espected Mr. President,Dear faulty and students,
Thank you for inviting me to talk about the emerging biological revolution.
In his book Brave New World, published in 1932, Aldous Huxley predicated a big biotechnological revolution about to take place: the hatching of people not in wombs but in test tube; the drug which gave people instant happiness; the sensation which was simulated by implanted electrodes; and modification of behavior through the administration of various artificial hormones. With 70 years separating us from the publication of this book, we can see that Huxley’s technological predications are startlingly accurate. Many of the technologies that Huxley envisioned are already here or just over the horizon. But his revolution has only just begun. New breakthroughs in biomedical technology are announced daily; achievements such as the completion of the human genome project portend much more serious changes to come.
According to Huxley, the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a “posthuman” stage of history. This is important because human nature exists and defines us as a species with a stable continuity. It is what defines our most basic values. Medical technology offers us in many cases a devil’s bargain: longer life, but with reduced mental capacity; freedom from depression, together with freedom from creativity or spirit. It will blur the line between what we achieve on our own and what we achieve because of the levels of various chemicals in our brains.
Consider the following three scenarios, all of which are distinct possibilities that may unfold over the next generation or two.
The first has to do with new drugs. We know human personality is plastic. Psychotropic drugs can affect traits like self-esteem and the ability to concentrate. Stolid people can become vivacious; introspective ones extroverts; you can adopt one personality on Wednesday and another for the weekend.
In the second scenario, advances in stem cell research allow scientists to regenerate virtually any tissue in the body, so that life expectancies are pushed well above 100 years. If you need a new heart or liver, you just grow one inside the chest cavity of a pig or cow; brain damage from Alzheimer’s and stroke can be reversed. The only problem is that there are many subtle aspects of human aging that the biotech industry hasn’t quite figured out how to fix: people grow mentally rigid and increasingly fixed in their views as they age. Worst of all, they just refuse to get out of the way, not just of their children, but their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In a third scenario, people will screen embryos before implantation so as to optimize the kind of children they have. If someone doesn’t live up to social expectations, he tends to blame bad genetic choices by his parents rather than himself. Human genes have been transferred to animals and even to plants to produce new medical products; and animal genes have been added to certain embryos to increase their physical endurance or resistance to disease. These will have serious and unexpected consequences.
We don’t have to await the arrival of human genetic engineering to foresee a time when we will be able to enhance intelligence, memory, emotional sensitivity, and sexuality, as well as reduce aggressiveness and manipulate behavior in a host of other ways.
The medical profession is dedicated to the proposition that anything that can defeat disease and prolong life is unequivocally a good thing. The fear of death is one of the deepest and most abiding human passions, so it is understandable that we should celebrate any advance in medical technology that appears to put death off. But people worry about the quality of their lives as well – not just the quantity. Ideally, one would like not merely to live longer but also to have one’s different faculties fail as close as possible to when death finally comes, so that one does not have to pass through a period of debility at the end of life.
While many medical advances have increased the quality of life for older people, many have had the opposite effect by prolonging only one aspect of life and increasing dependency. Alzheimer’s disease – in which certain parts of the brain waste away, leading to loss of memory and eventually dementia – is a good example of this, because the likelihood of getting it rises proportionately with age. At age 65, only one person in a hundred is likely to come down with Alzheimer’s; at 85, it is one in six. The rapid growth in the population suffering from Alzheimer’s in developed countries is thus a direct result of increased life expectancies, which have prolonged the health of the body without prolonging resistance to this terrible neurological disease.
We could find ways to preserve bodily health but would fail to put off age-related mental deterioration. Stem cell research might yield ways to grow new body part. But without a parallel curer for Alzheimer’s, this wonderful new technology would do no more than allow more people to persist in vegetative states for years longer than is currently possible.
The consequences of medical advances might be the world in which people routinely live to be 120, or even up to 150, but the last decades of life in a state of childlike dependence on caretakers.
We’re still trying to make sense of what is happening.
Thank you again for my privilege of speaking at this famous university.