ESSASYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY






ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY:
Frankenstein in the Land of Dichter and Denker
Manfred D. Laubichler*



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Manfred D. Laubichler is a theoretical biologist and historian of
science. He holds a Ph.D. in biology. His work is on conceptual issues
in evolutionary and developmental biology, and he is currently also
writing a book entitled Between Philosophy and Experiment: A History of
Theoretical Biology, 1900 to World War II.
CREDIT: ALLAN BURCH



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Social scientists [in Germany] tend to associate 'selection' with
Auschwitz, whereas natural scientists think foremost of Darwin's book."
This quotation from developmental biologist and Nobel Laureate
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard captures in a nutshell the problems one
faces when discussing questions of biology and biotechnology in
Germany.* What most distinguishes the "two cultures" in Germany is
their different understanding of certain key concepts of science and
history. Here, more than in other countries, the past is a continuous
presence that shapes intellectual debates. And the close association of
Nazi ideology with the language of biology still hangs like a shadow
over any discussion of the implications of modern biology and
biotechnology.

A heightened sensitivity for the consequences of modern biology is not
intrinsically a bad thing, of course, and neither is an intense public
debate of such matters. There is no need to go as far as Jim Watson,
who suggests that "it is time to put Hitler behind us" when making
decisions about biotechnology today. However, there is a serious
problem when the public debate about biotechnology is dominated by
philosophers, social scientists, and commentators more concerned with
ideological agendas and the horrors of history than with
biotechnological realities.

In Germany, the bone of contention in the latest round of public uproar
against the "brave new world" of genetic technology is Karlsruhe
philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's attempt to reinterpret Plato, Nietzsche,
and Heidegger in the light of what he calls future and past
"anthropo-technologies." In his recent, widely attacked paper, "Rules
for the human farm," Sloterdijk refers to human "breeding" and
"domestication" as alternatives to the "failure of humanism" in
education. His metaphorical model is animal husbandry, in which
generations of breeders have been very successful in creating docile
races of wild animals. According to Sloterdijk, it is a humanistic
illusion to believe that traditional "nurture" is enough when it comes
to taming the bestial dimension of man's nature--from the Roman circus
to modern video games.

Sloterdijk shares the cavalier attitude of many German public
intellectuals toward science. His references to "selection,"
"breeding," "human farms," "domestication," and other
anthropo-technologies have the flair of literary metaphors, yet are
employed in the context of an expected future "age of biotechnology."
Equally irritating is Sloterdijk's unanswered question, which he
attributes to Plato, whether it is the philosopher's role to devise
"rules for human farms" devoted to the "breeding of an elite."

Not surprisingly, Sloterdijk's text has caused an uproar, and ever
since its publication, German papers have been full of responses of
variable quality. Whereas some dealt with Sloterdijk's arguments in a
calm manner, others sounded more alarmist tunes. But in general,
Sloterdijk's interpretation of philosophy is reviled as dangerous, his
motives are branded as suspect, and his call for a human bio-utopia is
considered naïve and mistaken. Sloterdijk's arguments themselves are
taken to illustrate the horrors of biotechnology that loom just around
the corner. Sloterdijk (and by implication all who have hopes that the
future of mankind might be improved through biotechnology) is
essentially accused of harboring fascist ideas.

An outside observer might wonder what the fuss over the misguided yet
calculated ruminations of this one philosopher is all about. And should
that observer possess even the most rudimentary knowledge of modern
biotechnology, he or she might want to point out that the self-declared
postmodern "emperor Sloterdijk" has no clothes. But the situation is
more complicated. The Sloterdijk affair has to be seen in the context
of other recent intellectual and political debates about Germany's
problematic history and the future intellectual orientation of the new
"Berlin Republic." The common theme in many of these debates is the
relation between present-day Germany and its Nazi past. In the
Historikerstreit of the 1980s, the comparability of Nazism with other
totalitarian systems was hotly debated,§ and the more recent Walser
affair, triggered by a speech by renowned writer Martin Walser, raised
the difficult question of whether the memory of Nazism needs to be
evoked to the extent that it is in modern political debates including
matters of biotechnology.|| What both of these controversies have in
common with the Sloterdijk debate is that the same chorus of public
intellectuals, led by philosopher Jürgen Habermas, continues to
proclaim that Germany's history must invariably be the moral compass
for its future.

This historical focus can pose a problem for an open debate about
biotechnology in Germany. Since the language of biology was part of the
Nazi ideology, in the name of which the most horrible crimes have been
committed, and since the moral imperative derived from German history
is "never again," the answer is clear: Hands off from genetic
engineering and biotechnology. This is indeed the widespread consensus
among German intellectuals and many in the German population.

Learning from history is indispensable. However, history can also
become an excuse for avoiding critical and important questions.
Genetics today is not the same as eugenics and racial hygiene in the
1930s, which were more concerned with technocratic solutions on the
level of whole populations than with any detailed understanding of the
role of genes in development and disease. This is not to say that
modern genetics does not pose serious challenges and that a society
should not have the right to establish limits as to what it finds
acceptable. But such a decision should only be made after an informed
discussion based on a proper understanding of the scientific issues and
the relevant historical background. Framing the debate exclusively in
the context of literary images (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Aldous
Huxley's A Brave New World, Goethe's Faust, or Nietzsche's Thus Spoke
Zarathustra) or the crimes and ideology of the Nazi period is not
enough. The common theme in the literary models evoked in this debate
is that man will give in to temptation and will try whatever is
possible, inevitably leading to disaster. History, and in particular
the Nazi period, then only serves to confirm these fears and leads to
fatalistic attitudes toward biotechnology.

