With Neither Fear nor Trembling
Amy Laura Hall
October 1, 2000
We threw out our television several years back, and I often find myself a few days behind in the news. So when a reporter called my office for a reaction to President Clinton's announcement about the genome project, I was dumbfounded. "He said what?" I asked incredulously. "'Today we are learning the language in which God created life,'" the reporter read again. After a long pause, I suggested that Clinton was badly in need of a Southern Baptist refresher course on sin and the wrath of God. "How can we know that we are not instead toying with the tools of Satan?" I asked the reporter. At this point, he decided I was some strange, younger version of Dana Carvey's Church Lady and quickly ended the interview.
The president's speech epitomizes much of the problem with our national conversation about the Human Genome Project. We lack a sense of peril. Clinton dutifully mentions the "ethical, moral, and spiritual dimension of the power we now possess," but he then goes on to specify "equality" and "privacy" as our chief moral concerns. Fair distribution of this technology and protection against discrimination apparently warrant some notice. But as long as we all have equal access to the goods of genetic research, and as long as no individual suffers "discrimination" based on the results of genetic testing, we may continue apace. As long as we can "guarantee" that these two criteria are met, all is well. What our president does not ask, what so few ask, is whether we should be on this road in the first place. He questions neither whether the perfectionist goals of the project are morally licit, nor whether we can ever adequately guarantee that this new form of technology will not be used to exploit the vulnerable and discard the ...
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