Dialogue: Beating back the forces of nature

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

One of the most curious and spurious arguments mounted by those who are philosophically opposed to genetic engineering is that it is not natural.

From the moment our forebears lifted their knuckles from the ground and had a look around, they thought the horizon looked pretty exciting.

Since then, they have been using their hands and minds to expand the serious limitations imposed by nature.

Civilisation is a construct of humankind, an elaborate and comprehensive edifice that has grown inch by inch over millions of years as men and women - unlike the amoeba, the duck-billed platypus and the chimpanzee - refused to accept that eating, procreating and dying are enough to make this world worth the visit.

And it's not only the Pakeha New-Agers and assorted nature worshippers who are ridiculously insisting that some incomprehensible natural way of living is healthier and more spiritual than the civilised.

I detect - and it's brave of me to say so - a strong whiff of sanctimony and phony superstition almost every time Maori leaders challenge science on the grounds of cultural and spiritual integrity.

Like the Scots, the Poms et al, their forebears were using all their considerable practical and intellectual resources to beat back the forces of nature and make their lives longer, more comfortable and more fun.

I chuckle every time I read about the nudists, who call themselves naturists, getting their gear off for sun-worshipping good health, baring their backsides to the carcinogenic rays of the sun. Melanoma Incorporated.

I'm reminded of a visit 15 years ago to a remote village in Malaysia in which a pygmy jungle people had been resettled because loggers were destroying the forest.

An American woman, taking copious notes, kept questioning them, through an interpreter, about their natural cures - the leaves they crushed, the saps they drank and the roots they ground and ingested for medicinal purposes. I'm sure they were making things up to keep her excitement high and, when she asked them what they took for headaches, I couldn't resist saying: "They send to town for some aspirin."

She looked at me with the withering contempt that is the defence unreasoning believers reserve for sceptics.

The fact that these people lived a few brief years of vigour between puberty and about 25 before they shrank, withered and died in their 30s seemed irrelevant to this woman, who blindly pursued the wonders of the natural life.

The freedom to pursue knowledge is precious and has been impeded many times over the centuries by ignorance and superstition, fuelled by fear. The main cause for concern is not science, but the use society makes of its discoveries.

If the world blows up in a nuclear holocaust, it won't be Ernest Rutherford or his successors who will be to blame, but ignorant sociopaths, blinded by hate.

The big GM danger is that commercial corporations are driven not so much by the curiosity that makes human beings so marvellous but by the profits that can make them so mean.

Thus the job of the Government is not to curb the curiosity of scientists but to put in place mechanisms that will carefully monitor the direction and progress of research to ensure it does not have unintended side-effects. It seems to me that is what the royal commission sensibly aimed to achieve.

The Greens would be better advised to watch carefully the application of these rules, and to ensure widespread consideration of the ethical issues involved in progress, rather than blindly and unilaterally deciding on your behalf and mine what is good knowledge and what is bad by self-righteously disrupting experiments.

Let's proceed with common sense and in good order towards a world in which our grandchildren and their grandchildren will have pushed back further the boundaries imposed by nature, and live longer, fuller and healthier lives.

And remember that neat little verse?

Please, folks, don't grieve for Adam and Eve,
Getting kicked out of the garden.
It was their defiance, of God not of science,
That made their ambition harden.

A garden for two, to just bill and coo,
In boring, nay, stupefied joy,
Could never have doused curiosity roused
By an ardent young girl and her boy.

The lush knowledge tree that first set them free,
Started them using their minds;
Science was in, competing with sin,
And enriching the world with its finds.