8/18/2019 The Biotechnology Culture Clash

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10 | SCIEN CE & TH EOLOGY N EW S |  J UN E 20 06

R e s e a r c h

By Lee M. Silver

In the year 2000, my family and I spent ninemonths traveling across Asia. Since then I havetraveled across most other areas of the wor ld,most recently sub-Saharan Africa, talking topeople about their spiritual beliefs and what theythink about biotechnology in particular. I will de-scribe my interpretations of what I saw and heard.

Differences in religious perspectivesIf you look at the national law/political climate of

embryonic research, you will notice three different areas: America, Europe (Mendocino, Calif., I include withEurope) and Asia. Asia, including Singapore, has a ver yliberal political climate when it comes to embryo researchin contrast to the other two regions. Conversely, you get a very different picture in Europe and America on geneti-cally engineered crops. In America you have positive na-

tional laws and political climate for genetically modified(GM) crops, whereas Europeans reject GM crops. And in Asia they accept GM. So you have these three differentcategorical responses to these two different technologies.Europe and America are essentially inverse, but Asia ac-cepts everything.

 All of Western culture is influenced greatly by Judeo-Christianity. The general idea we learn as children is thatthere is a master of the universe and there is a masterplan. That’s what directs our future. If you reject thechurch, it is not uncommon, judging from people I havetalked to, to transfer this belief in a higher power froma material God in the sky to the material Earth below.Mother Nature becomes the master of the universe witha master plan, which is what has happened in Europe.

Some polls show that 78 percent of Americans believein a Christian version of God as presented in the Bible.

Europe has become very different in its religious beliefs,in a very specific way. The number of people who havetraditional Christian beliefs and attend church is way, way down. Instead, what is rising is a belief in a higherpower. And so Europeans answered, “Yes” to the state-ment, “I don’t believe in a personal God, but I do believein a higher power of some kind.”

 Asian culture and traditions are completely differentfrom those in the West. Western spirits are discrete andstatic — you are given a soul, you die, you go to heaven asa distinct individual. On the other hand, Eastern spiritsevolve. The idea is that all spirits start off in the simplestorganism and then, during each life, a plant or animalgains karma. When the body grows old, the spirit leavesthe worn-out body behind and jumps into a new one. This is a very different perception of the world.

Human or not human

My colleague Robert George, a politics professor atPrinceton University and member of the President’sCouncil on Bioethics, says in The Clash of Orthodoxies:Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis : “The scientific evi-dence establishes the fact that each of us was from con-ception a human being. Science, not religion, vindicatesthis crucial premise of the pro-life claim.”

Is this really science? Or, is this just hidden theology?If early embryos are human beings, embryonic stem cellderivation is not only unethical, it’s murderous, because you’re taking a human being apart and growing cells outof it. If early embryos are just a bunch of cells, embryo

research is not really human research, it’s cell research.

I would call it “ethically innocuous” as opposed to murder.(See pages 19 – 26 for more trends in embryonic stemcell research.)

 The claimed scientific evidence works as follows: Atany moment during development, there’s no substantialchange in the biology of the organism. Development isa continuous process — we know that. If we look at ababy, and then step back a nanosecond, she wouldn’t besubstantially different. Then go back another nanosec-ond, and there’s no substantial change. It’s all continuouschange. If you accept that, then any cutoff for defin-ing human beings is arbitrary, because if you draw anabsolute line, on either side of that line are going to beorganisms that are substantially equivalent. Therefore,all lines are arbitrary. And since a baby is a human being,an embryo is also.

 The problem with this argument i s that it is basedon an unstated assumption. We instinctively believe

that a thing either is or is not a human being. We havethis either/or perception of life. And if something iseither a human being or not, then this argument stands,because any line you draw arbitrarily is going to separatetwo organisms that are biologically equivalent. So howcould one be a human being and the other one not be ahuman being?

The theology of embryos This assumption comes from an interpretation of

Genesis made by certain religious groups that strictlyfollow the Bible. Genesis 1:27 says, “God created manin His own image.” And that is interpreted by some asmeaning that God created man instantaneously. Therecan be no such thing as gradual creation, because then you have partial man, and man would not be in theimage of God. There is no such thing as a partial God.

