!! spellx done
69   Genetic Intervention Is a Way
     Of Improving Our Species
     The Washington Post, Saturday, November 4, l967

     "Tampering with human genes" is a lurid cliche I have encountered
over and over again in discussions of the prospective applications of
molecular biology.  It has been brought about to some extent by those
of my colleagues who, quite rightly, wish to encourage wider public
appreciation of the importance of the new biological science.

     In a sense, we may be competing with the physicists, whose
importance for society is emphatically punctuated by the imminence
of the Bomb.  "Tampering" is, however, a rather loaded and irritating
way to describe an intervention as likely to be constructive or
harmful as any other technical advance.

     We might as well call education the process of "tampering with 
the human environment".

     Why this special anxiety about genetic intervention?  If it is
irreversible, we should of course worry about the implied commitment
of the evolution of the species.  But when we reach that stage of 
scientific sophistication, there should be no greater difficulty about
reversing the evolutionary mistakes than there was in making them in
the first place.

     Nor can we trust natural processes always to produce the most
admirable of biological types.  Indeed it is hard to point to any
part of the human scene which is not thoroughly permeated with
completely artificial stresses on the evolutionary process, the
byproduct of civilization.

     Without rational intent, we influence the environment to change
our mutation rates, and much more important, to create rapid
convulsions of different rates of reproduction of different kinds
of people.

     Furthermore human self-consciousness may often operate to inhibit
natural evolutionary change.  Thus if a child were to display a 
conspicuous but fundamental "favorable" mutation he might be rejected
as to overwhelm his advantage.

     Imagine, for example, a child with four functional arms and
hands, and the brain to manage them.  A parent might well be advised
to have the extra limbs amputated, despite their biological advantage,
so the child could grow up as an accepted member of the community.
The example merely illustrates the way in which striking deviancy is
outlawed in the context of human culture, though it might have served
as an important advance at an earlier stage of human evolution.

     In fact, since socially coordinated people (not mad scientists)
will be the decision-makers in genetic intervention, there is no
reason to expect them to ignore these influences of the community.
Such interventions will have to be gradual to be acceptable and hence
useful.  A few points in IQ for a generation is as much as we can
stand in a realistic system of human improvement, and this gives
the time needed to reflect on what progress really consists of.

     In fact, the anxiety about genetic intervention is almost
certainly not directed at anything really likely to happen.  We
probably will welcome any chance to alleviate the impact of mongolism,
schizophrenia, diabetes or dwarfism.  Probably what is more alarming
is the abstract concept that "man will control his own destiny".
Man as manipulator is too much of a god; as object, too much of a
machine.

     Freud once commented that a grave difficulty in the acceptance
of psychoanalysis was universal human narcissism, the infantile
self-love that defies the scientific dissection of human nature.  To
understand this makes man less magical to the primitive mentality.
He pointed out three major historical assaults on that self-concept,
each of them violently resisted in their time: the cosmological,
when the earth was displaced from the center of the universe; the
Darwinian, when man was shown to be part of all living nature and
to have evolved from it; the psychological, when man was shown to
be unable to know all that transpired in his own mind, so many
transactions being unconscious.

     Some of the more panicky reactions to genetic engineering, and
their characterization as "tampering", are, no doubt, very closely
akin to the anxiety and derision that greeted Darwin's formulation
of man's evolution from ape-like forerunners.  How would an ape-
prophet's relatives have greeted his predictions about the upsets
their species would soon experience?

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