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Theme
“Biotechnolgy
and Modern Democracy”
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The
Fourteenth Annual Series (2002-2003)
of the LeFrak Forum
and
Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy:
Biotechnology
and Modern Democracy
Introduction:
Until 1997, bioethics was a topic confined primarily to scholars
and professional ethicists whose work was largely unknown
outside of universities, think tanks and hospital boards.
The birth, in 1997, of the sheep-clone Dolly and the emerging
promise of human, embryonic stem cell research suddenly propelled
bioethics to the forefront of popular interest. Intellectual
magazines and a spate of books and essays soon buzzed with
debate and conflicting opinions about the ontological status
of blastocysts, the difference between reproductive and therapeutic
cloning, and the future of genetic engineering, eugenics,
and the other strange fruit of biotechnology. So pressing
were these new disputes that President Bush established the
President's Council on Bioethics. And political battles erupted
over bans on cloning and the use of embryonic tissue for research
and the alleviation of disease.
The Forum
and Symposium’s 2002-2003 program will examine this welter
of bioethical concerns. Several questions will focus our investigation.
What do the amazing advances in biotechnology and genetic
engineering mean for the fundamental principles of liberal
democracy? Do these advances, especially eugenics, threaten
or enhance equality of opportunity, the family, human dignity,
and the freedom of the individual? Will they, especially in
the case of embryonic stem cell research, increasingly lead
to the injection of theology into politics, threatening the
liberal divide between Church and State? Should these advances
be regulated, or left to the forces of the free market? If
regulated, then by what means? On a still more general level,
what does biotechnology portend not just for liberal democracy
but for the human race and the entire modern project of science
and technology? Are we on the verge of a technologically transformed
human nature? Do we even possess the moral and conceptual
equipment needed to think about this adequately?
The program
will consist of four public lectures and a year-end conference,
all held at Michigan State University. The conference will
be co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna
College.
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