GenEthics and Religion - Группа авторов

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different from that of the historian or the reader of historical literature who interprets a text as a testimony that has been written under different circumstances. But mind that this way of speaking about texts in genetics treats the interpretation of DNA as a text, not the sequence of DNA.

      To see description as interpretation can perhaps also help to liberate our minds from old images and doctrines. We can play with metaphors more easily when we are aware of what they do, with which questions they resonate, and what they do not do. Living in highly technologized worlds where most things are constructed according to plans and instructions are abundant, it is no surprise that biologists started from the question how the organism is constructed according to instructions or a plan. Today we obviously need new metaphors for the genome-cell relationship that make better sense but are still easy to grasp. Many things are possible.

      We could, for example, see the genome like a library. A library is – in contrast to a book – not an organized text, not a message with a stable content. The meaning that readers take out of a library depends on which books they are picking, which books they are leaving behind, what proportion of the books they check out they are reading, in which order they are reading them, what they read, hear or see from elsewhere, and on what they make of the texts they are using. The library metaphor is, however, also lopsided, because libraries still contain books that were written by authors, whereas the genome is not a written text at all. But when we put the emphasis on the side of the reading act, the comparison is more accurate. The cell ‘reads’ its genome like readers read when they are selectively and creatively using a library.

      Or we can compare the mechanisms of how words gain meaning in spoken or written language. There is a similar phenomenon that we know well in language to that of the multifunctionality of genes or proteins. Words have multiple meanings; they are polysemous. Polysemy means the capacity for a sign to have various meanings. How can we understand each other with words if the words can mean different things? The answer is that one word can say different things, but which meaning is in the foreground depends on the context in which it is used.

      When we now look back on the history of the genetic program we see that it was an attractive preconception about the meaning of the genome drawing on the language of computers, whose attractiveness can be explained in the historical and cultural context in the second half of the 20th century. It was essentially an anticipated story of how the genes work, invented before experimental knowledge in developmental genetics was available. Lily Kay has written the ‘history of the genetic code’ in a book with the ambiguous title ‘Who Wrote the Book of Life?’ [4].

      The book of life was meant to be a book written by nature. But it turns out that it is rather written by humans, scientists in particular, but not just by them. We have seen politicians play their role as well. This writing, it emerges, happens not on the level of the genes but on the level of the explanations that have been promulgated and were selected because they seemed to be more meaningful than others.

      When scientists today explain genetics to the general public there is a risk that they use the same old preconceptions over and over again, just because they feel or anticipate that this is what the public ‘out there’ will understand. They might be right that it is the program view and the family of sign metaphors that they do know ‘out there’. But this is nothing other than what, a few years earlier, the public was told by scientists to believe. I believe that the storyteller (in the best sense of the word: the scientist truly explaining genetics to the general public) has a responsibility to be not just rhetorical but authentic.

      We Do Our Genes

      It is easy to see that genome interpretations do have ethical implications. Space allows me only to mention some. Consider pre-symptomatic genetic tests. Within the framework of program genomics, a mutation in a cancer-related gene is understood as information that the body carries and that instructs the cells to make tumors, or, in the case of mutated tumor suppressor genes, as a ‘fault’ in the information that tells the body how to suppress tumor cells that might emerge. In the framework of systems genomics it looks different. The same mutation in a cancer-related gene is an indicator for an elevated likelihood that the body under certain circumstances can get cancer, or an indicator that the body's capacities to prevent cancer are weakened. Within this interpretation, the mutation does not indicate ‘information for making cancer’ or a ‘fault in the information on how to suppress cancer’. There is no information ‘for cancer’ in the body right now. The patient does not walk away with the idea that ‘I have a fault in me’, but knows about a risky, even dangerous condition and hopefully about possible precautions to take.5 The practical measures that are recommendable will not be different, but the relationship of the patient to his or her body will be different. This has implications for the language used in genetic counseling, and also for the ideas of what ‘good counseling’ means.

      ‘The potentiality to become a male or female human adult is due to the biological program contained in the genome’.

      And therefore, he argues, it is not the gametes that are entitled to moral and legal protection but the embryo and the fetus, right from its beginning. Or read Otfried Höffe who argues in a similar way:

      In the framework of systems, obviously, this argument does not work. To recognize this not necessarily changes our ethical attitudes of care and parental responsibility, which we owe to embryos. It will not make them freely accessible for research, because there are other grounds for responsibility as well. But nevertheless, it will change the reasons why philosophers can defend a responsible legal framework for embryo research. And other positions might be less dogmatic and allow more freedom for individual ethical judgment.7

      Bioethics, I want to conclude, needs a contextual hermeneutics of the body, of genes, of cellular systems, and of nature, which is methodically and topically not separate from the hermeneutics of traditions, art, discourses and morality. This bioethics that society needs cannot be a shallow kind of ‘applied ethics’ where a certain moral dogma is taken for granted and ‘applied’ to a practical dilemma. Society needs a bioethics that is part of broad practical philosophy and works closely with the social sciences and humanities. Philosophy needs to go into the world and to work in interdisciplinary collaborations with social and cultural studies. It also needs to learn from people out there in the situations, who live those new kinds of dilemmas, who feel where and how moral questions arise. In the practical circumstances surrounding biotechnologies or biomedicine, the deepest questions about what is ‘good’, what is our desire for ‘a good and fulfilled life with others and for the others’ in a social and natural environment arise. Questions about what are ‘just institutions’, and what is ‘ethical governance’ in bio-societies arise. Bioethics therefore also needs a strong theoretical component reflecting independently the needs of society with regard to the conceptual tools and methods used. In this respect, biosciences are a fruitful soil on which ethics can grow.

      Footnotes

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