 congressman Markey released records detailing experiments by the U. S. government between 1940 and 1971.
- 3.
Note: all citations in the text are from this edition of Mawer’s novel.
- 4.
Among other features, such dwarfs exhibit a large skull, with a narrow foramen magnum, and relatively small skull base. The vertebral bodies are short and flattened with relatively large intervertebral disk height, and there is congenitally narrowed spinal canal. It is caused by a change in the DNA for fibroblast growth factor receptor 3 (FGFR3), which causes an abnormality of cartilage formation and such dwarfs are thus of short stature. The cause is either a sporadic mutation or is an autosomal dominant disorder.
- 5.
Another novel well worth taking quite as seriously as Mawer’s is Katherine Dunn (1983). Dunn lays out precisely these variations of anomaly, personality and values among the children deliberately conceived by their parents to be freaks.
- 6.
A microbiologist, Rheinberger is also Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
- 7.
Subsequent citations from this article are cited textually.
- 8.
Despite the apparent promise of such new potential therapies as individually designed treatments utilizing a patient’s own immune system.
- 9.
The distrust is open in, for instance, Leon Kass’ rejection of human cloning (Kass 1997).
- 10.
Itself a stark reminder of what Edmund Husserl pointed out at the very beginning of the twentieth century in his 1910 essay in the journal, Logos: “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” (Husserl 1965).
- 11.
“The Indomitable Rachel Bittman,” a story, in Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas 10 (2013–2014), pp. 68–79, preceded by “Why I Write”.
- 12.
In particular, the potentially lethal consequences from alien viruses and bacteria.
- 13.
I have used a neologism to capture this complexity: complexure.
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Zaner, R.M. (2015). Visions and Re-visions: Life and the Accident of Birth. In: A Critical Examination of Ethics in Health Care and Biomedical Research. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 60. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18332-9_9
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