Modern science is not known for its tolerance and inclusion of religion, and the same is true in reverse. This does not mean, however, that they exist as separate spheres, unable to influence each other. Lee Silver, a professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton University, recently explained how biotechnology is shaped and limited in different ways around the world based on religious beliefs.
At the start of his Oct. 11 lecture, Silver stood in front of a slide with three icons to represent the three religious groups he would go on to discuss. A statue of Christ represented the American Christian viewpoint and a picture of the Earth stood in for the post-Christian European belief in nature. A depiction of Buddha captured the “Eastern religion.”
Silver presented two controversial areas, human embryonic stem cell research and genetically modified crops. He said that Christian values reject the former, while freely allowing the latter, while post-Christian values suggest the opposite reaction. Silver believes that Eastern religions tend to be more open to both technologies.
Human embryonic stem cell research is currently off-limits for all federal science funding in the United States, limiting it to well-funded private institutions. Even private research is coming under fire, as legislation is being developed to ban all human stem cell research.
“Congress wants to outlaw this technology because of doctrinal Christian theology,” Silver said.
Despite the fact that embryonic stem cell research is widely regarded as a route towards curing a number of diseases, Silver said that President Bush’s Bioethics Council is firmly opposed to this work. This is because Christian theology insists that something either is or is not human, according to Silver.
“I’m giving you the argument they make,” Silver said. “There is no biological discontinuity all the way back to [a newly formed embryo].”
This means that from the moment a sperm fuses with an egg, all development is gradual and continuous. Christians argue that because the baby that is born human and nothing radical has happened since conception, the embryo must also be human, according to Silver.
Because harvesting embryonic stem cells requires creating an embryo in a Petri dish and disrupting it, Silver said that the majority of the Bioethics Council believes that stem cell researchers are committing murder.
“It’s a pretty solid argument if you just use the logic of the argument,” Silver said.
Silver refuted this approach with an example from evolution. Because evolution is mostly a gradual process, there is a continuous line of change from primitive common ancestors to both humans and modern chimpanzees. Silver said that the logic applied to the development debate would suggest that these primitive, distinct ancestors must also have been human, as no discontinuity took place.
“Unless you’re a creationist,” Silver added.
Silver said that biology does not present a definite threshold at which an embryo or a fetus becomes a person. These boundaries are arbitrary, he said, and are often not drawn by scientists. They are social lines, and society is often more easily swayed by theological arguments than by scientific thought.
Silver then compared the Christian approach to the spiritual attitudes he encountered while traveling in South Eastern Asia with his family. In villages in Sumatra, he found a very different approach to humanity, in which spirits can be passed from one generation to the next.
“In a sense, what we would call genes, they would call spirits.” Silver said. “Spirits gain karma… and make their own future.”
Silver said that embryonic stem cells could be seen as a spiritual conduit through the lens of Eastern religions. This is the reason why there has been little opposition to stem cell research in Asia, including the 2004 announcement that South Korean researchers had successfully cloned human stem cells. One of the South Korean researchers, however, was Christian, complicating Silver’s theory.
In the second part of his lecture, Silver discussed genetically modified crops. American culture does not, as a rule, object to the use of genetically modified organisms (GMO). In Europe, however, the creation of GMOs is often seen as interfering with nature, Silver said.
In the Christian theology, plants and animals were created by God for man’s benefit, according to Silver. Because of this, there is little objection to changing what was given to humanity if it seems advantageous. In the post-Christian ideology, the traditional God has been replaced with a sense of “mother nature” as a guiding force that maintains boundaries between species. When humans use biotechnology to blur those lines, the European mentality considers this to be cruelty, Silver said.
Again, Silver offered a rebuttal to this claim in the form of examples of human modifications of plants and animals that took place tens of thousands of years ago. Corn, for example, was engineered through traditional plant crossing to be more edible and fruitful. Bananas do not exist in the wild, and are completely sterile. They can only be propagated by taking cuttings, the equivalent of cloning. Cow’s milk and sheep’s wool are also products of ancient breeding programs.
“Almost all foods we eat except for fish are creations of humankind,” Silver said. “It’s too late [to stop genetic modification]. We have completely modified the globe, and we can never get back to how it was ten thousand years ago.”
According to Silver, there is no significant difference between classic breeding as a form of genetic modification, and new techniques used in biotechnology. Both have the ability to cross species that would never breed in the wild. Biotechnology is also more transparent, as the exact molecular nature of the exchange is known. Silver said that not all genetic modification is safe or wise, but this should not rule out the entire technology.
Genetically modified organisms, like human stem cell research do not meet with extensive resistance in Asia because of differences in Eastern and Western spirituality, according to Silver.
“Playing god is meaningless when there is no god,” Silver said.
Reaction to Silver’s lecture was generally positive among the audience, which included faculty from multiple science departments. Students asked some questions, but no serious objections to Silver’s work or theories were raised.
Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Scott Holmes said he found the lecture interesting and thought that it related well to his introductory science classes. Holmes gives his students a survey at the start of the semester to see what their response is to issues including genetic modification and cloning.
“A lot of people have a ‘yuck factor,’ a gut response, that says [cloning] is a bad thing,” Holmes said. “I take it as one of my responsibilities to teach these topics in my course and educate, because people do change their minds pretty rapidly and frequently.”
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