Self-eugenics: the creeping illusionising of identity from neurobiology to newgenics

Abstract

No, it had to be sweet/as grass, the kind of stuff that's habit-/forming like all things half-conceived:/ for instance, Adam/anaesthetized, and God, part surgeon, part/cosmic dating service, / taking her out for the first time/to see how it would go (the Bible leaves this part out, / although the Greeks not believing/ in premature withdrawal, left it in)! (1) Eleanor Wilner, 'Candied' Creep, scientists tell us, is 'the slow deformation of a material that occurs when it is held under a constant load, such as the gradual stretching of a piano or violin string'. (2) During creep in metals or metallic alloys, voids form and grow with time accompanied by fundamental changes in the original crystalline structure. This essay is about a different kind of resistless transition--not in brass but in biomedicine and brain science--whereby the organism is being 'deformed' by computational science and 'knowledge engineering' into a synthetic medium. I explore what this steady veering by the life sciences towards the model of information-processing is doing to our everyday attitudes about the body from genetics to consciousness. More specifically, I am interested in the accelerating notion of using performance-enhancing technologies to boost everything from physique to brain performance. (3) In short, the argument of this essay is that information technologies are quietly, automatically, and steadily, transforming us into a culture of self-perfection from the cellular to the gross anatomical level. Since Darwin, it has become increasingly difficult to uphold any concept of species that insists on the permanence and stability of each kind, as Cuvier could still do. If, since 1859, there has been a constant 'species problem', there has also been an accompanying erosion of the foundations of taxonomy. (4) Contemporary biology seems smitten by visions of transmutation and transmutability far exceeding those proposed by Lamarck or Geoffroy de Saint Hilaire. Modern biology first underwent the 'biochemical' turn, then the 'molecular' turn, and now is in the process of making the 'compositionist' (synthetic) turn (5)--raising deep classificatory, epistemological, and even ontological questions not just about the reducibility of the living to chemistry or physics but whether the phenomenon of life can be engineered. Thus, it is not unusual to hear about 'custom-building biological systems' (6) and ambitious plans 'to modify the whole behavior of the cell' by engineering it from the ground up 'rather than tinkering with a handful of genes or tweaking a metabolic pathway or two, as do today's genetic engineers'. (7) Note that the rhetoric is one of constantly breaking new ground in the area of life. In this reckless company, Craig Venter's neo-Darwinian aspiration to assemble a Whole Earth Gene Catalog by collecting the DNA of everything on the planet does not seem extreme. He imagines a 'combinatorial genomics' using existing robotic technologies not only to collect 100,000 new species and tens of millions of new genes but to construct a functioning synthetic genome and to dream up new life forms. (8) Nor does William Hurlbut's proposal to grow teratomas (naturally occurring monsters that grow from an egg and sperm cell but without the balance of gene expression to create an integrated organism) sound bizarre in this context. No doubt it would satisfy the Vatican and conservative theologians that this horrible hodgepodge of organs could never constitute a true embryo destined for a human 'trajectory'. (9) But the fact that scientists would be engineering mutant non-embryos ought to produce more than repugnance. It ought to produce an articulation of the fundamental problem. That is, treating the body as discrete units divorces the parts from the interconnective system in which they inhere and work. These units thus no longer possess a history or belong to something other than the anonymous laboratory which excised, manipulated, or generated them. …