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Positive Eugenics – is it even an Issue?

Much has been made in science fiction, notably in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” of 1932, of the idea of applying genetic engineering beyond the area of corrective or preventative medicine into changing human characteristics – the notion of “improving” the human being, and its political corrolaries like engineering a “master race” and a “slave race”. This has become a favourite topic for speculation and a source of catchy headlines in the media, but without any regard for the impracticability of the idea, thus perpetuating misconceptions and raising false alarms.
We have been considering thus far, the relatively small number of rare diseases which are accountable to a defect in a single gene. Although our understanding of the human genome may increase this number somewhat, it is important to make clear that the vast majority of both diseases and normal human characteristics – like height, physical endurance, artistic ability and intelligence – are highly complex “multi-factoral” phenomena. That is they involve the interactions of many different genes and any number of environmental influences and individual choices. Even supposedly simple things like the inheritance of hair and eye colour now seem to be more complex matters. Thus to talk of “improving the human race” by means of genetic engineering would seem to be as fantastic as most science fiction, quite apart from any ethical objections. Unfortunately, eugenic experimentation under the Nazi regime in Germany, has not only cast a shadow over the whole field of genetics, rather as Hiroshima has for nuclear power, but it has demonstrated what as Christians we would suspect from human sinfulness and perversity – that we could never discount the political possibility of genetic abuse if ever the technology were feasible.

The Illusion of Improving Human Beings

Although eugenics of this type is more of the stuff of science fiction than any likely reality, a question to be raised is at what point would we pass from a genuine somatic gene therapy into cosmetic improvement? An ethical limit has been suggested by the analogy of the distinction between feeding growth hormone (which is not a gene therapy) to a child who is abnormally short, compared with feeding it to another child of normal height in order to get them into a basketball team. (ref. D.Suzuki, in “Designer Childen”, transcript of episode 5 of the BBC television series “Cracking the Code”, 5 October1993).

A more fundamental question is what sense could we conceive of improving human beings? Logically is it a contradiction in terms to speak of improve ourselves? What constitutes an improvement, how would we recognise it as such, and who would decide it and control it? Chrisitian teaching has several vital insights on these questions. There is something profoundly noble about man but also something profoundly lost, ignoble, perverse. However many medical advances we make, however much genetic engineering we might imagine doing, that intrinsic faultline is still there. The biblical testimony is that we are not evolving better and better, and the evidence of history would seem to agree. The dream of true improvement is an illusion while, as Jesus declared, it is what is in our hearts which defiles us. Moreover, even the best repair is only temporary. The writer of Psalm 90 observes that even living 10 years more than average is no great improvement, “and our years come to an end like a sigh”. There is deliverance “from this body of death”, but it requires “a new heavens and a new earth”, the resurrection of the dead, not merely progressive improvements.

A Different Vision of Perfection

Our ideas of what we mean by improvement are transient, as for example different cultures’ conceptions in history of the “ideal” shape for a woman! There is perhaps a danger of the Greek concept of ideal forms, which has no part in a Christian view. The “proper man” of Luther’s hymn, or Newman’s “second Adam to the fight”, is the man of sorrows, the shepherd king coming humbly, who though in the form of God became as a servant. Most paradoxically, the writer to the Hebrews observes “It was fitting that God, for whom and through everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Hebrews 2:10). To emulate Him is our calling, man and woman alike. Paul’s ambition “that Christ may be formed in me” is something very different from changing our genetics, where we remain uniquely ourselves, and yet Christ-like. Instead of the uniformity of the ideal, a narrowing of options of our gene pool, there is a rejoicing in diversity, and an expanding of possibilities in Christ.