Monday, September 10, 2007
Dr. James Watson's Contradicting Statements on Ethics
I greatly appreciate the efforts that the Houston Holocaust Museum has done putting on the lecture series "Science and Medicine: After the Holocaust". Both the speakers, Dr. James Watson and Dr. Eric Kandel, were great. But for me the most interesting thing in the lecture was Watson's notion of "good" genes and "bad" genes and that somehow "the guys of Nazi Germany were not like us" in some special way. I was troubled by Watson's vocabulary and tone, when in part, he was there to confess the eugenics "wrongs" of Cold Spring Harbor from past times (1908'ish) and to which institution he is now president. Nazi Germany was not particularly backward, especially in science. In fact the lecture series is to remind us of that! The vocabulary in the discussion maybe at the root of the mislabeling or misperception. For example Watson speculated that genes "may well make a person dispositioned to criminal activity", which if one believed is true, that would presumably label that group of genes "bad". Some of those genes may in fact be biological related to some signaling pathway that "endeavors people to deep love and loyalty" (my hypothetical speculation). I believe that whole line of reasoning is flawed. Genes are genes, and have a phenotype (to the extent that it can be classified and quantitatively measured) but do not absolve a persons moral responsibility. People do "good" and "bad" in the context of the biology encoded in genes and experience, but human history encoded in literature would testify that each persons response to a similar genetic "predisposition" (I hate the phrase… need a new one!) is as divers as the challenges people face.
http://www.nodussolutions.com/MedicalEthics/
I greatly appreciate the efforts that the Houston Holocaust Museum has done putting on the lecture series "Science and Medicine: After the Holocaust". Both the speakers, Dr. James Watson and Dr. Eric Kandel, were great. But for me the most interesting thing in the lecture was Watson's notion of "good" genes and "bad" genes and that somehow "the guys of Nazi Germany were not like us" in some special way. I was troubled by Watson's vocabulary and tone, when in part, he was there to confess the eugenics "wrongs" of Cold Spring Harbor from past times (1908'ish) and to which institution he is now president. Nazi Germany was not particularly backward, especially in science. In fact the lecture series is to remind us of that! The vocabulary in the discussion maybe at the root of the mislabeling or misperception. For example Watson speculated that genes "may well make a person dispositioned to criminal activity", which if one believed is true, that would presumably label that group of genes "bad". Some of those genes may in fact be biological related to some signaling pathway that "endeavors people to deep love and loyalty" (my hypothetical speculation). I believe that whole line of reasoning is flawed. Genes are genes, and have a phenotype (to the extent that it can be classified and quantitatively measured) but do not absolve a persons moral responsibility. People do "good" and "bad" in the context of the biology encoded in genes and experience, but human history encoded in literature would testify that each persons response to a similar genetic "predisposition" (I hate the phrase… need a new one!) is as divers as the challenges people face.
http://www.nodussolutions.com/MedicalEthics/
Comments:
Hi John - these are my few cents on this "good genes" vs "bad genes" debate: one of the biggest problems/ challenges for modern science is in precisely understanding in its entirety, how our gene regulatory networks function, and how (if at all) the sum total of human behavior plus thinking plus consciousness etc can be linked to the genome function. This is a very fuzzy/grey area and the entire scientific community ought to be extremely cautious in making interpretations without substantial evidence. In my opinion, the techniques at our disposal are just not adequate to understand all of life in its entirety. Therefore, the statements of men like Dr.Watson need be taken with generous doses of salt. There are questions such as "Can our genome alone explain how we manage to keep things in our memory ?", "how does one remember incidents from the past, say even childhood with enormous clarity ?" - given that proteins are the ultimate endproducts of our genome, and given that proteins do not have a long shelf-life, can our 'long-term' memory related to consciousness be linked with the 'genome-transcriptome-proteome' cycle ? I hope you understand what am trying to address here - therefore, as of now, the mind is a conundrum and how it acts and does not, is still a mystery - some day science might be able to explain, but at the moment, we just are not equipped to make inferences leave alone conclusions.
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