Site Presented By
Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Francis Fukuyama warns that the combination of runaway biotechnology and individual freedom could lead to a social nightmare.
May 21, 2002 | Maybe in 2053, when my clone is having coffee with your clone, the arguments in Francis Fukuyama's cautionary polemic "Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution" will seem as quaint as the early opposition to railroads does today.
But now, with so-called designer babies still as illusory as a reliable cure for male-pattern baldness, Fukuyama's warning cry about biotechnology is resonant enough to give even the biggest scientific boosters pause. Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University, argues that in the near future it won't be a corrupt state, à la Big Brother, that will use genetic engineering to undermine individual rights. The state won't have to. Instead, millions of parents earnestly seeking to do what's best for their own children will make insidious choices in the privacy of doctor's offices -- choices that will undermine democracy and alter nothing less than the nature of what it means to be human.
This is not Fukuyama's first rhetorical firebomb. He's best-known for his controversial article "The End of History?" published in 1989 in the National Interest, which made the case that liberal democracy represents the endpoint of humankind's ideological evolution.
Fukuyama is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, and his arguments in "Our Posthuman Future" favoring government regulation of biomedical research have already inspired much fulmination in libertarian circles.
Fukuyama told Salon why he thinks that the right to be cloned and to tinker with our offspring's genes aren't liberties that we should all enjoy, and what should be done to restrain the onrush of biotechnology.
Why do you think it's important for the state to regulate cloning and genetic engineering? Why shouldn't it be left up to individual choice?
A lot of people would argue that parents' being able to make genetic choices is just an extension of the kind of existing personal autonomy that people enjoy in liberal societies. But I think that there's a real question about the degree to which you can assume the consent of the child that you are creating.
The best case of this is this recent one where there was a deaf lesbian couple that chose to implant a deaf embryo, and now they've got two deaf children, because they wanted to preserve this deaf culture within their family.
Is that really in the best interests of their child?
Isn't the deaf child an unusual case, in that it's selecting for something that most people would consider a disability, and that couple obviously didn't? What about cloning?
I think even being born a clone is not something that you could automatically assume any child would give prior consent to having done to them.
It's probably true that there are sympathetic instances where you might want to do cloning. A child gets killed and the parents don't have any possibility for having another one, and they want to clone that one.
So, what you're balancing are certain kinds of conceivable harms vs. certain kind of conceivable benefits. In my view, I think that overall in reproductive cloning the harms outweigh the benefits.
What's important in the cloning debate is really the precedents that are being set for other technologies that are further down the road.
Such as?
Basically, designer babies. You're going to get preimplantation genetic diagnosis, where you're going to be able to select not just for therapeutic characteristics but also enhancement ones. And that is really already arriving.
And then further down the line you'll get human germ-line engineering, in which you'll be able not just to select for existing characteristics among a group of embryos that a couple may produce, but you'll actually be able to insert various characteristics that didn't exist previously.
In the future, you'll presumably be able to do what they do with agricultural biotechnology: You'll be able to take a gene from a completely different species and put that into a child. And at that point the sky's the limit.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
