Biotechnology

Listen to Greg read this section:

Mary was only sixteen when she ran away with Percy Shelley . He was in his early twenties but had already had one failed marriage. He fashioned himself a political radical and free thinker. Percy would shortly be discovered as an up-and-coming author and poet. By the time Mary was nineteen, she was becoming somewhat disillusioned with her life. Percy and Mary traveled to Lake Geneva for a summer holiday but were forced to stay indoors because of an unusually cold and rainy summer. After a night of visiting with fellow artisans and intellectuals, Mary had one of those strange experiences that happen just before one falls asleep; she had a waking dream. She describes her vision:

“…with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world….”¹⁵⁴

Immediately, she began to write one of the most important classics of her time, Frankenstein . The book was published in 1817 at a time when Science was taking hold of its new hallowed place in our culture. Mary would publish one more book in her lifetime, a science fiction novel called The Last Man, but its success was limited. Her husband died a few years later in a drowning accident and Mary devoted the rest of her life to editing and publishing his works.

Several summers ago, I downloaded and reprinted the book. I made it required reading for the Bitgood teenagers. My four children have a strong propensity for science and mathematics and I felt this would be a great book for discussions around our dinner table. It was an interesting but scary summer. Yes, the monster is terrifying but not for the reasons you think. If all you know about the story is what you have seen in Hollywood movies you will miss this point. What makes the story so frightening is how easily we can identify with Victor Frankenstein .

The story of Dr. Frankenstein should warn us of what a mind driven toward scientific understanding and creation is capable of. The young doctor’s driven nature and his drive toward science put all questions of ethics and morality out of his mind. You can hear his regret for his lack of circumspection:

“For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

He created a monster because the science of the thing drove him to it. He did it just because it was possible.

Biology + Digital World = Biotechnology

Your body is digital. Electronic signals are coursing through your entire body as you read this book. Your eyes are sending an analog picture, captured by 130 million receptors, to your brain through electric signals carried by the optic nerve.¹⁵⁵ These signals are going to the occipital lobe¹⁵⁶ at the back of the brain. This is your visual processing center. The digital signal carried by the nerves makes contact with tissues of the brain and chemically transfers the information. Your brain then sees these signals and sends the information to millions of other interpretive centers. Mix in some magic, zap it here and there and, voila, you are reading this page!

As our technology becomes predominately digital, we have opportunities to merge the engineering sciences with the life sciences. The marriage of the body and machine is now possible through translating these digital signals. The biological sciences are becoming the new frontier for digital research.

In the essay, The Merger of Flesh and Machines written for the futuristic book: The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, Rodney Brooks¹⁵⁷ writes about the changes taking place in the sciences. He is a leading scientist in this field.

“Fifty years ago, just after the Second World War, there was a transformation of engineering. Before that engineering had been a craft based exercise. But starting around 1950, it was transformed into a physics based discipline. Now we are seeing the beginnings of a transformation of engineering again. This time into a largely biologically based discipline, though it will not sacrifice the rigor of its physics background. At MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where I am director, I see signs of this transformation every day. We have torn out clean rooms where we used to make silicon chips and installed wet labs in their place, where we compile programs into DNA sequences that we splice into genomes in order to breed bacterial robots. Our thirty year goal is to have such exquisite control over the genetics of living systems that instead of growing a tree, cutting it down and building a table out of it. We will ultimately be able to grow the table. We have turned labs where we used to assemble silicon and steel robots into labs where we assemble robots from silicon, steel and living cells.” ¹⁵⁸

What is happening at MIT is not unusual. Until recently, technology has mostly been a means for extending ourselves into our environment. We have focused on transportation technologies that have taken us to other planets. We have networked trillions of kilometers of fiber optics so that a phone call from Bangalore , India sounds like it came from next door. But science is now looking for ways to get smaller so that we can join technology to the human experience. In the book Radical Evolution, Joel Garreau addresses this shift in priorities.

“For all previous millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment.… Now, however, we have started a wholesale process of aiming our technologies inward. Now our technologies have started to merge with our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny and perhaps our souls. Serious people have embarked on changing humans so much that they call it a new kind of engineered evolution – one that we direct for ourselves.”

Note that last phrase “a new kind of engineered evolution.” With the naturalistic worldview of evolution it is no wonder that science is beginning to move in this direction. I have watched many an episode of Star Trek that proposed this idea. Mankind’s merge with technology would push us further in our evolutionary ascent as a species. This continues to present some of the most serious questions the human race has been faced with, the biggest being: “What is man that you are mindful of him?” Psalm 8:4 (NIV) Rodney Brooks continues in his essay, The Merger of Flesh and Machines, to ask these very same questions. Brooks writes,

“…there will be an alteration in our view of ourselves as a species. We will begin to see ourselves as simply a part of the infrastructure of industry. While all the scientific and technical work proceeds we will again and again be confronted with the same constellations of disturbing questions. What is it to be alive? What makes something human? What makes something sub-human? What is a Super-human? What changes can we accept in humanity? Is it ethical to manipulate human life? Is it ethical to manipulate human life in particular corrective ways? Whose version of corrective? Whose version of life and human? What responsibility does the individual scientist have for whatever forms of life he or she may manipulate or create? And these questions will not only be asked in the well meaning precincts of science, they will be thrashed out in the larger society accompanied by everything from vandalism to terrorism to full fledged war.”¹⁵⁹

The stark difference between Brooks and the Psalmist of scripture is that Brooks seeks the answer from human reason and rejects the wisdom of the Creator God. By rejecting God’s wisdom he has only himself and other scientists to find the answers to these enormous questions. He is correct in predicting great conflict over these essential questions. The directions that we take in these new sciences could be very different depending on if we answer these questions from a religious point of view versus a scientific point of view.

Scientists know what is at stake here. This may be the deeper reason why many scientists and science organizations are fighting the teaching of Intelligent Design¹⁶⁰ in our public schools. They know that if the world was created by an intelligent mind, then there are ethical issues that must be addressed in the sciences. The Creator would have something to say about the way we are mucking about in His creation and how we are manipulating it.

This line of thought calls to mind a funny story:

All of the scientists of the world gathered together in a great conference and decided they were advanced to the point that they could challenge God. They called Him to a contest of wits.

“Almighty God, you have done well with creation to this point but we don’t need You anymore,” stated the spokesperson.

“Really,” replied God. “What do you propose?”

“We propose to create life - and not just any life; we will make a sophisticated life form out of non-life!”

“Well, that’s pretty good,” said God. “I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”

The scientists began gathering the raw materials they would use to build their creation when they were suddenly interrupted by God.

“Wait a minute guys, who said you could use my dirt?”. . . . . .

Read or Listen to more.