GOD'S GENETICALLY MODIFIED IMAGE: COOPERATION BETWEEN BIOTECH AND RELIGION IS NOW MORE COMMON, BUT HOW MUCH CAN ONE ACCOMMODATE THE OTHER?
Written by Kevin Ferguson - Freelance Writer

A priest, a rabbi, and an Islamic scholar walk into a room full of scientists .

Sound like a modern twist to a politically incorrect joke? Actually it happened in 1999 in Rockville, Md., and serves as an ideal metaphor for the growing cooperation between science and religion. The three religious leaders were among 11 experts called by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to give religious perspectives on human stem cell research.

The witnesses agreed on little. But it was evident that a fundamental question had gone unchanged, at least since Nathaniel Hawthorne's cautionary short story "The Birthmark" was published 163 years ago. Should scientists do something simply because they can? As biotechnology enables us to do more and more, that question becomes ever more finely parsed. From 1866 to this day, no one has looked askance at Gregor Mendel's cross-pollination of pea pods. Yet in the spring of 1994, biotechnology firm Calgene's genetically modified Flavr Savr tomato drew salvos from activists who charged that the company was producing "Frankenfood" that could harm human health and disrupt the food chain.

Genetically tweaked tomatoes, however, are child's play when compared with other innovations in biotechnology: in vitro fertilization, DNA fingerprinting, animal cloning, xenotransplantation, stem cell therapy, bionics, the subcutaneous insertion of tracking devices and a catalog of other applications from the relatively banal to the bizarre. "There is something in the human spirit that wants to conquer," said Dr. Andrew Fergusson, president and CEO of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity in Bannockburn, Ill. "The problem is when the fallen side of human nature gains control."

Whether these are miracles or monsters depends on one's political views and - to a large extent - religious beliefs. Believers and nonbelievers alike vary greatly in their biotech outlooks. For example, the Church of England has voiced approval of cloning techniques that use embryos fewer than 14 days old to produce stem cells. The Greek Orthodox Church discourages such practices, believing that human life begins with the zygote, a single fertilized cell. And the American Humanist Association embraces a laissez-faire approach, noting in March 2005: "Embryos obtained or derived for research or therapeutic purposes with the informed consent of the donor are not destined for personhood and have no independent moral status."

In other words, it all comes down to values. "I don't think technology is value-neutral. It comes with a set of values," said Dr. Robert "Skip" Nelson, an associate professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia.

Different values produce different goals. Shareholders in biotech giant Monsanto valued the financial return on their investment after the company bought Calgene and its Flavr Savr tomatoes. The Roman Catholic Church, which has long placed a high value on social justice, has given conditional approval to genetically modified crops, saying they may ease hunger, poverty and disease. The Seventh-day Adventist Church likewise has encouraged genetic modification of plants, but notes, "Exploitations and manipulations that would destroy natural balance or degrade God's created world should be prohibited."

Natural balance is in eye of the beholder, though. "A lot of what I do is unnatural, but no one wants me to withhold penicillin to treat streptococci because penicillin is unnatural," says Nelson. Seventh-day Adventists and Roman Catholics have no doctrinal objection to using antibiotics and synthetic drugs but reject certain assisted reproductive techniques they deem unnatural, including sperm and ovum donations.

Meanwhile, the voices of the values keep changing. From the 1950s to the 1970s, bioethics discussions were most often dressed in the language of theology. Pope Pius XII's 1957 allocution to the International Congress of Anesthesiologists, "Prolongation of Life," argued against the use of extraordinary means to sustain life. Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical "Humanae Vitae" denounced sterilization, abortion and artificial birth control. Their speeches resonated far beyond Roman Catholic circles - particularly as scientists and politicians became increasingly alarmed at worldwide population growth statistics. In the 1980s and 1990s, secular moral philosophers held the biotechnology high ground and led the widespread creation of hospital ethics boards to review new technologies. That was a marked change from 1975, when courts and theologians battled over the fate of comatose Karen Ann Quinlan, and ethics boards were nonexistent except in a few Catholic hospitals. Since then, "hospital ethics committees have become a part of the recognized medical landscape," said Bruce Jennings, a senior research scholar at The Hastings Center, a secular bioethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y., following the death of Terri Schiavo.

