The Ethics of Biotechnology

Gaymon Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000152012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Ethics in Medicine

The essays collected in this volume provide students of ethics with essential tools for making sense of emerging biotechnical capacities and the turbulent power relations these capacities are bringing into the world. Unlike previous reference works in bioethics, which focus on specific domains of human activity (such as genetic research or biomedicine), this volume directs students' attention to the underlying cultural and institutional forces that shape how biotechnologists approach the world, and teaches students how to weigh the ethical significance of these forces. This innovative approach to the ethics of biotechnology, detailed in the volume's introduction, equips students to track the dynamic interplay of biology, digital technology and the high-tech economy which is remaking the living world today and the human relation to it.

Part I:Artificiality and industry: Biotechnology between the possible and the actual

1 SCIENCE Evolution and Tinkering

DOI:10.4324/9781003075035-1

François Jacob

Some of the 16th-century books devoted to zoology and botany are illustrated by superb drawings of the various animals that populate the earth. Certain contain detailed descriptions of such creatures as dogs with fish heads, men with chicken legs, or even women without heads. The notion of monsters that hlend the characteristics of different species is not itself surprising: everyone has imagined or sketched such hybrids. What is disconcerting today is that in the 16th century these creatures belonged, not to the world of fantasies, but to the real world. Many people had seen them and described them in detail The monsters walked alongside the familiar animals of everyday life. They were within the limits of the possible.

When looking at present-day science fiction books, one is struck by the same phenomenon: the abominable animals that hunt the poor astronaut lost on a distant planet are products of recombinations between the organisms living on the earth. The creatures coming from outer space to explore the earth are depicted in the likeness of man. You can watch them emerging from their unidentified flying objects (UFO’s); they are vertebrates, mammals without any doubt, walking erect. The only variations concern body size and the number of eyes. Generally these creatures have larger skulls than humans, to suggest bigger brains, and sometimes one or two radioantennae on the head, to suggest very sophisticated sense organs. The surprising point here again is what is considered possible, ft is the idea, more than a hundred years after Darwin, that, if life occurs anywhere, it is bound to produce animals not too different from the terrestrial ones; and above all to evolve something like man.

The interest in these monsters is that they show how a culture handles the possible and marks its limits. It is a requirement of the human brain to put order in the universe. It seems fair to say that all cultures have more or less succeeded in providing their members with a unified and coherent view of the world and of the forces that run it. One may disagree with the explanatory systems offered by myths or magic, but one cannot deny them unity and coherence. In fact, they are often charged with too much unity and coherence because of their capacity to explain anything by the same simple argument. Actually, despite their differences, whether mythic, magic, or scientific, all explanatory systems operate on a common principle. ïn the words of the physicist Jean Perrin, the heart of the problem is always “to explain the complicated visible by some simple invisible” (1). A thunderstorm can be viewed as a consequence of Zeus’ anger or of a difference of potential between the clouds and the earth. A disease can be seen as the result of a spell cast on the patient or of an infection by a virus. In all cases, however, one watches the visible effect of some hidden cause related to the whole set of invisible forces that are supposed to run the world.

The World View of Science

Whether mythic or scientific, the view of the world that man constructs is always largely a product of imagination. For the scientific process does not consist simply in observing, in collecting data, and in deducing from them a theory, One can watch an object for years and never produce any observation of scientific interest. To produce a valuable observation, one has first to have an idea of what to observe, a preconception of what is possible. Scientific advances often come from uncovering a hitherto unseen aspect of things as a result, not so much of using some new instrument, but rather of looking at objects from a different angle. This look is necessarily guided by a certain idea of what the so-called reality might be. It always involves a certain conception about the unknown, that is, about what lies beyond that which one has logical or experimental reasons to believe. In the words of Peter Medawar, scientific investigation begins by the “invention of a possible world or of a tiny fraction of that world” (2). So also begins mythical thought. But it stops there. Having constructed what it considers as the only possible world, it easily fits reality into its scheme. For scientific thought, instead, imagination is only a part of the game. At every step, it has to meet with experimentation and criticism. The best world is the one that exists and has proven to work already for a long time. Science attempts to confront the possible with the actual.

The price to be paid for this outlook, however, turned out to be high. It was, and is perhaps more than ever, renouncing a unified world view. This results from the very way science proceeds. Most other systems of explanation— mythic, magic, or religious—generally encompass everything. They apply to every domain. They answer any possible question. They account for the origin, the present, and the end of the universe. Science proceeds differently, it operates by detailed experimentation with nature and thus appears less amhitious, at least at first glance. It does not aim at reaching at once a complete and definitive explanation of the whole universe, its beginning, and its present form, Instead, it looks for partial and provisional answers about those phenomena that can be isolated and well defined. Actually, the beginning of modern science can be dated from the time when such general questions as, “How was the universe created? What is matter made of? What is the essence of life?” were replaced by such limited questions as “How does a stone fall? How does water flow in a tube? How does blood circulate in vessels?” This substitution had an amazing result. While asking general questions led to limited answers, asking limited questions turned out to provide more and more general answers.

At the same time, however, this scientific method could hardly avoid a parceling out of the world view. Each branch of science investigates a particular domain that is not necessarily connected with the neighboring ones. Scientific knowledge thus appears to consist of isolated islands. In the history of sciences, important advances often come from bridging the gaps. They result from the recognition that two hitherto separate observations can be viewed from a new angle and seen to represent nothing but different facets of one phenomenon. Thus, terrestrial and celestial mechanisms became a single science with Newton’s laws. Thermodynamics and mechanics were unified through statistical mechanics, as were optics and electromagnetism through Maxwell’s theory of magnetic field, or chemistry and atomic physics through quantum mechanics. Similarly different combinations of the same atoms, obeying the same laws, were shown by biochemists to compose both the inanimate and the living worlds.

