I am a poet not a scientist, so many of the things that
matter to me are not the subject of scientific studies. Walt
Whitman and Herman Melville had opposing visions of the force
that gave birth to the universe. For Whitman, the universe was
born in and is held together by the force of love. For
Melville, “the invisible spheres were formed in
fright,” in a terrifying primal darkness—a dark
force that continues to dictate the evolution and workings of
the universe. No matter which vision might seem more congenial
to you, both of them are transcendent, posing the fundaments of
a connective unity that is whole in every single aspect.
Scientists, however, outside of theoretical physics, are
generally unconcerned with the universe as a whole. The nature
of scientific inquiry would seem to privilege human beings a
priori, but beyond that, the motives and contexts of
research are obscure or downright disingenuous. Not to speak of
the results, which rarely resemble the original intentions.
There is no scientific experiment that does not raise ethical
questions in every aspect of its unfolding, from the premise it
aims to prove or disprove, from the context in which it is
conducted, from the results, and from the subsequent interests
that translate those results into practice. If one looks at
nature as the Great Experimenter whose motives are either
Whitmanic or Melvillian or neither (being self-propelled by its
own, as yet unknown, logics), all other experimenters fall
woefully short. The Great Experimenter, indifferent to how we
interpret its intentions, acts as an organic whole; no part of
it is left out. Science, as practiced by humans, began as an
investigation into the deepest questions raised by nature and
did not, until after the Enlightenment, lose sight of the
ethical and the philosophical. In the nineteenth century,
discoveries in medicine, physics, biology, astronomy, and nearly
all aspects of matter led to astonishing practical results that
then fed back into scientific inquiry and increased the pressure
for more results. Many ethical and philosophical concerns fell
by the wayside in the rush to improve control over nature. All
that remains today connected to the whole of the universe is the
insatiable appetite for bettering the human enterprise.
Everything else in the universe is tangential or at least
secondary to the human need to improve the human body and its
material needs. The spiritual needs of humans in
connection to the whole of the universe are not the concern of
science now. It is generally assumed by scientists that those
needs either do not exist or will take care of themselves in
some mysterious ways that are the specialty of an imprecise
class: poets, ethicists, dreamers, theologians, humanists of
every stripe. This is a distinctly lesser class of people now.
Culture is of interest to scientific researchers only insofar as
it affects their funding and their relationship to the political
class. Politics itself has abandoned, for the most part, its
ancient concern for philosophy, becoming focused only on the
visible benefits of science to power. And vice-versa. The
political matters to science because it facilitates research.
In our democracy, competing political interests are
constantly meeting the competing interests of science, adjusting
themselves to one another in a tiresome game of redefinition.
Ethics rarely enters the equation in this mutual game, because
if it did, it would awaken a terrible anxiety in
individuals—an anxiety that is already quite widespread
today, despite the use of optimistic or neutral language by both
scientists and politicians. The fact is that individual human
beings continue to be racked by essential questions about their
connections to the universe, and they will simply not put up
with becoming numbers in a statistic or guinea pigs in the
soothing rhetoric of science and power. Our job as humanists, as
lesser members of the investigative class, is to encourage and
increase the anxiety of individuals about what is done in their
names.
Poetry is one of the surer ways to increase this anxiety. As
I was preparing to write this article, I trusted, as I always
do, in the inexplicable generosity of the left field to provide
me with a few meaningful balls. Sure enough, a little poetry
booklet appeared in my mail. I opened it at random and came upon
this:
CRUSHERS OF THE UNIVERSE
By William Zink
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Five-legged frogs are better
Than their four-legged friends.
It's always a plus to have more
Of a good thing.
Remember that when you see
One of those creatures with an extra
Appendage dangling from her shoulder,
Struggling from the water to bask
On his favorite stone.
What looks like a burden
Is really a bonus.
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Maybe not a great poem, but containing enough
“unscientific” delights to raise the blood pressure
of a hundred scientists. Among those: irony (a truly
unquantifiable and un-research-worthy force); outrage at the
unending boosterism of late capitalism in its essential belief
that “more is better”; and genuine sadness at our
disregard for nature, still the Great Experimenter. For
scientists happily playing with the genes of animals to produce
aberrations on their way to some desired modification, these
concerns are irrelevant. They are “sentimental,”
that is to say, they come from some affective area of the brain
that feels such things. The frog with five legs may not have
been produced in the laboratory but has come about as nature's
own mistake. Furthermore, the Great Experimenter is the author
of many mistakes, and evolution is littered with them. Your
scientist will see nothing wrong with duplicating mistakes on
the way to a successful result. He will see no difference
between his experiment and that of the Great Experimenter. Is he
not part of the Ongoing Experiment himself, a
pequeño dios, as the Peruvian poet Cesar
Vallejo put it? Objectively, there is no reply to that without
reference to other unscientific human responses, among which is
the persistent feeling that we may be involved in some
unspeakable act of hubris, that some kinds of research are
contra naturam and not part of it. It is the feeling
that we are conducting a parallel experiment that is at odds
with the Great Experiment, that, in the end, we are a part of
the Great Experiment that is about to go awfully wrong, and
that, if this is indeed the case, the Great Experimenter will
have no choice but to terminate humans altogether as part of the
universal experiment gone wrong. Buckminster Fuller saw humans
as an “information-gathering function in an eternally
regenerating universe,” and if we fail in this regard, we
will be unsentimentally replaced by another
“information-gathering function,” maybe some kind of
ants.
