Hello, this is from the English version of the French newspaper Le Monde
iplomatique. I hope you like it. You may find it on the Web at
http://www.monde- diplomatique.fr/en/2000/08/01eader
Juan Carlos Garelli
August 2000
Friendly mutants
by IGNACIO RAMONET
Pokemon is everywhere. All of a sudden the world has been invaded by a new
range of Nintendo Game Boy products, cartoon films and collectable cards
which, together with a vast range of associated consumer products, make up
the pokemon phenomenon.
The word is short for "pocket monster". It refers to a range of fantasy
mutating creatures to be found living in grass, undergrowth, woods, caves,
lakes, etc (1). There are 150 of them in total, all different and each
with their own genetic make-up. Some of them are very rare, others are
difficult to capture. The point is, first, pokemons have to be caught.
Then you have to domesticate and train them, so they can then mutate into
other species. They metamorphose, change what they look like - in fact
they "evolve" (this
Darwinian concept is part of the game) - and develop new abilities, new
powers etc.
It is hardly surprising that children are so taken with this idea of
"friendly mutants", given that we live in an age of cloning, revolutions
in biotechnology and invasions of genetically modified organisms (GMO).
The expansion of our capacity for intervening in humanity's genetic
make-up seems unstoppable. But at the same time the alarm bells
are starting to ring.
Issues such as cloning, the creation of genetically modified animals, the
sequencing of the human genome, gene therapy, the patenting of life forms,
the genetic identification of hereditary illnesses and the growing use of
genetic testing are giving growing cause for concern (2).
Some of us remember the likes of Dr Jos? Delgado in the 1960-70s. He was a
supporter of mind control as a method of achieving a "psycho-civilized
society", and he and his associates used to tell us that the central
philosophical questions was no longer "What is man?" but "What kind of man
are we going to manufacture?"
Professor Marvin Minsky, one of the founding fathers of computer
technology, has forecast that by 2035, thanks to Nan technology, the
electronic equivalent of the brain may well be no bigger than the size of
your fingertip. This would give us plenty of space in our brains for the
implantation of additional systems and memory. We could add a little more
knowledge each year, building in new types of perceptions, new kinds of
logic, and new ways of thinking and imagining (3).
Francis Fukuyama is on record as saying that in the course of the next two
generations, biotechnology will provide the tools to enable us to achieve
what the specialists in social engineering have so far failed to do. At
that stage, we shall have definitively gone beyond human history, because
by then we shall have abolished human beings as such. Then a new history
will begin, beyond the human (4).
Ever since the cloning of Dolly the Sheep in February 1 997, it has been
obvious that the cloning of humans is just around the corner. Science has
overtaken fiction, to the extent that it has gone well beyond the
"Bokanovsky process" imagined by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. Dolly
was not the result of a conception as such. Her embryo was created simply
by taking the nucleus of an adult cell and placing it in an egg from
which the nucleus had been removed. Since then we have had the cloning of
mice in Hawaii, sheep in New Zealand and Japan, goats in North America
etc. A s long ago as 1998.
The Lancet was arguing that, despite the mounting level of international
concern, the creation of human beings by means of cloning had become
"inevitable", and it called on the medical community to face the facts.
It was in this context that on 26 June the media announced the start of a
new era, with the news that scientists had succeeded in decoding upwards
of three billion DNA base pairs on the 23 chromosomes which makeup our
inherited genetic characteristics. This will now make possible the
sequencing of the genes involved in various human illnesses. Potentially
there are huge benefits for humanity in all this - the identification of a
gene responsible for any given hereditary disease would open the way for
discovering a possible treatment, and perhaps even a cure.
But we are still a long way from understanding the full implications of
this discovery, and the kinds of dangers it could create. We are in an
unprecedented situation in human history. Genetics is now making it
possible for humanity to embark on "a wholesale appropriation of the
world, a modern version of the slavery and plundering of natural resources
that characterized the colonial enterprise" (5). The simple fact is that
patenting genes is tantamount to privatizing the common heritage of
humanity. And the selling of such information to the pharmaceutical
industry - thereby restricting its availability to the privileged few who
can afford to pay - threatens to transform what has been a major
scientific advance into a new source of discrimination (6).
The other danger is that genetic engineering will lead to a new kind of
eugenics, in the sense that it opens the way to forms of "trans humanity".
We may see a resurgence of ideas about the creation of "perfect children",
selected in terms of the quality of their genetic coding.
Our society seems unwilling to confront these issues. There is a lurking
but unspoken fear that the human species could be on the verge of being
produced by factory methods, with a mass use of heavy biotechnologies. Are
we going to end up manufacturing human (or "trans human") Pokemons?
Perhaps we should get ready for an invasion of genetically modified
people.
(1) See the site at http://www.pokemon.com
(2) See Traversales Science Culture, January-February 1999.
(3) Le Temps, Geneva, 24 November 1999.
(4) Le Monde, 17 June 1999.
(5) Jean-Yves Nau, "Brevets industriels pour matriau humain?", Le Monde,
27 July 2000
(6) See The Economist, 1 July 2000.
Translated by Ed Emery
Juan Carlos Garelli, M.D., Ph.D.
Department of Early Development
http://attachment.org.ar
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