PRESUMPTION THY NAME IS MAN :

The future of humanity: "How beauteous mankind is!" said Miranda in The Tempest. But can natural evolution or our own genetic engineering improve on the present model? (Colin Tudge, 8th April 2002, New Statesman)

The designer baby,...the child conceived like a custom car, is metaphorical pornography that, we may note in passing, is perpetrated not by the much-maligned "press", but by the scientists themselves, many of whom have their eyes on megabucks and argue the market mantra that what people are prepared to pay for is by definition good. Fortunately, it is also ludicrous. The listing of genes through the Human Genome Project does not "open the book of life" as some idle geneticists (not the Cambridge scientists who actually did the work) have claimed.

If we think of genes as words, then what we have is an incomplete lexicon. An individual's apportionment of genes - the genome - should be construed as an arcane work of literature with its own syntax, puns, allusions, redundancies, colloquialisms and overall "meaning" of which we have almost no inkling, and may never understand exhaustively. On present knowledge, or even with what we are likely to know in the next two centuries, it would be as presumptuous to try to improve on the genes of a healthy human baby as it would be to edit sacred verse in medieval Chinese if all we had to go on was a bad dictionary.

So all in all, human beings seem likely to remain as they are, genetically speaking, barring some ecological disaster; and there doesn't seem to be much that meddling human beings can do about it. This, surely, is a mercy. We may have been shaped blindly by evolution. We may have been guided on our way by God. Whichever it was, or both, the job has been done a million times better than we are ever likely to do. Natural selection is far more subtle than human invention. "What a piece of work is a man!" said Hamlet. "How beauteous mankind is!" said Miranda. Both of them were absolutely right.

Unfortunately, Mr. Tudge seems to have missed the point. He assumes that because such experimentation will not actually result in an "improved" human being that it will not be undertaken. If only science worked that way. Instead, genetic engineering may well come to resemble alchemy, a futile even destructive but wildly popular pursuit, fueled by the promise of great wealth for the successful, undeterred by the repeated failure of even the greatest minds (Newton in the case of the search for man-made gold). Posted by Orrin Judd at April 28, 2002 8:46 AM