The Brave New Worlds by Bryan Appleyard, HarperCollins, 拢16.99, ISBN
0002570211
BE AFRAID, warns Bryan Appleyard. Be very afraid. The biggest upheaval in
human history is upon us and yet we sleep like innocent babes.
Thankfully, Appleyard does enough worrying for us all in this unashamedly
gloomy analysis of where the brave new science of molecular genetics is likely
to take us. For him, what began all those years ago with a vainglorious Francis
Crick running into a Cambridge pub to announce, as legend has it, that he had
found 鈥渢he secret of life鈥� is not a seminal insight. It鈥檚 the seminal
insight, the mother of all breakthroughs which will 鈥渓eave nothing, including
ourselves, unchanged鈥�.
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From conquering cancer and the ravages of old age to laying bare the material
basis of personality, the knowledge of human genetics we are accumulating
promises everything鈥攂ut at a price that, in the end, could make Adam and
Eve鈥檚 fall seem like a minor setback.
This is hardly virgin territory. The dark side of the double helix has
occupied many, and here, once again, we encounter the eugenics-obsessed Hitler,
Dolly the sheep and designer babies.
And Appleyard himself has already nailed
his colours to the mast about the dangers of science in general. An earlier
broadside, Understanding the Present, raised the hackles of
men-in-white everywhere with its claim that 鈥渟cientism鈥� has become so central to
our culture that it threatens to destroy or usurp what little spirituality and
sense of self-worth we have left.
Fortunately, the initial feeling of d茅j脿 vu soon
fades. Part of the reason is that Appleyard, a heavyweight journalist with
the Sunday Times, chews the implications of human genetics research over
with a thoughtful pessimism so unbending it becomes interesting in its own
right. To hammer home what we might lose, for example, if screening fetuses and
aborting those with 鈥渄efective鈥� genes became the norm, Appleyard recounts the
story of his niece Fiona, a stubborn, curry-eating young woman with muscular
dystrophy. In a perfection-obsessed world, she might have been aborted.
It is also hard to disagree with Appleyard鈥檚 mistrust of the routine
reassurances dispensed by scientists who say that a development is unlikely
because of technical obstacles or because humanity has no great need for it.
After all, no one saw Dolly coming, and was humanity鈥檚 need for silicone
implants and tummy tucks ever that great? In free-thinking capitalist
democracies, demand for knowledge and technologies has a habit of materialising
out of thin air. One way or another, the fruits of science will out.
Whether those fruits are as poisonous as this book suggests is more doubtful.
Clearly the moral universe will change if people increasingly blame every quirk
of their biology and temperament on genes, as opposed to willpower or
upbringing. But to talk about molecular genetics overthrowing 鈥渢he basis on
which the wealth and stability of Western democracies are constructed鈥� seems
overly portentous. And it takes a bleak view indeed of the resilience of the
human spirit to think that we will ever come to regard our minds and bodies as
nothing more than spacesuits for genes, devoid of meaning.
At least you know where you stand with Appleyard: this is the most dangerous
seam of knowledge humanity has ever taken a shovel to.
This is why his finale is so disappointing. If the science is that dangerous,
surely the logical solution is to stop people from digging? Instead, Appleyard鈥檚
recommendations are uncharacteristically vague. We should 鈥渞esist鈥� its assault
on our biological and spiritual sensibilities, he says. And we should 鈥渉umble鈥�
the science and scientists.
Perhaps Appleyard is pulling his punch here. Or perhaps he realises, quite
rightly, that we can no more ban the pursuit of knowledge than we can ban the
human imagination.