The genetic manipulation of plants, animals and microbes : the social and ethical issues for consumers : a discussion paper / by Roger Straughan.

  • Straughan, Roger.
Date:
1989
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The genetic manipulation of plants, animals and microbes : the social and ethical issues for consumers : a discussion paper / by Roger Straughan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    2. Genetic manipulation assumes a reductionist view of life, encouraging us to adopt the chemist's perspective and look upon all forms of life as just dna: ...the important unit of life is no longer the organism, but rather the gene.... From this reductionist perspective, life is merely the aggregate representation of the chemicals that give rise to it and therefore they see no ethical problem whatsoever in transferring one, five or a hundred genes from one species into the hereditary blueprint of another species. For they truly believe that they are only transferring chemicals coded in the genes and not anything unique to a specific animal. By this kind of reasoning, all of life becomes desacralized. All of life becomes reduced to a chemical level and becomes available for manipulation (3). 3. Genetic manipulation breaches barriers and boundaries between species which Nature has set up through the . process of evolution to prevent genetic interactions between species, possibly for some overriding evolutionary reason (4). Alternatively, the creationist view is that all existing species were created once and for all by God. and attempting to modify this arrangement constitutes a form of blasphemy Both perspectives see species as sacred, either in evolutionary or creationist terms, and genetic manipulation as a violation of this sacredness: The entire notion of a species as a separate, recognizable entity with a unique nature or telos becomes arcane once we begin recombining genetic traits across mating walls (5). 4. Genetic manipulation distorts mankind's relationship with the rest of nature. By engineering plants and animals for our own purposes, we come to assume that we own other life forms: genetic engineering represents the concrétisation of the absolute claim that animals belong to us and exist for us (6). The possibility of patenting new life forms encourages this arrogance: what hubris in the human species! We can claim to invent a pig because we put a human gene in genetic code - as our invention? We own a patent on it? (7). 5. Genetic manipulation of animals involves unnatural experiments and can cause suffering. 'Transgenic animals - for example, a sheep/goat chimaera - can be 28