Genetic Engineering and Morality

“What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.”

— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Chapter 2

“My friends are toys. I make them. It’s a hobby. I’m a genetic designer.”

— J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson), Blade Runner, 1982

CALL ME A GEEK, BUT ONE OF THE GREAT HIGHLIGHTS of my 2007 was the night in December when I finally got to see a favorite film of mine on the silver screen at the biggest and best cinematic venue I know of, Baltimore’s historic Senator Theatre…

That film: The “Final Cut” of Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi/noir classic Blade Runner.

Blade Runner is a favorite of mine for a bunch of reasons. First, it’s the finest example I’ve ever seen of the seamless integration of script and cinematography. Unlike with so many others of the science fiction genre, the special effects — though incredible for their time and for the budget from which they were created — don’t overpower the story, but complement it in a sublime symphony of storytelling excellence.

In fact, Blade Runner’s symbiosis of story and effect is so elaborate and well-conceived that it almost literally transports you to a future America that seems as plausible and palpable as the hustle, bustle and daily grind you left outside the theater. The primary reason for this isn’t Ridley Scott’s renowned movie-making wizardry, which has given us such indelible classics as Alien, Gladiator and what is almost universally acknowledged as one of the greatest commercials of all time — Apple’s famous “1984” Super Bowl ad for the then-new Macintosh computer…

In my opinion, it’s because of co-screenwriters’ Hampton Fancher and David Peoples’ inspired and ingenious re-envisioning of the equally ingenious source material: Sci-fi master Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Beyond being an intense, nuanced, visually arresting, near-perfectly realized exercise of the cinematic art (I believe it’s filmmaker Scott’s high-watermark as a director thus far), what truly makes Blade Runner great is its uncannily prophetic story.

A story that becomes more relevant with every passing day.

The Blade Runner Prophecies

Blade Runner is set in the year 2019, in Los Angeles. For those of you who don’t know the story, it’s basically a cop drama about a police assassin whose job it is to track down and kill genetically engineered and organically manufactured super-humans (called replicants) on Earth. Replicants are superior to ordinary people in strength and at least equal in intelligence — and are indistinguishable from the natural-born without detailed tests of emotional responses. Bred for slave labor, combat or dangerous jobs in the “off-world colonies,” replicants are illegal on Earth, under penalty of death…

This fact does not stop some of them from coming to Earth incognito. Enter assassin Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford at the peak of his early fame). He’s semi-retired, but pressured back into service by his old boss to eliminate an especially deadly group of four replicants who’ve returned to Earth bent on infiltrating the company that manufactured them, the Tyrell Corporation, in hopes of finding a way to extend their lives beyond their built-in four-year life spans…

The movie illustrates how this infiltration attempt plays out (violently), how these replicants struggle with their own mortality and emotional under-development, how Deckard “retires” these pseudo-humans and comes to grips with the guilt of killing them — and deals with the fact that he may indeed be a replicant himself…

It’s a great story, and extraordinarily well told. But what’s so prophetic about the movie isn’t the plotline so much as the vision of 2019 America that Dick, Fancher, Peoples and Scott created during Blade Runner’s production in the early 1980s. In their Los Angeles of 37 years later:

• The language spoken on the street is not English, but a mish-mosh of several languages. The floating sky-billboards alternate the languages they entice people with, and generally feature Asian-looking faces. Most of the people seen on the street are non-whites. Ethnic foods, especially Asian varieties like sushi, seem to be the kinds most consumed. These things imply a huge, unchecked influx of immigrants into the U.S., and an aggressively globalized economy — with resulting changes in the culture…
• The L.A. cityscape is vast and towering. It’s a dirty, gritty mix of industrial structures, futuristic architecture and dilapidated old apartment buildings. The night sky is illuminated violently with flaming natural gas blow-off from high discharge stacks. Also, it’s almost constantly raining. Clearly, the U.S. (and presumably, the world) is still dependant on fossil fuels for much of its energy, and the global climate has changed as a result…
• If the size, prominence and extravagance of their corporate headquarters is any indication, one of the most influential and profitable businesses in Los Angeles is the Tyrell Corporation — manufacturers of 100% organic, genetically engineered replicants (and other man-made duplicate organisms, the script implies). Their motto is “More Human than Human.” It seems that a sizeable amount of people are employed in this industry, or subcontracted by the Tyrell Corporation…

Clearly, Blade Runner’s masterminds spent considerable time and effort to imagine what the U.S. would be like in four decades time. And judging by where we are in 2008, they’re not far from the mark on a lot of things: Globalization, immigration, America’s changing cultural identity, climate change theory and the rise of genetic engineering.

