Requiem for the Mad Scientist
The National Institutes of
Health happened to be hosting a gene-therapy conference last month when the
makers of the film Gattaca launched their ad campaign. Gattaca 's
premise is the creation, in the not-so-distant future, of a genetic elite whose
DNA has been rejiggered at the embryo stage to eliminate dispositions to such
traits as premature baldness and attention-deficit disorder while heightening
cheekbones and IQs. The newspaper ads for the film featured a mock promotion
for a biotech company that offered prospective parents "children made to
order." At the NIH conference, gene therapists reported that after seven years
of trying to insert DNA into the cells of the genetically sick, not a single
cure had been reported. Considering the difficulty of such relatively simple
procedures as these, the world of Gattaca seems a distant nightmare.
"There's not a chance in hell," said a conference participant, geneticist
Huntington Willard of Case Western Reserve University, "that you could
recombine all those genes and get a desired effect."
Still,
Francis Collins, the guru of the Human Genome Project at NIH, which is
sequencing and identifying all human genes, was intrigued enough to see
Gattaca twice, the second time leading a matinee field trip of 60 NIH
scientists and staff. Collins, a Christian in the C.S. Lewis mold, broods about
the ethical reverberations of genetics quite a bit these days. What he worries
about most is genetic redlining, where claims adjusters use tests, which he has
helped develop for heritable illnesses, to deny Americans their health
insurance. What fascinates and horrifies artists, on the other hand, is the
impression that geneticists have more creative power than artists. (Ian
Willmut, the Scotsman who cloned Dolly, would seem to be a guy whose work has
really come alive.) In Gattaca , as well as in lots of other recent films
and books, artists have dreamed up complex nightmares of genetic determinism,
where characters are mere puppets of their DNA scripts or of the scientists and
profit seekers who manipulate them.
The wellspring of these works is H.G. Wells' The Island
of Dr. Moreau . In this 1896 novel, a vivisectionist attempts to transform
animals into men until the misshapen creatures revert and kill him, the forces
of nature overcoming man's civilizing artifices. From The Boys From
Brazil (Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, alive and well and cloning Hitlers
at a secret lab in the Brazilian Amazon) to Jurassic Park (Richard
Attenborough alive and well and cloning velociraptors), Wells' basic formula
has become familiar: an island; a Frankensteinian experiment; a Faustian
scientist; something gone terribly, terribly wrong.
But something else has gone
terribly wrong since H.G. Wells' time. In the new genetic thriller, the
scientist is no longer mad, because he has no illusions of mastery. Instead,
he's a lone and often belated moralist, eaten up with remorse and anxiety,
pushed into unsavory experimentation less by runaway curiosity than by
unscrupulous corporate overlords. Genetic manipulation is a given. The yucky
thing is the profit motive. And the mistreatment of lab animals.
In
Gattaca , the victim is Vincent Freeman (played by Ethan Hawke), a "faith
birth" whose parents didn't tamper with his embryonic DNA. Because baby
Vincent's instant genome readout indicated a weak heart and a life expectancy
of 30.2 years, he finds as an adult that nobody will hire him, particularly not
at the space agency. The hero, in a sense, is the company doctor, who helps
Vincent realize his dreams of becoming an astronaut in order to spite the
biotech-state (the doctor's own eugenically planned son "didn't turn out the
way they promised").
Or consider Robin Cook's thriller Chromosome
6 . Molecular biologist Kevin Marshall works at a secret lab in Africa
(shades of Moreau) fiddling with the DNA of apes to render their organs
immunologically fit for transplanting into rich Americans. One day Marshall
notices smoke rising from the island on which the organ-harvested apes are
warehoused. Arriving to investigate, he finds them standing around a campfire,
chatting. It seems that he has inadvertently re-created the missing link.
So what
does Kevin do? Resign and register his ethical concerns with the NIH? Write up
his results for publication in Nature ? Order his broker to buy biotech?
In the end, his nostalgia for fuzzy critters results in an act of defiance
against his corporate boss: He throws biotech and science to the wind and helps
the man-apes flee into the wilderness.
The misgivings of scientists are particularly shrill in
Frameshift , by Canadian sci-fi writer Robert J. Sawyer. It's a purple
premise: The Treblinka death-camp guard Ivan the Terrible has adopted a new
identity in California as the chief actuary for a health-insurance company.
When a French-Canadian scientist working in the genome project at Berkeley
stumbles onto a series of murders in which Ivan is implicated, he thinks he's
found a neo-Nazi plot to eliminate the genetically challenged. But it turns out
Ivan's goals are more banal: His company is bumping off clients whose genetic
profiles indicate big future medical bills.
In
Gattaca and elsewhere, genetic enhancement is harnessed to profit,
reflecting capitalism's relentless remaking of the world in search of
efficiency. This can backfire alarmingly, as in Nancy Kress' 1991 novel,
Beggars in Spain . In it, genetic engineers adhering to an Ayn Rand-like
philosophy called "Yagaism" create a race of people who don't need to sleep.
The genetically altered kids are exceedingly bright, ambitious, and nerdy, as
if cloned from Bill Gates, and grow up believing that a person's only value is
what he or she produces. Eventually, this race of supergeeks becomes so
thoroughly eugenicist that it turns on its makers.
In Dr. Moreau , it's the monsters who
force the moral issues. They're sloppy, imperfect products, trying desperately
to live up to an ideal of progress. "Are we not men?" they plaintively ask.
Their struggle underscores Moreau's spiritual poverty and capacity for
mischief. "To this day I have never troubled about the ethics," he says of his
work. In the new genetic thrillers, it's the scientist who makes a last-ditch
stand against an irresponsible society--reflecting a role for scientists as the
defenders of ethical principles that were born at the Nazi doctor trials at
Nuremberg and endured through the Cold War.
Treblinka and Nagasaki may
have given scientists pause, but the doubts they occasioned came too late. They
didn't stop the arms race or radiation experiments using human guinea pigs. The
Human Genome Project, in fact, was built using the infrastructure of the
nuclear-weapons program, taking over unused labs at Los Alamos, Berkeley, and
Livermore. But unlike the Manhattan Project--in fact, like no other Big Science
project in history--the Genome Project has equipped itself with a research
division to explore the social and ethical ramifications of genetics. Its
findings have armed Francis Collins in his crusade against genetic redlining.
And it was Ian Willmut, whose work opened the door to human cloning, who most
forcefully denounced that prospect at Senate hearings held last spring.
Which brings to mind a line
from Fay Weldon's 1989 novel, The Cloning of Joanna May . "These days
scientists talk a great deal more about God than does the rest of the world,"
she writes. "What is that but an obeisance to the shadow of the God who ran
off, the God they drove off when bold and young and frightened of nothing!" But
if God has taken flight, in Gattaca and elsewhere, at least a few of his
imitators are trying to save their souls.
