When you are out in front, it is tough to get a fair hearing of your concerns because those behind are busy talking among themselves. They are sure they know where they are going and what is ahead, because they talk amongst each other and develop a consensus. Today, they are wrong. Listen up for a second. I work long hours to write what I write.
It seems every day we read of yet another mountain of funding going toward the race to get in on the biotech revolution's fantastic promises of profits, jobs, inventions, cures, wealth and panacea. Who is fooling whom here? Utopia is a long way off, and few should doubt, given the current state of the world, it lays less distant in the past, than it does in the future.
Science is driving this bus we are all on. And yet all scientists claim they are amoral. This is one of the great fictions of the scientific community, that science is amoral. This great lie casts a pall of moral immunity over the scientific of every genre. However, everything we fear most came to us from science. I am in excellent scientific company with this assertion.
So get real.
This biotech thing is an obvious peril in every direction. And when we are all caught by it, scientists will blame the immoral results of their publicly funded research, upon humanity.
The morally inept secular humanist press and the more penurious financial press are only concerned with making money off selling the public this biotech tripe.
Those who stand to benefit from the wash of federal and venture capital dollars pouring into biotech have explained to the eagerly credulous press in impossible detail the benefits of delving into the genome and biotech at breakneck speed and with reckless abandon. But, has anyone really thought this through? No.
No one should fool themselves. You can fool most of the people some of the time, but this time; I am not one of them. I am speaking up. I am speaking up from the front of the pack, so listen. Consider.
This is not like your average invention, like nuclear power, chemical pesticides, TNT or planned obsolescence. This is different. This invention has a life all its own.
If you hesitate with my assessment here, consider what society is doing to male children with Ritalin in schools today, today at the elementary school in your own hometown. Government priorities change, and rarely in any way favorable. And make no mistake about it; government is the least moral entity on the planet. Biotech is the government's tool. That is a clear and unmistakable given.
The simplest danger of something perilous escaping one of these biotech labs is enough for me to call a halt to this and every other genetic experiment. It could be the new AIDS, another flu pandemic, or simply the ever greater proliferation of what are essentially bio-warfare technologies being made available by academic institutions and research centers.
The possible danger inherent to these technologies is impossible to predict, which is really the problem here. My own mind experiments are simply insufficient to begin to presage the probable and possible negative effects of the bio-engineering technology being created for good and with a far greater propensity for incredible evil. The average citizen would be left with a cold chill were it not for the propaganda that bolsters confidence in this thing.
Ironically, my mind experiments are no less sufficient than those of the proponents seeking ideas about possible positive results that can then be used to hype and spin funding out of society for their industry geared toward developing biotech. No. This is a kidnap of our humanity going on here.
And, it is happening. It is happening not because there is a popular movement to pay for these immoral ventures, immoral because they make gambles for which the wager is the future of our species and of the world. Our society is funding this irresponsibly immoral gamble, the wager for which is the very future of humanity, because it is being sold to us with money that the government has already put into the hands of those who are doing the selling of this immoral pursuit. The funding process has even taken on a life of its own.
I ask you, what is the rush? Is not life good enough?
State governments too are getting in on this immoral gamble because they see possible riches that might come into their own evil bureaucratic kingdoms. But messing with genetics is not playing Tidily-Winks with computer chips. We are tinkering with ourselves. We are tinkering with all nature all around us.
These scientists are intent upon playing god, when they have the mind, the social skills and responsibility of no more than a fairly intelligent ape. They already have things growing in their labs that no fallible human being should possess.
The Mathematical Probability of Something Going Wrong
There are roughly, and only a rough count is known, some 30,000 human genes. Given the simplest equation, that might mean there are 30,000 squared for a possible interactive component to the puzzle from which these biotech engineers are attempting to pull a panacea out of the genetic hat. Those odds are not very promising given the associated risks.
While the reality is likely far more complicated, 30,000 squared is 900,000,000 possible interactions among the genes of the human genome.
If gene interactions support a cubed relationship, the number of possible relationships jumps to 27 billion possible relationships of 1,2, or 3 genes among the estimated 30,000. There is no known reason to suggest the exponential value of the relationships of genes does not rest in reality even higher and more complex still. Enumerating the numbers and probabilities for catastrophe is already beyond the scope of the comprehension of the human mind.
