THE GENOME & US
Cornwell, John
John Cornwell The social and ethical scruples thrown up by the science of new genetics are by now familiar. Who will benefit from the therapies? Will the gold rush for gene patenting be...
...Reductionism seeks to explain phenomena in terms of their smallest parts...
...They do not...
...The new findings," Rose writes, "must be broken out of their reductionist mould" and located instead "in a more integrated understanding of the relationships between the biological, personal, and social...
...Rose and those colleagues who share his view, such as Richard Lewontin, argue that the hijacking of genetics by the media exponents of reductionism threatens to paralyze our social and moral sensibilities, with inevitable far-reaching consequences...
...Should we be allowed to choose the intelligence level, the hair color, and the sexual orientation of our children...
...Still their simplistic message has a wide appeal in the mass media since garbled, sensational oversimplifications of science permeate public consciousness much more easily than complex, interdisciplinary arguments...
...Rose insists that the publicly accepted emphasis on deterministic nature is destructive of the very notion of community...
...The notion of neurogenetic determinism has been broadcast by a well-known group of biological reductionists, such as E.O...
...It is not a sufficient means of understanding the significance of genetics for the social and spiritual realities of human nature...
...Will the gold rush for gene patenting be controlled...
...But our ability to set limits, to forestall its potential for social and moral ill, depends upon the extent to which we integrate this knowledge with an authentic account of personhood and community...
...a criminal is violent because he has a "violent gene...
...The task ahead, then, is to find ways of understanding, and talking about, the mysterious marriage between the given and the made in the light of this challenging new science...
...We have the power to alter what is given as never before...
...Reductionist method may be a necessary condition for scientific experiment in the laboratory...
...Wilson and Daniel Dennett in the United States and Richard Dawkins in Britain...
...The divide between what is given, what can be "made by human hands," and what we can do for ourselves, is in a process of dynamic change and exchange...
...But there is a question that affects the reception of all other questions: Which voice dominates the public understanding of the new genetics...
...John Cornwell is director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge, England...
...Will screening create a new underclass of the uninsurable and the unemployable...
...Their books and articles have been hugely successful, but the notion that they speak exclusively for science is false...
...One of the strongest voices against hard-line reductionism has been that of Professor Stephen Rose, a leading neuroscientist and geneticist in Britain...
...The tendency to seek determined causes, and reductionist remedies, for our behavior generates a fatalism among those it stigmatizes...
...If the homeless or depressed are so because of a flaw in their biology, their condition cannot be the fault of society," although, he goes on to say, "human society may attempt, pharmacologically, or otherwise, to alleviate their distress...
...Crucially, however, even within the confines of the biological sciences, the science of genetics does not, and cannot, speak with a single, oracular voice...
...The fault, after all, lies in our genes, and moral agency is increasingly obscured and denied...
...Undoubtedly, new genetics are set to enrich our knowledge of human behavior in sickness and in health...
...That conversation is essentially pluralistic, and open-ended—calling for contributions from many disciplines and discourses...
...Through much of the 1980s and 1990s the public perception of biology in the mass media was widely influenced by the rise of "neurogenetic determinism"—a synthesis of cognitive science and the new genetics that draws an equivalence between genes and human behavior...
...A man is gay because he has a "gay gene...
...a woman is depressed because she has a "depression gene...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 11
