Most people recoil instinctively from the Huxleyan prospect of transgenic children, but if a child could be born without her parents' congenital disease, transgenic medicine might be consistent with the Hippocratic oath, benefiting people while doing no harm. In a short time we will have transliterated the human genome, played out many parts of it in cells, and gotten some difficult passages translated for us in transgenic animals. Then we will begin hunting for the passages we want most to know about, the ones responsible for our humanity and, if not our souls, then our ability to imagine souls. What we have found so far suggests that it will be impossible to know ourselves this way, but we could easily do great damage to future fellow citizens by trying. As a friend once said to make me reconsider a particularly seductive experiment, if it isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well.
Molecular biologists have two choices.
They can continue working out the meanings of individual genes, going into business for themselves with the discoveries they have made in tax-supported laboratories, shortcutting peer review using news conferences and patent secrecy, taking tax money from 40 million fellow Americans who cannot afford health insurance at all, and ignoring potential eugenic uses of their work. Or they can begin to rethink what they do and why they do it. These groups will set the future of molecular biology to suit their purposes unless the scientists who would find themselves constrained to carry it out join the debate. Only by openly sharing concerns with others and asking for the broadest possible audience to help set its agenda can science meet its responsibilities to the society that supports it.