As an individual, we are, when it is all boiled down to mathematics, the product of 30,000,000 to the power of 30,000,000. And, no species is made just of genes. Genes interact with themselves and the products of those interactions interact with the environment created by the genes as life develops and continues to live as genes continue to interact. Assertions about causality here are wholly specious.
The polar bear and the pygmy have something in common. They are both at one far end of the genetic possibilities of their respective species. In the realm of Darwinist understanding, I doubt anyone has considered just how variable a gene pool of a species must be in order for it to survive over geologic time. And no one can comprehend everything concerning what Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley put forth far too simply as just survival of the fittest.
Both the popular and the scientific press are far too credulous of all science claims. They always have been, and they always will be. This is especially true of the claims of medicine and bio-engineering.
Examine closely the example of Doctor Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University who has been recently convicted of outright fraud in his stem cell research. Doctor Hwang is not the tip of an iceberg. That would be putting it rather too mildly.
Doctor Hwang is the canary in the coalmine, the very coalmine in that we all live and breathe.
Doctor Hwang's fate was sealed not because Korean scientists are bigger liars than other scientists around the world. Doctor Hwang was publicly exposed because there were those around him who hadn't fully learned the Mad Cow Disease lesson of keeping their mouths shut when science runs afoul of what the public needs to know about what scientists know.
All this FrankenFunding by the government has to stop. We must take a measure of our human selves. Is the world so desperate for miracle cures, we would choose to risk the end of the world for the remote possibility someone will find one? More than 98% of the world's population could not afford any such cure even if one were invented. That is the reality.
It is in the interest of all scientists to stop it, because when bio-engineering creates a Frankenstein that runs amuck causing mayhem and fear in the general population, it is all scientists who will suffer the popular consequence. An admonition against scientific crimes against humanity carries with it the same proscription given to soldiers.
Soldiers cannot simply claim they were following orders. As scientists, this responsibility is yours too. It is your world, is it not?
The severest criticism I make here is against all scientists. Scientists have refused to accept their own moral responsibilities.
These scientists know they have every reason to step in and say, Look, these biotech engineers have bit off way more than it is scientifically possible to either control or guaranty against catastrophically apocalyptic dangers. They are likely to destroy all humanity and, if not, these scientists will surely make life immensely more miserable for everyone in the future. But few have stepped forward thus.
The scientists of humankind should not be reticent now. Speak up! Refuse the orders that will send you to the gallows!
Scientists are not amoral in their negligence. They are immoral by their complicit silence and, by their willingness to tread where they know no one should be permitted to tread. This is a gamble wagering that which is all of ours and not theirs alone. This biotech step is no toe into the pond. It is a Gold Rush stampede we are seeing, a stampede of scientific lemmings ready to push humanity itself off a cliff in the hope of finding one soul that might fly.
The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.
I discovered the moral imperative last year. The moral imperative fills in completely the blank in the Categorical Imperative of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant left his Categorical Imperative void when he died puzzled by it and ignorant of it in 1804. The moral imperative flows seamlessly from the cogito. The moral imperative is a huge philosophic breakthrough, even if I came upon it simply out of my own luck. The moral imperative comes from my own modestly scientific mind.
The moral imperative is very easy for every scientist with a scientific mind to use and, to comprehend exactly why it is absolutely true, 100% of the time. There simply is no excuse for letting this genetic engineering suicide bomb go off on this crowded planet.
There no longer can be any pretense that scientists are protected by a claim of amorality. Scientists, live up to your moral responsibilities, or face the social consequences that will catch up to all of you sooner or, later.
Today the popular moral consciousness is concerned with war criminals.
If scientists do not meet their moral responsibilities the popular social consciousness will be demanding prosecution of scientific criminals for crimes against humanity in exactly the same fashion as society demands prosecution today for war criminals. There is no difference.
The great scientific charade of amoral infallibility is over for scientists. Philosophy and morality has caught up with you. And if you keep up with the phony pretense, all the Gold Medals of all the world's Nobel Laureates could soon become no more than weights holding down scientific corpses on the bottom of a river.
Scientists, this American Philosopher has spoken in as kind and gentle words with which I am capable about these things. By these words here, I mean to say in no uncertain terms, drop everything you are doing, right now.
You have something very important to tell the people of the world. It is time to tell everyone the truth about what you have been doing, and, confess the crimes against humanity you have been committing.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
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