The Hierarchy of Objects

Despite such generalizations, however, large gaps remain, some of which probably will not be bridged for a long time, if ever. Today, there exists a series of sciences that differ, not only by the nature of the objects that are studied, but also by the concepts and the language that are used. These sciences can be arranged in a certain order—physics, chemistry, biology, psychosociology— an order that corresponds to the hierarchy of complexity found in the objects of these sciences. Following the line from physics to sociology, one goes from the simpler to the more complex objects and also, for obvious reasons, from the older to the younger science, from the poorer to the richer empirical content, as well as from the harder to the softer system of hypotheses and experimentation. In order to obtain a unified world view through science, the question has repeatedly been raised as to the possibility of making bridges between adjacent disciplines. Because of the hierarchy of objects, the problem is always to explain the more complex in terms and concepts applying to the simpler. This is the old problem of reduction, emergence, whole and parts, and so forth, Is it possible to reduce chemistry to physics, biology to physics plus chemistry, and so forth? Clearly an understanding of the simple is necessary to understand the more complex, but whether it is sufficient is questionable.

This type of question has resulted in endless arguments. Obviously, the two critical events of evolution—first the appearance of Life and later that of thought and language—led to phenomena that previously did not exist on the earth. To describe and to interpret these phenomena, new concepts, meaningless at the previous level, are required. What can the notions of sexuality, of predator, or of pain represent in physics or chemistry? Or the ideas of justice, of increase in value or of democratic power in biology? At the limit, total reductionism results in absurdity. For the pretention that every level can be completely reduced to a simpler one would result, for example, in explaining democracy in terms of the structure and properties of elementary particles; and this is clearly nonsense.

This problem can be considered in a different way. One can look at the series of objects, moving from the simpler to the more complex. Molecules are made of atoms. They therefore obey the laws that determine the behavior of atoms. But, in addition, two statements can be made about molecules. First, they can exhibit new properties, such as isomerization, racemization, and so forth. Second, the subject matter of chemistry, the molecules found in nature or produced in the laboratory, represents only a small fraction of all the possible interactions between atoms. Chemistry constitutes, therefore, a special case of physics. This is even more so with biology that deals with a complex hierarchy of objects ranging from cells to populations and ecosystems. The objects which exist at each level constitute a limitation of the total possibilities offered by the simpler level. For instance, the set of molecules found in living organisms represents a very restricted range of chemical objects. At the next level, the number of animal species amounts to several millions; however, this is small relative to the number that could exist. All vertebrates are composed of a very limited number of cellular types, at most 200, such as muscle cells, skin cells, and nerve cells. The great diversity of vertebrates results from differences in the arrangement, in the number, and in the proportion of these 200 types. Similarly, the human societies with which ethnology and sociology deal represent only a restricted group of all possible interactions between human beings.

Constraints and History

Nature functions by integration-Whatever the level, the objects analyzed by natural sciences are always organizations, or systems. Each system at a given level uses as ingredients some systems of the simpler level, but some only. The hierarchy in the complexity of objects is thus accompanied by a series of restrictions and limitations. At each level, new properties may appear which impose new constraints on the system. But these are merely additional constraints. Those that operate at any given level are still valid at all more complex levels. Every proposition that is true for physics is also true for chemistry, biology, or sociology. Similarly every proposition that is valid for biology holds true in sociology. But as a general rule, the statements of greatest importance at one level are of no interest at the more complex ones. The law of perfect gases is no less true for the objects of biology or sociology than for those of physics. It is simply irrelevant in the context of the problems with which biologists, and even more so sociologists, are concerned.

This hierarchy of successive integrations, characterized by restrictions and by the appearance of new properties at each level, has several consequences. The first is the necessity of analyzing complex objects at all levels. If molecular biology, which presents a strong reductionist attitude, yielded such a successful analysis of heredity, it was mainly because, at every step, the analysis was carried out simultaneously at the level of the molecules and at the level of the black box, the bacterial cell. This applies also to recent developments in immunology. And it seems likely that such a convergence of analysis will play an important role in the study of human beings and their societies.

The second point concerns predictability. Is it possible to make predictions at one level on the basis of what is known at a simpler one? Only to a very limited extent. The properties of a system can be explained by the properties of its components. They cannot be deduced from them. Starting from fundamental laws of physics, there is no way of reconstructing the universe. This means that a particular system, say a cell, has only a certain probability of appearing. All predictions about its existence can only be statistical. Molecular biology has shown that ultimately the characteristics of a cell rest on the structure of its molecular components. But the appearance of life on the earth was not the necessary consequence of the presence of certain molecular structures in prebiotic times. In fact, there is absolutely no way of estimating what was the probability for life appearing on earth. It may very well have appeared only once.

The third point concerns the nature of the restrictions and limitations found at every step of increasing complexity. Can one explain why, among all the possible interactions at one level, only certain are actually observed at the more complex one? How is it that only some types of molecular structures are present, for instance, in living organisms? Or only some interactions in human societies? There is no general answer to such questions, and it seems doubtful that there will ever be a specific answer for any one particular level of complexity. Complex objects are produced by evolutionary processes in which two factors are paramount: the constraints that at every level control the systems involved, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Titlepage
• Series Page
• Full Titlepage
• Copyright Page
• List of Content
• Acknowledgments
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Artificiality and industry: Biotechnology between the possible and the actual
• Part II: Increased capacity: The foundations of a bioeconomy
• Part III: Recombinant thresholds: From molecular biology to biotech
• Part IV: Sequencing, synthesis, design: From genomics to synthetic biology
• Part V: Digital biology and the biotechnical imagination
• Part VI: Biotechnical uncertainty and the ethical near future
• Index