a crucial role in the politics and ethics of embryo research (stem cells, cloning, etc.) is potentiality [33]. Many bioethicists who defend this argument base it on the genome. The embryo, after fusion of the egg and sperm, carries the full genome for the individual. Alfonso Gómez-Lobo [34] writes:
‘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:
‘Was Kritiker als “blossen Zellhaufen” abtun wollen, trägt von Anfang an, als befruchtete Eizelle mit doppeltem Chromosomensatz, das volle genetische Programm für die Entwicklung eines Menschen in sich. Das Programm liegt tatsächlich rundum vor, in seiner notwendigen und zureichenden Gestalt’ [35, p 137].6
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
1 The ‘blue’ stems from the photochemical reaction leading to Prussian blue that is used in the cyanotype process which was developed by photographer and astronomer Sir John Herschel in 1842. For a century, blueprint was the only available low-cost process for copying drawings [11].
2 Elsewhere [18], I have argued that a phenotypic ‘program’ cannot consistently be said to be a program, because the term program is based on the distinction between prescription and realization.
3 See our collection [31].
4 Another line of critique against the genetic program view would be that it naturalizes its metaphor. The assumption is that programs are not just our ‘way of understanding’ but that genes ‘really are’ programs, i.e. that they ‘work as’ programs.
5 Thanks to Lorraine Cowley, herself a genetic counselor, now social researcher in genetics, who brought to my attention that the usual language in genetic counseling sessions in Britain includes ‘genetic fault’ for mutations and ‘instruction book’ for the genome.
6 ‘What critics want to dispatch as ‘just a heap of cells’ in fact carries the whole genetic program for the development of a human being, from its very beginning as a fertilized egg cell. The program is integrally present, in its necessary and sufficient form’.
7 Implications for morally interpreting the role of the embryo donor in stem cell research are pointed out by Scully and Rehmann-Sutter [36].
References
1 Giorgi A, Giorgi B: Phenomenology; in Smith JA (ed): Qualitative Psychology. A Practical Guide to Research Methods. London, Sage, 2003,pp 25-50.
2 Quine WV: On empirically equivalent systems of the world. Erkenntnis 1975;9: 313-328.
3 Ricoeur P: The Course of Recognition. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005.
4 Kay LE: Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000.
5 Keller EF: Decoding the genetic program. Or, some circular logic in the logic of circularity; in Beurton P, Falk R, Rheinberger H-J (eds): The Concept of the Gene in Development and Evolution. Historical and Epistemological Perspectives. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000,pp 159-177.
6 Angier N: Scientists and Philosophers Find that ‘Gene’ Has a Multitude of Meanings. New York Times, 11 November 2008.
7 Zimmer C: Now: The Rest of the Genome. New York Times, 11 November 2008.
8 Nerlich B, Hellsten I: Genomics: shifts in metaphorical landscape between 2000 and 2003. New Genet Soc 2004;23: 255-268.
9 Gadamer H-G: Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, ed 5. Tübingen, Mohr, 1986.
10 White House Office of Press Secretary: President Clinton Announces the Completion of the First Survey of the Entire Human Genome, June 25, 2000. www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/project/clinton1.shtml; accessed March 2, 2010.
11 Ware M: Cyanotype. The History, Science and Art of Photographic Printing in Prussian Blue. London, Science Museum, National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, 1999.
12 http://www.genome.gov/10001356; accessed March 2, 2010.