It’s this last element, genetic engineering, that I want talk about a bit more today…

Children of a Transgressor “God”

In Blade Runner, the replicants locate and force one of the Tyrell Corporation’s genetic engineers, J.F. Sebastian, to arrange a meeting with the company’s master designer and patriarch, Dr. Eldon Tyrell. What transpires at that meeting, I won’t spoil here. But what I will mention is what Sebastian has surrounded himself with in his own home. Being a genetic designer, Sebastian has created a spacious apartment full of genetically aberrant pseudo-humans whose only purpose in life is to amuse and befriend him…

They’re like pets. And they are engineered not to be free of defect — but to be more entertaining or endearing than typical humans byvirtue of their defects. They are abnormally sized, have abnormal voices and mannerisms, and are clearly less intelligent and coordinated than typical humans. Sebastian dresses them up in cute little costumes, teaches them to say trite catchphrases in greeting as he comes home from work each day, and poses them around his home like stuffed animals.

This, in my opinion, is the most terrifyingly prophetic aspect of Blade Runner: The notion that needy, greedy, maladjusted, corrupt, agenda-driven or just plain lonely people could one day implement the awesome power of genetic creation on a whim and without due concern for its ramifications — like a kid who finds his dad’s pistol in the bedside table and shoots up the neighborhood just to hear it go “bang.”

Think this couldn’t happen? Think the sole purpose of human genetic engineering science is to accelerate evolution, prevent chromosomal imperfections, ensure better health and eradicate disease? Think we humans are too moral and noble of spirit to intentionally create less-than-perfect children?

Think again.

Right now, in the U.K., a pair of deaf-rights organizations — the Royal National Institute for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People and the British Deaf Association — are lobbying to give deaf prospective parents (and presumably, hearing parents as well) the right to genetically engineer deaf children. Their efforts are focused on amending a bill currently passing through the legislative process in the House of Lords, the Human Tissue and Embryos Bill, which currently would prohibit the screening of embryos for the purpose of choosing one with an abnormality. According to the U.K.’s The Sunday Times, a broader coalition of organizations representing people with disabilities will also begin campaigning for this amendment to the bill, starting this month.

This kind of stuff isn’t just happening in merry old England, either. According to an Associated Press report from December 21, 2006, 3% of the 137 surveyed U.S. clinics that offer genetic embryo screening have provided the service to families intent on creating disabilities in their children…

The arguments on both sides of this issue are, in their own ways, persuasive. And they starkly illustrate just how slippery a slope human genetic engineering will be in the future. Groups that support the right of parents to choose disabilities in their children are concerned that the genetic eradication of conditions like dwarfism or deafness would be tantamount to the eradication of valuable cultural identities — and would weaken the bond parents and kids with similar disabilities share. And they’re right, sort of…

Opponents of giving parents the ability to choose disabled children say it subverts the cardinal rule of medicine — to heal, not harm. They equate the practice to the intentional crippling of kids. And they’re right, too.

Consider this as well: If the engineering of disabilities becomes OK at the genetic level before birth, how would this be any different from the infliction of the same disabilities after birth? If, say, deafness or blindness were to somehow become the right of parents to design into their kids at the embryonic level, wouldn’t it also be their right to simply wait until the child is born, then deafen it with repeated gunshots close to the ears — or blind it by poking its eyes out? Other than a little pain, what’s the difference? Kids live through circumcision, right?

Arguably, most forms of post-birth disabling would be better than genetically engineering the same thing. Unlike embryonic screening, post-birth deafening or blinding of a child, for example, would be 100% reliable — and it would surely be a lot cheaper than paying $15,000 or more for gen-gineering procedures…

Which would mean more money left over to make a kid’s home deaf- or blind-friendly!

Also, when would the Statute of Limitations end on disabling kids? If a single father, for example, were to be deafened by an explosion at work, could he then come home and deafen his nine-year-old daughter to buttress his own cultural identity or/and strengthen his family unit?

Beyond this, if the right to genetically design children were to reside wholly with parents, what would stop some maladjusted parents (see also Spears, Britney ) from designing kids that are entirely dependant on them? If parents with low self-esteem see the nurturing of their children as a way to validate their own lives or restore their own sense of worth, what better way to ensure a lifetime of this than to create a mentally or motor-challenged child that can never leave the nest?

Extrapolations and suppositions (absurd or otherwise) aside, someone’s going to be playing God here any way you cut it. Either the government and medical establishment will do it by determining where the lines are in terms of what “designer” features we can and can’t build into our children — or disabled parents will by creating kids in their own defective images, or for their own sick validation…

Bottom Lines: Is it fair to children to engineer them deaf, blind, dwarfed or otherwise challenged to ensure the survival of their parents’ cultural identity? Is it fair to children if they’re intentionally bred inferior as therapy for, or enablement of, their parents’ neuroses?

But here’s the most disturbing aspect to this equation: As scary as offering the power of genetic engineering to parents might be, it could become even more dicey to invest the government with that authority…

Grave New World

In Aldous Huxley’s classic 1932 novel Brave New World, the vast majority of people (those who are part of the World State) are sterile, marriage and parenting and family are obsolete among them and children are purpose-bred and lab-reared by the government to meet society’s needs. In the World State, there are five classes of genetically engineered humans. In descending order of intelligence, they are: Alphas, betas, gammas, deltas and epsilons. Each has their own skill set and societal roles that suit it (alphas are the thinkers, epsilons the menial laborers) — and everyone is medicated by the government into blissful acceptance of their place in the scheme of things.