It's also the job of humanists, then, to see to it that this
doesn't happen, that the universe might be propitiated in some
way to not act like your run-of-the-mill human scientist who
doesn't care how he gets to experiment or where the experiment
might lead.
Among the many mysteries in the toolbox of poetry and ethics
is synchronicity. This phenomenon cannot be easily bypassed by
scientists, who know, just as poets do, that the left field
often provides them with unexpected and inexplicable help. A
book in the mail, a just-published DNA sequence, an overturned
glass, a phone call from a stranger working on the same problem
. . . Luther Burbank, the California botanist who created many
new plants in his garden, used to say that he rarely requested
any seeds or cuttings for his experiments: they just showed up
in his mailbox. In fact, he ended up relying so much on his
mailbox, he got angry if what he needed didn't show up,
though he'd never asked anyone for it.
Scientists are not unconcerned with this force. Looking at
studies of twins, Ruth Levy Guyer mentions “the Ohio twins
Jim and Jim, named identically by their separate nonadoptive
parents. When they were studied at age 40, each weighed 180
pounds, was six feet tall, had a dog named Toy, a child named
James Allen, a wife named Betty, and an ex-wife named Linda.
Each drank Miller Lite and chain-smoked. Each ground his teeth
at night and regularly wrote love notes to his wife.”
How are these twins connected? Scientists fascinated by twins
have measured everything measurable, from brain waves to
electrical signals they may have received in the womb, but they
cannot find the force that connects them.
Neither can we experimentally find the force that drives
certain researchers to be fascinated by twins, without
introducing a fundamental ethical question. All researchers of
twins may be performing “science,” but there is a
profound ethical difference between Dr. Mengele, the Nazi doctor
at Auschwitz, who tortured and murdered Jewish twins, and
researchers at, let's say, St. Thomas' Hospital in London. Is
“science” really the connection between the monster
Mengele and the London researchers (who are probably Tony Blair
Labourites)? If that's the case, there is something seriously
wrong with “science.” Mengele and other Nazis
produced reams of data that later scientists were not reluctant
to use until they were brought up short by ethicists. An anatomy
atlas by Eduard Pernkopf, Topographiche Anatomie des
Menschen, was used by physicians in Europe and the United
States until the late 1980s, when some people began to question
the source of the drawings. The models turned out to be victims
of Nazi atrocities, and the medical illustrators were Nazi
butchers. Some of those bastards considered themselves good
doctors or good artists, and they doubtlessly invoked the god
“science” when they were questioned. Most of them
were never questioned; some of them were hanged; others died of
old age under assumed identities.
It is easy, from the perspective of today, to condemn the
Nazis, though it is harder to deny that their work was science.
The ideology that underwrote that science was evil, but science
itself was generally understood to be something pure, driven by
that generous cliché still in circulation: the human
thirst for knowledge, a thirst that generates the next
cliché, which is that science works to improve mankind.
Certainly, the researchers studying twins at the Twin Research
and Genetic Epidemiology Unit at St. Thomas' Hospital in London,
established in 1992, wouldn't have it any other way. Their
mission is to explore the role of genes in complex diseases,
including osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, and
asthma. St. Thomas has the UK's largest database of twins, and
it has the most detailed cohort of adult twins in the world,
with hundreds of measurements for each twin. For Professor Tim
Spector, director of the unit, this represents an important
resource for researchers. We already have huge amounts of data
on all our twins: 300 measures ranging from sense of humour to
leptin levels, with the potential to gather much more. And we
have a whole genome scan for 3,000 twins (1,500 pairs). It's an
exciting resource for the future.
What if, in some order not yet studied in any
“scientific” way, names are indeed destiny? In such
an order, an interest in twins by somebody named Spector is
quite significant because a twin is the “specter” of
another, the shadow, as it were. The fascination with the
mirror, with our own “other,” is not the subject of
Dr. Spector's genetic research, but we humanists cannot do
without it.