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Genetics and the Inhuman in Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
For several decades, molecular genetics have given rise to a new order of phenomena, profoundly disturbing the classic ideas that men have of their identity and their place in the universe. What becomes of the classic figure of man when hybridizations permit the systematic crossing of the frontiers between species? What do the possibilities opened by cloning and especially the grafting of foreign genes in mammals mean to us? What happens to the classic structures of relationship when the introduction of foreign genes into the cells of embryos allows us to obtain individuals that are heirs of the genetic patrimony of eight or twelve different parents? The list of all these strange phenomena would be long, and the disquieting nature of the results thus obtained gives spectacular effects that, for the scientific mind, are not satisfactory. It is thus in a different perspective that we must reflect on the rapid irruption of this new order of phenomenality brought about through the genetic approach.
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- Copyright © 1985 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 For example, experiments at the University of Pennsylvania, consisting of cloning the promoter of the gene of the metalothioneine of the mouse and fusing it with the gene of the growth hormone of the rat or man. DNA is injected, the purified recombinant obtained from mouse embryos at the unicellular stage and in this way transgenic mice are obtained, two to three times larger than the normal species.
2 Max Planck, The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics, (1929), quoted by Hannah Arendt in La Crise de la Culture, "Idées", Gallimard, 1972, p. 345.
3 In fact, many physicists and mathematicians estimate that the time and space paradoxes observed are only paradoxical because of the weakness of the formaliza tions used, an explanatory unification of all phenomena being a fundamental requirement.
4 Hannah Arendt, op. cit., p. 350.
5 Heidegger, Essais et conférences, "La Question de la technique", Gallimard.
6 Antoine Dauchin, L'Oeuf et la poule, Fayard, 1983, p. 28.
7 Lysenko, Agrobiologie, Editions de Moscou, 1953.
8 Ibid.
9 Benno Müller-Hill, Die Philosophen und das Lebendige, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1981; and Tödliche Wissenschaft, Aktuell, "Ro-Ro-Ro", Roh wolt Verlag, 1984.
10 On this subject, see the article entitled "Emigré physicists and the biological revolution" in The Intellectual Migration, Europe-America 1930-1940, ed. by R. Flemming and Baylin, Harvard Univ. Press, 1969; also the study by Michel Morange, "A propos de Schrödinger et la Biologie moléculaire", Fundamenta scientiae, Vol. V, No. 2, 1984; see also our article "Génétique et totalitarisme", ed. by the Centre Georges Pompidou in the collection 1984 et les présents de l'univers informationnel.
11 This obviously presupposes that transformation techniques be perfected, allowing the introduction of foreign DNAs; that we are able to avoid the expulsion, rejection of these DNA fragments by the host-organism, and finally that we can insert these foreign DNA particles in the genome of a bacteria.