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8-Humans: Jeremy Rifkins comments on "hi-tech eugenics"

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TITLE:  Dazzled by the science
        Biologists who dress up hi-tech eugenics as a new art form are
        dangerously deluded
SOURCE: The Guardian, UK, by Jeremy Rifkin,3604,874312,00.html
DATE:   Jan 14, 2003


Dazzled by the science
dangerously deluded

Recently, J Craig Venter, the gene scientist whose company, Celera
Genomics, led the race to map the human genome, announced a plan to
create the first artificial life form in a laboratory dish. Venter, who
has teamed up with the Nobel laureate biologist Hamilton Smith, says he
hopes to use a $3m US government grant to create partially man-made
organisms that could produce hydrogen for fuel or break down carbon
dioxide from power plant emissions. Other scientists worry that Venter's
creation could wreak havoc on natural ecosystems or be used to create new
kinds of biological weapons.

Venter is among a new genre of biologists who see themselves less as
engineers and more as creative artists - designers and architects of what
they envision as a "second genesis" - this one inspired not by divine
guidance or by the forces of evolution, but by the human imagination.
Ironically, this subtle shift in the focus of the biological sciences
from "engineering" to "art" is being mirrored in the art community,
raising the question of whether a new social gestalt is being readied to
make acceptable this radical new manipulation of nature.

All of a sudden, artists around the world have discovered DNA and are
feverishly at play in their studios using the cutting-edge tools of
biotechnology. An American artist, Eduardo Kac, commissioned a team of
geneticists in France to create a transgenic rabbit named Alba with a
fluorescent gene from a jellyfish in its biological code. The rabbit,
which glows, is considered a living piece of genetic artistry. Currently,
an exhibit entitled Genesis is touring the US with much fanfare. Like
Kac's illuminated rabbit, many of the works on display use the tools of
genetic science to create living representations just as their
predecessors used paintbrushes to create their representations. A group
calling itself the Critical Art Ensemble engages in a performance piece
called GenTerra, in which it releases transgenic bacteria into the
audience. Christine Paul, the curator at the Whitney Museum of American
Art says: "We are witnessing the emergence of a new type of artist, the

The new biotech artists say that such exhibits will help the public
wrestle with the scientific, ethical and legal issues surrounding the new
genomic science. Many of the artists hope that their work, which includes
digitally produced portrait photographs of hybrid cat people and tubes of
real DNA suspended from the ceiling, will provoke an emotional response
from the audience and force people to think about the many implications
of the new science. Maybe.

But it's far more likely that the real consequence of such art exhibits
will be to legitimise the idea of a new "artful" eugenics movement. The
melding together of genetic science and artistic expression could help
ease the way to a popular acceptance of Venter's new microbe, as well as
cloned, transgenic and chimeric animals and designer babies. More than 30
years ago, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote expectantly of the
possibility of designing "a useful protein from first premises, replacing
evolution by art". Recombinant DNA techniques are increasingly being
viewed as the "artist's" tools of the postmodern era. With the new
technologies, human beings assume the role of creative artists,
continually transforming evolution into works of art.

Already in laboratories around the world researchers are creating new
hybrid creatures that have never before existed. Scientists have fused
together the embryos of a sheep and goat, two totally unrelated species,
and given birth to a new creature called a Geep, a chimeric animal with
the head of a sheep and the body of a goat. The anti-freeze gene in a
flounder fish has been inserted into the genetic code of a tomato plant,
to make it resistant to freezes. Human growth hormone genes, the human
immune system and even human brain tissue have been inserted into the
genetic blueprint of mice embryos. The mature mice express these human
genes in their bodies. The mice with the human growth hormone genes grew
twice as big as ordinary mice. Scientists have even grown human skin,
pancreases and breasts in laboratory jars.

Other scientists have inserted the nucleus of a human cell into a cow egg
whose own nucleus was removed in a partially successful effort to create
a quasi-human embryo. Spider genes have been inserted into goat embryos
and the mature goats produce spider silk in their milk. And Japanese
scientists have just announced that they are planning to use tissue from
the legs and testicles of a dead mammoth to clone the extinct creature
and "display" it at an ice age wildlife park in Siberia. Are these
"beings" works of engineering, or works of art?

In their near limitless possibilities to reconstruct and reinvent the
body, move DNA across species boundaries, erase the genetic past and pre-
program the genetic future, the new geneticists bring the biology of life
squarely in line with the new protean spirit. Life, long thought of as
God's handiwork, and more recently viewed as a random process guided by
the "invisible hand" of natural selection, is now reimagined as an
artistic medium. Freeman Dyson writes: "It is impossible to set any limit
to the variety of physical forms that life may assume. It is conceivable
that in another 1,010 years, life could evolved away from flesh and blood
and become embodied in an interstellar black cloud ... or in a sentient

A growing number of people already see themselves - their very corporeal
being - as the ultimate work of art, a continually metamorphosing
"project", taking on new shapes, forms and attributes. The widespread
popularity of cosmetic surgery, psychotropic mood-enhancement drugs and
personal therapies of all kinds are a reflection of the new sense of self
as an unfinished work of art.

By masquerading as artistic tools, genetic engineering technologies
create the illusion that the new era somehow represents a creative
renaissance of sorts. Rather, the new technologies threaten to smother
the artistic sensibility altogether. Art, historian Lewis Mumford reminds
us, "is essentially an expression of love, in all of its many forms ...
in contrast to technics, which is mainly concerned with the enlargement
of human power". Genetic engineering represents the ultimate enlargement
of human power. Making decisions over what genes to insert, recombine or
delete in an effort to alter, transform and redesign oneself is less an
artistic expression then, and more a technological prescription. It is
not art, but artifice.

Now that we can begin re-engineering ourselves, we mistakenly think of
the new technological manipulation as a creative act, when in reality it
is merely a set of choices created in a laboratory and purchased in the
marketplace. The biotech revolution is the ultimate consumer playground,
offering us the freedom to recast our own biological endowment and the
rest of nature to suit whatever whim might move us. More importantly, the
new genetic technologies grant us a godlike power to select the
biological futures of the many beings who come after us. This is a new
and dangerous form of hi-tech eugenics whose cold engineering edge has
been softened by the guise of artful expression. Beware of Venter's new
creations. They may be less a harbinger of a second renaissance and more
a reflection of the "brave new world" that Aldous Huxley warned of more
than 70 years ago.

Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Biotech Century (Victor Gollancz, 1998)