Unsettling Thoughts

For anyone who hasn't paid attention lately, there was a very contentious thread over at the Rott this week on the subject of embryonic stem cells and their use in research for a host of conditions. Feelings were, of course, strong on the subject, ranging from moral and religious objections to scientific opinions to the contrary.

I have to confess very strong misgivings on the subject based on unsettled questions in myself about the nature of life and when cells become "human". However, I think my biggest objection relates to the law of unintended consequences. What will happen if we really start to play with the building blocks of human life? I realize that many scientists will confidently proclaim "If we do X, than Y will occur."
That's nice. Forgive me if I do not share your confidence. Living material introduces an element of unpredictability that isn't present in simple mechanical creations. Nature is a funny thing. Even if you don't believe in design, I think a careful examination of the human body would lead you to the conclusion that things work the way they do for a reason. I have no reason to believe that the myriad of afflictions that affect humanty are any different.
What's that you say? Do I mean that people are supposed to die of cancer, diabetes, birth defects, and on and on?

Maybe. This is a concept I struggle with as the grandson of a man with Parkinson's, and having a father who died last year from a host of complications with diabetes. My Dad was the one to put it best: "Everyone has to die of something."

Dad was a science teacher. Science was the lens through which he viewed life. He really had no patience with religious or philosophical ideas such as the one I frequently find myself kicking around. Yet he came to the conclusion long ago that "nature" had a way of finding balance, and that if we didn't do something to control our numbers, and instead continue to push into places that we haven't been before, we will encounter emerging diseases. He also marveled at people's amazement at increases in deaths from cancer and things like that. He always thought that since people were living longer, and diseases that used to kill were now curable, it wasn't exactly a mystery why other diseases became more prevalent.

It is something that I occasionally consider. I don't pretend to be an expert, but I don't consider myself to be an ignoramus, either. Being the son of a science teacher, I got good grades in science in high school and college, won medals at our region's Science Olympiad every year, and still occasionally read a science book. (Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Casti's "Paradigm's Lost", Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", Kakio's "Hyperspace", to name a few.)

Where am I going with this? Perhaps I only want to answer the question "What are you thinking, questioning the big brains like you are?"

I'm glad you asked, and if you didn't, too bad. It's my blog, so I get talk about whatever I want to.
1. Things have a way of turning out very differently than expected.

There are many examples that I can think of. The maiden voyage of the Titanic. Television. The lab workers working with those harmless monkeys in Marburg, Germany. Starlink corn. The list goes on. Sometimes the variations are a disappointment, sometimes they are catestrophic.

2. Our abilites have come farther than our restraint.

We can do things with genetic material now that would have been beyond consideration twenty years ago. Now if someone can dream it up, you can bet someone else is already working on it. Computers can catalog, retrieve, and manipulate data at unheard of rates. The idea of a man-manipulated 'super bug' is commonplace. But genetic material does not always react in ways that scientific observation might lead one to conclude. Mutations to viruses and bacteria occur daily. Cancer is an abberation; it occurs when cells do not grow in the way that they 'should'.

And now, as a society, we sit with a modern-day Pandora's Box on our lap. We know that hope resides in the box, but we have no idea who her companions might be. The Devil sits on our left shoulder saying "They are not really people." or "They never consistuted viable humans anyway." The Angel sits on our right shoulder, whispering "Power over what life will and won't be is God's business, not yours." It is hard to hear the whispering for all the other noise around us. Finally, the few like me wonder if the ability to do something gives us the right to do something. We ask if we are wise enough as a species to deal with the effects the advance might spawn, and more importantly, if we are smart enough to confront the challanges we might set upon ourselves with out tinkering.

For myself, I don't trust us to deal well with what we find.