Exam: Sach- und Gebrauchstext

Natasha Walter, Can Science Save us from Ourselves?

Assignments:

1. Point out the helpful and dangerous aspects of genetic engineering as depicted in this text.

2. Analyse how Mrs Walter presents this report on the decision of the House of Lords made in February 2002.

What kind of language and point of view does she choose and what is their effect?

3. Comment on the writer’s criticism of human beings in their attitude towards nature and the treatment of illnesses and her neglection of ethic aspects.

Can Science Save Us from Ourselves? Natasha Walter

A decision taken yesterday in the venerable atmosphere of the House of Lords would once have sounded as if it had been plucked straight from an Aldous Huxley novel or a Stanley Kubrick film The Lords in their wisdom decided that scientists should be able to dabble in cells taken from cloned human embryos. But given the current rash of tales about ‘designer’ babies and genetic manipulation, such a decision has almost lost its potential to surprise us. Over the past few days we’ve been treated to the story that one baby will be selected so that its genetic material can save its brother and to the tale that another baby has been born after being selected to be free of the gene that predisposed her mother to Alzheimer’s disease.
So much has been talked about designer babies that the public’s perception of what is now possible in genetic science has already way outrun reality. Many people probably believe that if they were given their way, scientists could already clone dozens of dinky copies of themselves, grow embryos to term in plastic wombs outside women’s bodies, manipulate the eye-colour or piano-playing ability of foetuses and, altogether, provide the perfect à la carte baby service.
Couples who can’t conceive naturally are often shocked to realise that doctors cannot just wave a wand and create a baby for them and that fertility treatments still have high failure rates. When you look at the reality of the designer baby stories, what is in fact going on is a lot cruder than the science-fiction dreams. But all the talk about designer babies means that the decision taken by the House of Lords select committee to allow limited research using cloned human embryos hardly feels revolutionary.
This move promises to put Britain in the forefront of stem-cell research, and most people in this country are likely to welcome it. After all, manipulating the very structure of life is exactly what we have come to expect from scientists. People in the Western world are beginning to believe that live should be completely controllable. They are beginning to believe that all babies should be perfect: that nobody should suffer from diseases caused by genetic dysfunction; that research using the cells of embryos will be used to combat disabilities and intractable diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s; that old age itself should one day pretty soon – and hopefully in time for our retirement – be curable.
And why not? If our culture didn’t have this impatient attitude to nature, this arrogant belief that physical and even mental illnesses can always be conquered, where would we be? Still thinking that 40 was a ripe old age and still having a dozen children in the hope that one would survive until adulthood, no doubt. […]
Certainly we in the West can dream of perfect control over our health – we can listen to the tales of dazzling experiments resulting in cloned animals and the possibility of break-throughs that might, one day, make paraplegics walk again and give brain connections back to Ronald Reagan. We can fantasise that we might become a perfect race, each of us taken through a life of absolutely predictable health from a managed birth to a far-off, pain-free trip to the grave.
If you buy into that dream, the Lord’s decision yesterday to allow research using cells from cloned embryos is just part and parcel of a great story of progress. […] As Robert Lanza, the vice-president of medial and scientific development at ACT, said after his company cloned the first human embryo in the US last year. ‘Our intention is not to create cloned human beings, but rather to make life-saving therapies for a wide range of human disease conditions, including diabetes, strokes, cancer, Aids.’ How can one argue with that?
One can’t. But look again at the diseases that he said that cloned-embryo cell research is now expected to deal with: diabetes, strokes, cancer, Aids. And then look at some of the other health stories to have hit the headlines.
The story that, for instance, one in four five-year-old girls is showing early signs of diabetes due to the increase in childhood obesity. Or that a form of diabetes, previously known to affect only overweight adults, is now being identified in children as young as 13 because of their poor diets and lack of exercise. Or that the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, is rising steeply because young people refuse to wear condoms. Or that deaths from alcohol-related car crashes rose sharply last year. Or that young girls and boys are becoming increasingly heavy drinkers. Or that smoking has increased among people aged from 16 to 19.
This is where the dream of total control falls down – not in the achievements of scientists, but in the messy reality of our lives. What do we really want? We may think we want perfect health, a life lived in absolute control. And when we make rational choices for ourselves or for others, of course that’s what we choose. But then we pour another glass to take the evening into a lovely haze, we strap ourselves into steel cages and roar around the country at 90 miles an hour, or we ride a wave of urgent passion without even remembering that packet of condoms sitting in the bathroom cabinet. Of course we do!
For all the trendy talk of holistic health care, what most people in the West want is the opposite - they want to eat what they like and do what they like and still live as long as they want. That’s why the reality of our lives so often falls so far short of the dreams of both science and science fiction. Neither takes account of the messy irrationality of human desires – desires that seem to get even more messy and irrational, as our theoretical ability to control our lives increases.
Nor, of course, does the dream of total control take any account of the unspeakable inequalities in the world. Because it beggars belief that, while we have worked out how to save a baby in America from her own genetic heritage, we still haven’t worked out how to save babies in other countries from dying of drinking dirty water.
That’s not to say that the scientists are on the wrong track. Surely they are just doing what scientists do – expanding our knowledge and spelling out the secrets of life, day by day.
But perhaps we should put their glittering achievements into perspective. Because, although scientists might one day be able to save us even from our genes, they still won’t be able to save us from ourselves.

(From: Natasha Walter, ‘Science Can’t Save Us from Ourselves’, The Independent, 28 February, 2002)

by Sarah Stöppel