Religious voices are once again being heard, as advances in biotechnology beg the question: What does it mean to be human? While atheists and secular humanists, too, have their answers, the faithful are demanding to be heard. "It's easier for a person without a faith position to choose that the embryo is not human or not sufficiently human," said Fergusson. Fergusson, who became a Christian while in medical school in the 1970s, contributed to Britain's Warnock Committee, organized in 1982 to study in vitro fertilization. "I found myself out of step with the front line in that long-ago process, as I was sure then, on biological and theological grounds, that life begins with a single-cell embryo." The Warnock Committee, influenced by the views of both scientists and Anglican theologians, ultimately decided that only embryos older than 14 days could be protected from experimental research.

Since then, religious perspectives offered by clergy and laity alike have become more easily visible in otherwise secular settings. Consider the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research's 1975 report, Research on the Fetus: Only one of eight ethicists and philosophers asked to contribute to the report overtly referred to religion. And of 27 witnesses who spoke at the commission's public hearings, only one, a Roman Catholic priest, mentioned religion, though several clearly identified themselves as being part of anti-abortion groups. Twenty-four years later, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission made it a point to invite Christians, Muslims and Jews to testify for its report Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research.

That doesn't necessarily mean biotechnology debates will increasingly become more religious in flavor. Rather, religious representation in biotechnology discussions will likely rise and fall depending on the role accorded religion by political leaders. Playing God will require playing politics first.

In February 2004, that meant tinkering with the President's Council on Bioethics. Two years earlier, President Bush had appointed 17 scientists, doctors, ethicists, social scientists, lawyers and theologians to serve on the council and named University of Chicago bioethicist Dr. Leon Kass as chair. But two members - University of California, San Francisco, cell biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and Southern Methodist University emeritus ethics professor William May - were dismissed three years later. The Bush administration explained that it was simply trying to give others a chance to air their views. Critics charged that the president was stacking the council with religious conservatives.

A different political wrestling match continues in Europe. There the European Commission's European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) has been struggling to accommodate member states' disparate views on tissue banking, stem cell research and other controversial topics.

That struggle includes the issue of biotech funding. The EGE supports stem cell research, but some member states do not, leaving some institutions in a research no man's land. Although the EGE prohibits discrimination against any person based on his or her beliefs, the EU has decided to withhold funding to any member state where that research is forbidden, including Austria, Ireland, Poland and Lithuania. Not coincidentally, each of these countries - while experiencing a rise in secularism as other European nations have - is home to some of the most religious voting populations in the Western world. Former Communist states like Hungary, Latvia and Slovenia have few regulations.

The EU's dilemma and its solution represent a significant milestone in the biotechnology debate. That's because more time will be spent on the administrative details - in this case, funding - than on the issue of the ethics itself, said Andrew Lustig, author of Genes, Genesis and God and a professor of religion and science at Davidson College in Davidson, N.C. "Religious voices are coming back to the table, but people are not sure what to do with them," said Lustig. "I sense more and more bioethics questions are increasingly driven by a legal model. That is, people can agree on a patient's right to consent rather than what is being consented to."

Indeed, such a discussion took place in November 2005 when South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk resigned his post as chairman of the World Stem Cell Hub in Seoul over revelations that a research assistant had donated her eggs in a human cloning experiment. Overnight, acceptable procedural guidelines displaced human cloning as the center of an ethics debate.

Such secondary discussions, while important, distract from the primary ones. And that leaves the priest, the rabbi and the Muslim scholar with their hands full.

Kevin Ferguson is a freelance writer living in Arlington, Mass.