(In Hindsight 40/May 25-30, 2010)
Scientists have now created life in the laboratory. Or have they? A number of people are venting their objections to that view of Dr. Craig Venter’s work.
Do we have, in Venter, an inventor of life? Or has he merely “replaced one of its motors”, as the Vatican put it? Venter admits, “We created a new cell. It’s alive. But we didn’t create life from scratch.” Basically his team scratched around for a bacterial cell and replaced its genome with a synthetic chromosome based on that of a different bacterial parasite (which seems to have got a taste of its own medicine!).
It’s the first known self-reproducing organism with no living ancestor. So it won’t be spending next Christmas with its family, but probably locked in a cold dark freezer in Maryland. I don’t even know if they keep any turkeys in there.
Thus it wasn’t an immaculate conception, or anything equally freaky. As mentioned above it was ‘born’ in Maryland, not of Mary. It came from the shell of another cell. The next challenge is said to be entirely recreating an organism out of non-biogenic molecules.
If it works, will we call it creation or idle recreation? Suppose that in the future, scientists produce an artificial man out of bits of other men, or even non-life chemicals: will he really be a man? Will he have a conscious mind, or be an unthinking robot powered by electrons shooting through his brain? Would there be any way to tell?
The sad truth, it seems, is that we are all machines anyway. Scientists have shown that our ‘conscious’ decisions begin at the level of individual neurons in the brain, more than half a second before we make (or become conscious of) those conscious choices. Moreover, there are periods when people ‘black out’ but still perform normal tasks as if they were consciously present.
If you have the time (and are enough of a nutcase), try this experiment: pass an electric current through the parietal cortex of a good friend’s brain (he’d have to be a very good friend to allow you to stick electrodes on him), and you could create what he’d believe were ‘conscious’ decisions in his mind.
This is treacherous territory. If a politician got hold of such knowledge, he might try to manipulate people to vote for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party of the UK, or the Beer Lovers’ Party of Russia; unless his own (professionally inactive) brain restrained him. If someone like Mariah Carey did, she might force us, against what we thought was our will, to sit through one of her concerts.
A more legitimate fear is that of bioterrorism. What if Bin Laden came up with a grim germ wearing a tiny turban and shouting ‘Death to all!’ before spewing noxious chemicals and possibly bad poetry?
Returning to the question of free will or lack thereof, there’s no need to feel depressed about it. In fact, you’d better hope you don’t have the kind of brain that’s programmed to get upset about being programmed. What’s the point of saying, “Dammit, my mind isn’t as free as I thought!” Better say, “What bloody difference does it make so long as I think I think!”