Abstract
Growing powers to manipulate human bodies and minds, not merely to heal disease but to satisfy desires, control deviant behavior, and to change human nature, make urgent questions of whether and how to regulate their use, not merely to assure safety and efficacy but also to safeguard our humanity. Oversight in democratic societies rightly belongs to the polity, not merely to self-appointed experts, scientific or ethical. Yet the task of governing the uses of dangerous knowledge is daunting, and there is little evidence that we have the will or the wisdom to do it well.
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Notes
“Forbidding Science? Balancing Freedom, Security, Innovation and Precaution,” a conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Law, Science, & Technology, Arizona State University, January 12–13, 2006. See overview essay in this volume (Marchant and Bird 2009). An earlier version of this paper was read for me at the conference, in my absence.
Such an inquiry was in fact US President George W. Bush’s first charge to the President’s Council on Bioethics: “To undertake fundamental inquiry into the human and moral significance of developments in biomedical and behavioral science and technology.” (Executive Order 13237, November 28, 2001).
Some may even remember that the NAS in the 1970s convened a blue ribbon panel to, in effect, censor as “unhelpful to any public purpose” Nobel Laureate William Shockley’s request that the Academy commission a study on race and intelligence. At about the same time, the Report Review Committee of the Academy censored for 3 years a report of its own National Research Council, Assessing Biomedical Technologies, on the (preposterous) grounds that its publication would endanger science and lead to a curtailment of all federal support for biomedical science. I was the executive secretary of the committee that produced the report, which was finally printed without publicity only after the financial sponsor, the National Science Foundation, threatened to publish the report on its own. Even scientists officially believe in censoring some forms of inquiry.
Here is how the Father of Salomon’s House describes their practice: “We have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not: and take all an oath of secrecy for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret: though some of those we do reveal sometime to the State, and some not” (Bacon 1989, p. 80). Bacon, the first prophet of the new relation between science and society and of the “conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate,” knew better than those living today that knowledge is dangerous, that publication is a public and politically relevant act, and that self-censorship on the part of scientists is necessary and desirable. This passage is also remarkable for its wonderful ambiguity regarding whether scientists or the State has ultimate authority over dangerous knowledge.
Here, for example, is the celebrated announcement by Descartes of the good news of knowledge that is “very useful in life”:
So soon as I had acquired some general notions concerning Physics… they caused me to see that it is possible to attain knowledge which is very useful in life, and that, instead of that speculative philosophy which is found in the Schools, we may find a practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and the action of fire, water, air, the stars, heaven, and all the other bodies that environ us, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of our artisans, we can in the same way employ them in all those uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves as the masters and possessors of nature. (Discourse on Method, Part VI. Emphasis added)
In the immediate sequel, Descartes makes clear that the goals of mastery of nature are humanitarian: the conquest of external necessity; the promotion of bodily health and longevity; the provision of psychic peace or a new kind of practical wisdom; and perhaps also the overcoming of mortality itself.
Because nearly all of biomedical science is experimental, scientific research is more than intellectual inquiry. It is almost always also a form of action, knowledge being gained only through experimental deeds. This fact lies behind the need for ethical guidelines to restrain the actions involved in research using human subjects (and, to a degree, also some non-human animals.) This fact also embarrasses any attempt to treat experimental science as (merely) a form of speech, fully immunized against Congressional interference by the First Amendment to the Constitution, even broadly construed. Scientists have no right of free speech and free inquiry to do more than talk and ask questions. It is not clear that even the act of making public (that is, of publishing) clearly dangerous knowledge would be—or should be—a protected deed implicit in constitutionally protected speech.
The precise Council proposals, all unanimously approved, were as follows.
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(1)
Prohibit the transfer, for any purpose, of any human embryo into the body of any member of a non-human species.
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(2)
Prohibit the production of a hybrid human-animal embryo by fertilization of human egg by animal sperm or of animal egg by human sperm.
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(3)
Prohibit the transfer of a human embryo (produced ex vivo) to a woman’s uterus for any purpose other than to attempt to produce a live-born child.
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(4)
Prohibit attempts to conceive a child by any means other than the union of egg and sperm.
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(5)
Prohibit attempts to conceive a child by using gametes obtained from a human fetus or derived from human embryonic stem cells.
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(6)
Prohibit attempts to conceive a child by fusing blastomeres from two or more embryos.
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(7)
Prohibit the use of human embryos in research beyond a designated stage in their development (between 10 and 14 days after fertilization).
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(8)
Prohibit the buying and selling of human embryos.
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(9)
Instruct the United States Patent and Trademark Office not to issue patents on claims directed to or encompassing human embryos or fetuses at any stage of development; and amend Title 35, United States Code, Sect. 271(g) (which extends patent protections to products resulting from a patented process) to exclude these items from patentability (President’s Council on Bioethics 2004).
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In the summer of 2006, the US Congress banned the practice of “fetal farming” (Fetus Farming Prohibition Act of 2006). This proscription functionally achieves the Council’s recommendation to “prohibit the transfer of a human embryo (produced ex vivo) to a woman’s uterus for any purpose other than to attempt to produce a live-born child.” However, Congress’s ban was inspired solely by a desire to protect nascent human life rather than by the Council’s wish to uphold the dignity of women and human procreation by preventing the exploitative use of women and their wombs as experimental laboratories or organ farms.
References
Bacon, F. (1989). New Atlantis and the great instauration (revised ed.). Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson.
Evans, J. H. (2002). Playing God: Human genetic engineering and the rationalization of public bioethical debate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marchant, G. E., & Bird, S. J. (2009). Editor’s overview. Science and Engineering Ethics, this issue.
Monod, J. (1972). Chance and necessity. New York: Vintage.
Moreno, J. D. (2005, Jan–Feb). The end of the great bioethics compromise, Hastings Center Report, 35(1), 14–15.
National Academy of Sciences. (2002). Scientific and medical aspects of human reproductive cloning. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
President’s Council on Bioethics (2004). Reproduction and responsibility: The regulation of new biotechnologies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Also available online at www.bioethics.gov.
Shattuck, R. (1996). Forbidden knowledge: From Prometheus to pornography. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
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Leon R. Kass is Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago, and former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics. The opinions expressed are his own.
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Kass, L.R. Forbidding Science: Some Beginning Reflections. Sci Eng Ethics 15, 271–282 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9122-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9122-9