Railing against the dangers of biotechnology from a position of
presumed moral authority will not ensure that the practice and
governance of modern biotechnology becomes any more democratic. The
benefits of biotechnology, in particular its medical applications, are
clearly visible to everybody, but there are also indisputable problems,
especially when economic interests are at stake. As the recent
controversies over agricultural practices (mad cow disease and dioxin)
and genetically manipulated food demonstrate, ignoring concerns about
safety or traditional values inevitably leads to a backlash. This is
even more the case in areas that involve questions of morality and
human self-understanding, such as stem-cell research and germ-cell
therapy. Here it is especially important to abstain from moralistic or
economic grandstanding and to consider both the factual realities and
the concerns of citizens when making policy decisions.

Informed (public) discussion requires informed (public) participants.
But whose responsibility is it to educate the general public about the
admittedly complicated issues of modern biology and biotechnology? In
the United States, not a single month passes that does not bring us
another piece of bad news about the state of affairs in science
education. The recent decision by the Kansas Board of Education to
eliminate evolution as a required subject in state exams represents
only the tip of an iceberg. Clearly this situation poses a challenge to
scientists. To counteract these trends, the national academies and
various scientific societies in the United States have initiated
programs to encourage scientific literacy. Similar efforts are under
way in Germany.

Equally important are efforts to popularize science in order to reach a
wider audience. Scientists need to speak out on matters of importance
for society and politics. But on this last issue, the attitudes of
scientists in the United States and Germany clearly differ. U.S.
scientists are generally quite willing to popularize their results and
to express their views in popular media; the archetypal "German
professor," by contrast, remains enshrined in the ivory tower of pure
science. There are, of course, exceptions--such as Hubert Markl, the
president of the Max Planck Society. But, simply put, there is no
Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Lewontin presently in Germany who could
meet the "public intellectuals"--Habermas et al.--on their own turf and
bring a certain level of scientific expertise to these public
discussions.

Scientists such as Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard often express their
dislike for a public discourse that "rewards scientific ignorance" and
only values "knowledge of dead languages." Unfortunately, they tend to
look at this situation with a certain amount of historical fatalism. We
should recall, however, that in the past, German scientists have had a
more prominent position in German intellectual life than they have now.
In the 19th century, a large number of renowned scientists (such as
Rudolf Virchow and Hermann von Helmholtz) were associated with liberal
politics and the industrialization and modernization of Germany. And at
the beginning of the 20th century, scientists such as Ernst Haeckel and
Max Verworn participated in the "culture wars" of their time and were
successful at popularizing their knowledge. Philosophers such as Ernst
Cassirer were in constant dialogue with leading scientists, and tried
to integrate the results of science into their work. Subsequent
generations of scientists were an integral part of the "hothouse of
intellectual life" that we associate with the Weimar Republic.

The Nazi years changed all that. Large numbers of scientists and
students were killed or forced to emigrate, retreated into "pure
science," or were compromised by the odd mixture of reaction and
modernism that characterized the Nazi attitude toward science. After
World War II, the intellectual foundations of the new Federal Republic
were laid by philosophers and social scientists, in particular by the
so-called Frankfurt School, which stressed the critical evaluation of
the past as the sine qua non for intellectual life. In the context of
this discourse, human genetics and any other form of "biologism" were
considered particularly dangerous. The German Green party, a major
force in the opposition against the unquestioned application of
biotechnology, also has its roots in the intellectual tradition of the
"Critical Theory" of the Frankfurt School.

The Sloterdijk debate is, above all, about the future of intellectual
discourse in Germany. Up to now Germany has escaped the (rather
sterile, in my view) "science wars," triggered by Alan Sokal's hoax,
that have encumbered discussions in the United States. Sloterdijk, at
52, represents a generation that has begun to challenge the dominance
of social science and Critical Theory in German intellectual life. What
does this generation of public intellectuals offer to scientists who
hope that their concerns will be represented in a more balanced way?
Judging from what has been said so far, not much. But with his call to
consider, rather than ignore, the biological nature of humanity when
asking philosophical and political questions, even though his own
knowledge of biology is limited, Sloterdijk does (inadvertently) open a
door to an older and vibrant German intellectual tradition that goes
back at least to Leibniz and Kant and continues into the early 20th
century.

It would be in the interest of scientists to recapture the position
they once had in German intellectual life. Maybe the present
intellectual struggle offers us that opportunity, if we are willing to
enter a dialogue. And maybe we are beginning to see a separation of
fact from fiction in discussions in Germany about biology and
biotechnology.



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The author is in the Program in History of Science, Princeton
University, 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA, e-mail:
manfredl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx This paper was written during a stay at the Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. The
author would like to thank G. Geison, M. Hagner, G. Honegger, R.
Proctor, and H.-J. Rheinberger for helpful discussions.
*C. Nüsslein-Volhard, "Menschenzucht ist weder wünschenswert noch
machbar," interview with Der Tagesspiegel, 27 September 1999.

J. D. Watson, keynote address to a molecular medicine congress in
Berlin, reported by R. Koenig, Science 276, 892 (1997).

P. Sloterdijk, Regeln für den Menschenpark (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am
Main, 1999).

§P. Jürgen, Der Historikerstreit und die Suche nach einer nationalen
Identität der achtziger Jahre (Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 1995).

||R. Leicht, "Warum Walser irrt," Zeit (no. 50), 1 (1998); J. Ross,
"Aus Auschwitz lernen," Zeit (no. 49), 3 (1998).



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