The Constitutional Right to Clone
I have been warning anyone who will listen, that the intellectual foundation is being laid to create a constitutional right to conduct scientific research. A new book, Illegal Beings, is touted by its publisher as advocating something akin to that approach. Specifically, the book argues that there is a constitutional right to engage in reproductive cloning.
Science has entered upon a trajectory of anything goes. The primary question thus becomes: Does society have the will to properly regulate science? We had better. Otherwise, science will dominate society.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 7:02 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Thanks for writing, Daniel. I like scientists. A lot.
I am not, however, that fond of the Science Elite because I don't agree with their general utilitarian values. I also worry that scientism is masking itself as science and seeking to impose a value system in the name of being the scientific way.
I don't think you are paying sufficient attention to recent events. The scientific prudence you describe is crumbling, at least in the life sciences. (See my piece on Ian Wilmut wanting to do ES cell research on dying people even though it hasn't been adequately tested for even Stage 1 human trials, for example.)
The American way is to impose democratic checks and balances on all powerful institutions. If there is a constitutional right to "do research," that would permit society from ensuring that scientific research stayed within ethical parameters with which it disagreed. That could result in society and its values dominated by a scientific materialistic view that might well refuse to value the intrinsic worth of human life.
Self regulation has its limits, particularly if the self regulators all tend to agree with each other. Check out some of the spectacular recent failures in the IRB system.
We already see science being corrupted by politicization in the cloning debates and its all out drive to get billions in public funding. When the people come to see science as a special interest and as a consequence, loses respect, those advocates of virtually unfettered research will only have themselves to blame.
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