Dialogue: Tinkering with life frightens me rigid

By GARTH GEORGE

If anything puts the fear of God into me, it's genetic engineering, not so much of plants or animals but of human beings. So the latest announcement from the Human Genome Project that it has deciphered the human genetic code, what it calls the "Book of Life" - and thus opened up a whole new string of possibilities in human engineering - is almost too ghastly to contemplate.

It's not that it isn't a fantastic scientific achievement, right up there with splitting the atom, it's what scientists will do with the knowledge once they've figured it out that scares me.

As Auckland University's senior lecturer in medical ethics, Dr John Crosthwaite, so aptly pointed out last week, history has shown humans' propensity for "tinkering" without realising where it can lead.

And when it comes to tinkering with human life, the possibilities of the results of that tinkering being put to what Dr Crosthwaite calls "amorally inadvisable" use are immense and frightening.

Already there is talk of being able to create designer people, of changing hereditary patterns, of making it possible for parents to choose their unborn child's traits - temperaments, body build, stature and cognitive abilities, for instance - from a genetic "parts list."

President Bill Clinton greeted the Human Genome Project's announcement thus: "Today we are learning the language in which God created life." At least he had the gumption to concede that God did create life, but that's where my problem begins.

The Bible (which, incidentally, is and always has been the only real "book of life") tells me that "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."

(And I stake my reputation on the proposition that he didn't need to experiment with a whole heap of monkeys before he perfected us, either.) Note that man became a "living soul." That I take to mean that God provided us with a temporary vehicle in which the indestructible soul could live for a time on this Earth - in other words, a body and a mind to drive it.

And it seems that do to so he engineered a specification containing 3.1 billion sub-units of DNA, which is what the Human Genome Project has unravelled - well, partly anyway.

Because the most interesting thing about the whole business is that the scientists admit that they have figured out only 97 per cent of the human specification - only 85 per cent of it accurately - and researchers concede that there are gaps which may be impossible to fill.

I strongly suspect that they're right and that the 3 per cent they're missing will ever remain indecipherable to science because it is not human but divine and known only to the creator, a spark of himself that is and has been implanted in every human being ever born.

There is no doubt in my mind that as the research continues - and apparently there are decades if not centuries of work still to be done - scientists will do their damndest to create a "perfect" human being, irrespective of any ethical objections that might be offered or of the size or volume of objections raised.

In any scientific community - as we have seen with the cloning of plants and animals - there will be some for whom the only meaning in life is to push the frontiers of knowledge beyond their limits, and others for whom making vast profits from that knowledge is irresistible.

No law can stop them. These modern-day Frankensteins, often bankrolled by big business which is by nature amoral, can pretty much do what they like. It is not a matter of if, but only of when, one or a group of them will try to create a human being.

The results of that are almost too horrific to contemplate, for science will never concede that there is more to human life than a string of units of DNA, that there is an element to humanity that is indecipherable because it originates from divinity.

And scientists who immerse themselves in genetic research with the aim of creating the perfect human being will be the last to admit that men and women are much more than just the most highly evolved animals, that we all have within us an indefinable element that makes every one of us what we are - absolutely one-off.

As God told us himself: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. For as the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts."

And that includes the ways and the thoughts of genetic tinkerers.

garth_george@herald.co.nz