Chilling quote of the week

Courtesy of The Dawn Treader:

"National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology."
Deputy Party Leader Rudolf Hess, 1934

Some years ago, when I was still working in the lab, and didn’t spend a lot of time thinking my way through the faith, an undergraduate student came by to interview some practicing molecular biologists about the potentials of genetic engineering.

I remember being pretty upbeat about the potential – I still am. The possibilities of engineering lower organisms to produce useful products, of engineering crops for increased nutritive value and pest resistance, of modifying food animals for greater and healthier meat production, and the possibilities of repairing human genetic defects is pretty heady stuff – especially so in the early 90’s when so much was new and promising.

Then the guy asked me about the downside. My comment was that I didn’t really see much of a downside. The risks of altered organisms escaping from control and taking over the earth, or at least the local schoolyard, seemed about as remote as being invaded by the saucer people. It’s hard enough to keep genetically modified organisms alive in the laboratory under ideal conditions, let alone having them run wild to destroy the ecosystem. The biggest risk is the same as the current risks we take with the crops and critters we engineer the old fashioned way by controlled breeding – namely, monoculture and the loss of genetic diversity. We could screw up and create some really bad medical products, but probably no worse than we do now. Frankly, the intervening years haven’t produced much data to change my mind a whole lot.

But then he asked, “What about human cloning?” I pretty much blew off the question, because I didn’t think that the cloning of higher critters was going to be accomplished in my lifetime. People had been trying to clone frogs and other organisms for decades and had failed. It was generally accepted (scientific lingo for “everybody in the bar agrees”) that cloning a mammal would be a really, really difficult thing to do. Besides, if it ever became possible to clone a human, no responsible scientist or doctor would ever do it.

A decade later, and two things have changed. First, it turned out to be a lot easier to clone a mammal than anyone ever thought possible. Some guys who were too ignorant to know how hard it was supposed to be went out and xeroxed themselves a sheep. Now you can buy glowfish for your kids, and designer cats are on the way. Second, I’ve become a lot more aware of my own capacity for sin. In light of the Hess quote above, I’m very glad I wasn’t a German Ph.D. back in the 30’s. The scary thing about the Nazis is how easy it was for normal people to slide into the Satanic. The SS wasn’t populated with drooling rejects; its ranks were filled with the best and brightest.

If we start cloning humans, I’m not worried that the clones will be the Soulless Zombie Monsters of a bad Sci-Fi movie. A cloned human is a human being made in the Imago Dei; it’s just a matter of the manufacturing process being a wee bit non-traditional. But if we start using the technology, there will be two certain results: slaves and parts people. The current push for the medical use of fetal stem cells is a fairly small step from growing babies for parts. There’s nothing specifically wrong with human clones; there is something fundamentally wrong in us. Given what we do to each other, what would we do with people whom we manufacture? Slaves and parts people - given the opportunity, it’s who we are and what we do.

After all, it’s nothing more than applied biology.