Here’s why I mention this: No matter how much moralizing we do here in America, human gen-gineering is coming to this world. It is already here in the form of “prenatal health screenings” — and it won’t be long before more and more of the traits of our children will be things we can decide for them. So let’s think down the road a bit…

Let’s say that by 2019, we can more or less order our children from a catalog. A couple can provide the DNA raw materials, and science can add positive traits, subtract negative traits, dial up intelligence, build in immunity and splice in hair color, eye color, height, metabolic rate, sexual preference, etc. Now, how many people in this brave new Utopia would opt for average, natural kids instead of gen-gineered, hyper-smart, disease-proof “super-kids?”

Not many, I’m betting.

And that means that over the span of a single generation, the natural Darwinistic Yin and Yang between bright and dim, strong and weak, hardy and vulnerable, beautiful and plain people would be unnaturally skewed to the “perfect” side of the spectrum. Instead of an America in which people run the gamut of all shapes, sizes, appeals and skill sets to fit every job and need in our society — from physicist to ditch-digger — we’ll have a glut of smart, fit, hardy, beautiful people perfectly suited to the most intellectually high-minded work, and a dearth of those suited to more menial, yet no less necessary, posts.

The dirty little secret of American society is that no matter how much rhetoric about opportunity and achievement our schools, parents, after-school specials, movies, therapists and self-help gurus sling at us, the brutal reality is that we need only so many supermodels, professors, lawyers, doctors, artists and Supreme Court Justices. For every one of these, we must need 100 ditch-diggers, pipe-fitters, welders, bricklayers, car mechanics, farmhands, cabbies, truckers and port-a-pot cleaner-outers. The vast majority of jobs and duties in America (and in any country, for that matter) fall on the less desirable, least glamorous and modestly remunerative side of the spectrum…

There are two very likely ways these needs would be met in a future America of lopsidedly perfect people: We’d either import an underclass to do these things for us (we’re already doing this), or we’d regulate who can have what kinds of kids — a la` Brave New World. Or both.

Bottom line: If we’re not mindful of how we apply this inevitable human genetic engineering technology, we’ll end up handing the government the power to tell US what kind of kids we’ll be having, based on societal needs.

Like the Office of the Handicapper General in Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, we could end up with the Department of Equity in Breeding, or some such. Like applying for credit or a loan, maybe we’ll have to prove our suitability before we can order up our perfect bundles of joy. Or maybe there will be a Breeding Lottery, and we’ll have to be happy giving birth and raising whatever kind of kid we pick. Becoming parents — and being happy and grateful to the state for whatever kind of child they allow us to have — could simply become one more duty of a Proper Citizen, like paying taxes.

Think I’m being absurd with all this? Keep reading…

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, NEW Fish

If you think the urge to tamper with nature isn’t pervasive among humans, consider what we do to ourselves in the name of individuality. We dye and curl our hair, trowel on makeup, pierce our skin, wear contact lenses (in colors, no less), tattoo ourselves — and go under the knife for bigger boobs, trimmer bellies and slimmer noses. We spend endless hours and countless dollars shopping for clothes, shoes and makeup to further enhance and call attention to our uniqueness. We do the same thing with our cars and homes. We customize them, because we aren’t happy with them as they are…

Don’t misunderstand me here — I’m not being critical of this tendency toward the improvement of all things. I do these kinds of things, too. We all do. I’m simply saying that it’s human nature to modify one’s self and one’s possessions (a lot of people view kids as these) to more closely fit some inner ideal of ME-ness. Do you really think we would resist this tendency when it comes to our children? Look at how we name our kids; many couples intentionally pick odd or unique names — or even make them up — to give their children a head-start toward individuality…

Do you really think parents — had they the power — wouldn’t do the same with how a kid looks? Do you really think you wouldn’t see young punk-rocker parents designing babies with hot-pink hair? Do you really think you wouldn’t see bodybuilding types lumbering down the street with blockish, sculpted kids trundling after them?

For those of you with doubts that this all is coming, consider the GloFish.

Marketed in the U.S. since December 2003, GloFish are genetically modified zebrafish (native to India and Bangladesh). By inserting genes from jellyfish, sea corals and other sources into the zebrafish’s genome, designers of the GloFish have succeeded in making them glow brightly in green, red and orange. The FDA, after study and risk assessment, found no public health reason to regulate these fish beyond what regulations are in place for normal zebrafish. Yes, they can breed — and yes, they continue to be strong sellers…

Also, consider the case of LifeStyle Pets — a new line of genetically modified, hypo-allergenic cats and dogs. All the pleasure, none of the sneezing.

Perhaps coming soon to a pet store near you: GloDogs — harder to lose and easier for cars to avoid…

Maybe soon thereafter: GloKids?

Trying to be brave in a grave new world,

Jim Amrhein
Freedoms Editor
February 1, 2008