Originally published 15 December 1997
A 63-year-old California woman gives birth to a child conceived with donor egg and sperm.
Then, septuplets are born to an Iowa mom on fertility drugs, and kept alive during their precarious first weeks of life by a massive intervention of state-of-the-art technology.
Next come reports of ready-made human embryos, available at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. Apparently, any infertile couple with $2,750 to spend can pick a frozen fertilized egg “off-the-rack” for implantation into the woman’s womb — with the opportunity to choose the physical, social, and ethnic pedigree of the embryo.
And, of course, there’s the business of cloning, which behind the scenes must surely be moving closer to human application.
Bobbie and Kenny McCaughey, the Iowa parents, thank God for their seven babies, but surely credit — or blame — for these modern miracles must go to the scientists who wrest from nature the secrets of life, and to the technologists who apply this knowledge for human benefit.
However, our joy for every infertile couple blessed with artificially-assisted offspring must be mitigated by the nagging worry that, in this instance, science and technology have raced ahead of our capacity as a society to think about where we are going, and whether or not we want to go there.
Ten years ago, in the journal Nature, Erwin Chargaff, one of the grand old men of reproductive science, warned us to back away from human embryo experimentation. In words thundering with indignation, he lashed out at fellow scientists who “stick [their] clumsy fingers into the incredibly fine web of human fate.”
“Scientific curiosity is not an unbounded good,” wrote Chargaff, who is now 92 years old. “Restraint in asking necessary questions is one of the sacrifices that even the scientist ought to be willing to make to human dignity.”
This is strong stuff — heretical within the scientific community — from a biochemist whose work at Columbia University in the late 1940s helped lay the foundations for unraveling the secrets of DNA.
Chargaff’s tragedy-filled life prepared him for the role of science gadfly.
His childhood in Austria must have seemed like the last golden years of a more civilized era. He was watching the sons of Kaiser Wilhelm II play tennis when news came of the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, an event that plunged all of Europe into the darkness of World War I.
He spent the years between the wars in Vienna. Torn between science and literature, he drifted into chemistry, as later he drifted into biochemistry. He was forced to leave Europe by the rise of the Nazis. Again darkness descended. His mother was deported from Vienna into the oblivion of the death camps.
In his autobiography, Chargaff says of his life: “In the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo depicts the creation of man, God’s finger and that of Adam are separated by a short space. That distance I called eternity; and there, I felt, I was sent to travel.”
It is generally accepted in science that all knowledge is good, or at the very least morally neutral. Researchers commonly dismiss ethical questions about their work as misdirected; it is not knowledge, but the application of knowledge that must be judged moral or immoral, they say.
But Chargaff is wise enough to know that what can be done, will be done — somewhere, sometime — and that scientists who make fundamental discoveries bear a measure of responsibility for the excesses of those who apply them.
His Cassandralike misgivings are conspicuous by their uniqueness. In the ten years since his cautionary cri de coeur in Nature, I cannot recall another scientist speaking out for restraint in research with such Jovian indignation.
In those same ten years, a lot of murky water has passed under the bridge in reproductive research. Much of what Chargaff foresaw has come to pass, including the buying and selling of ready-made embryos. More is certainly to come.
He particularly worried about the mass production and industrial exploitation of human embryos. He wrote: “What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, a molecular Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.”.
Chargaff is clearly a man who believes with Goya that the dream of reason can bring forth monsters.
Many of us will not agree with his bleak assessment of human nature, and we certainly do not want to return to a time when human life was the helpless plaything of disease, infertility, and death. But all of us, scientists and non-scientists, should value his voice.
“A balance that does not tremble cannot weigh,” Chargaff writes in his autobiography. And he adds: “A man who does not tremble cannot live.”