God is absolute.Embryonic stem cells can develop into an actualperson. So, based on the definition of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, embryonic stem cells are equivalentto embryos. Yet based on the molecular signals that yougive the cells, the cells can change from embryonic tononembryonic and back to embryonic. You can do this very, very easily.

So then you can ask, “How many human beings arethere in a dish of embryonic stem cells?” If there are amillion cells in the dish, and you separate all the cells,then you have a million human beings. But you canthen put them back together to form a single organism. What happened to the 999,999 human beings? RobertGeorge would say they all died. Scientists would saythat this is not a scientific question, but a theologicalquestion. Science can’t answer the question because it istheological not scientific.

Genetically modified beliefsGenesis 1:28–29 says, “God gave man dominion

over every fish, bird, living creature and every seed-bear-ing plant.” What does that mean? It means that plantsand animals exist for our benefit and that belief extendsinto the idea that genetic modification of plants andanimals is not inherently unethical. It doesn’t mean that you might not worry about the effects on healthor the environment, but that you use rational cost-benefit analyses to determine the legitimacy of anyuse of the technology.

Six of the top 10 countr ies producing GM crops

in the year 2004 were in the Western Hemisphere, which is a very traditionally Chr istian hemisphere.Europe has rejected GM crops, and so has MendocinoCalif. China has rapidly advanced beyond the rest ofthe world.

 The European proclamations all say, “We want to pre-serve Mother Nature. We don’t want your American ge-netically modified crops. We don’t want to harm MotherNature.” Genetic engineering is seen as a violation ofMother Nature’s master plan.

 The Europeans I have talked to couldn’t care lessabout human embryos, but don’t touch their crops,they say. The problem with this picture is that it is 99percent artifice. There is almost nothing in Europe thatis natural. Take the Loire Valley in France, for example. The corn growing there comes from Mexico; it doesn’tbelong there. The weeds growing along the side of thefields weren’t growing there 1,000 years ago. They were

selected by nature because they are able to grow alongsidefields like that. None of the meadow trees were growing when Europe was forested — those trees can’t grow inthe forest. All of this happened because of agriculture. Wild cattle, wolves, bears and all the other wild animalsin Europe went extinct.

 Western spirits are tightly bound to the material, eithe Jesus or the Earth. Eastern spirits are detachable. I wentto cremation services all across India. The idea is that inthis process, the spirit is going up to heaven and comesback down into another organism. In Buddhism, there isno single God and no master plan. As a consequence, theidea of playing god is meaningless.

China, India and Singapore — which is so tiny thatpeople there don’t grow crops — upset the Westernmindset entirely. Singapore would grow crops if it could.But embryos are tiny and the country has a huge embryo

research effort going on. Moreover, they’re stealing a lotof scientists from America. A woman I met in Sumatra, Indonesia, calls hersel f

a Muslim, but her beliefs are purely Eastern. She saysthat she is reincarnated in her grandchildren. A quarterof her spirit goes into her grandchildren and otherquarter portions of their spirits come from the othergrandparents. And when I heard this, interpretedthrough her son, I realized that what she called spiritsI would call genes.

Playing god only makes sense in the context of thetraditional monotheism that prevails in America or thepost-Christian monotheism of Mother Nature commonin Europe. In Asian culture it doesn’t make sense, whichis the reason why there’s no grassroots opposition thereto either embryo research or genetically engineered crops Western humanitarians and environmentalists who op-pose the current reigning policies on biotechnology and

hope to benefit humanity and the environment need totake a place at the discussion table. It can happen only ifthey can separate subliminal spiritual beliefs from scien-tific evidence and theory. n

Lee M. Silver is a professor of molecular biology and publicaffairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and

 International Affairs at Princeton University.

This article is adapted from “Challenging Nature,” remarksdelivered at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken,

 N.J. Used with permission.

The biotechnology culture clashWhy East and West differ in response to genetic engineering and stem cell research

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