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The Hippocratic oath is based on the notion that physicians will above all else do no harm to others. It is explicitly stated that this concept is first, and everything else follows that. Don’t subject prisoners of warm to hypothermia and hyperbaric experiments. Don’t vivisect thieves or debtors to better understand anatomy. Don’t separate twins to study genetics. But what if the people who employ a physician do harm to others; what role does a doctor play then?
When I was a young boy, my grandmother sat me on her knee and breathed words to me that I have always carried with me. I remember it distinctly: geckos crawled on the screens of her porch between the 2x4s stained to look like red cedar. The shuffleboard court just beyond shimmered through the balmy air, illuminated blindingly by the white sunlight that shone down on her little patch of Fort Myers.
Carried on fumes of gin and the jangly rattle of her thick bracelets, she said to me, “Josh, it will always be a bad idea to clone the Neanderthals. I know you don’t know what those are right now, but you will someday. And I want you to remember; no matter how they want to bring them back, it’s a bad idea. The Neanderthals died off for a reason.”
There’s a battle being waged in the field of bioethics that I hadn’t heard of recently. The transhuman movement, dedicated to using technology to effectively remove humanity from the grips of the genetic crap shoot that is evolution, is caught in the middle of a dispute. Particularly, once we’ve removed ourselves from Darwinian evolution through a mastery of genetic engineering, will we still be humans? Even more particularly, will those humans who choose to opt out of genetically altering themselves or their offspring — and it’s expected there will be a sizable group who object to tampering with nature — be enslaved and/or slaughtered by enhanced posthumans?
Last Minute Christmas Gift Idea: Your Lungs and Eyeballs
by Josh Clark | December 23, 2009
(Sorry in advance for the really, really long post. In case you don’t make it to the bottom, happy holidays!)
Back when I was a paranoid little raver kid in the early 1990s, my friends and I maintained a firm belief that it was a bad idea to register as an organ donor. The logic went that if we ever ended up in the ER in need of some talented surgery, a physician who noted we were organ donors might take less than heroic measures to save our lives.
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