23 - 29 August 2001
Issue No.548
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 23 - 29 August 2001 Issue No.548 |
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Limelight
Is this our 'brave new world'?
The hare and the tortoise decided to have a race. The tortoise plodded along slowly and steadily until it won. Aesop's Fable comes to mind as we observe the race between science and science fiction getting uncomfortably close at the finish line. The fast and furious debate over stem cell research and the stormy controversy over human cloning seem too unreal to be real. Is this a science fiction tale, a figment of an imagination such as Huxley's in his 1932 novel Brave New World? Or is this the first year of the third millennium and the debate over the ethics and value of artificially reproducing human beings monopolizes daily headlines and deliberations. Who shall win the debate? The thought produces a shudder!
Since pre-historic times, man has been preoccupied with the fantastic, the unnatural, the mythical and the mysterious. Those were his early tools to better understand his universe. They laid the foundation for that branch in literature we call science fiction. Man then rubbed two stones and discovered fire, and science was born. It was thought that reality could never reach the height, the width, the length, the breadth, the speed and the scope of imagination and adventure. Yet many scientists were also science fiction writers.
The 1600s brought the birth of both science and science fiction. Francis Bacon (1561- 1626) known as the father of modern science, wrote The New Atlantis, the first science fiction tale of a fantastic voyage to describe a mythical society based on experimental science and the wonders it could create. It was followed by the first science fiction set in the future, Aulicus (1644) by Françis Cheynell, and by Jacques Guttin's Epigone, Story of the Future Century (1659). The 1700s brought about Jonathan Swift's literary masterpiece Gulliver's Travels (1726) and in the 1800s science fiction reached maturity with the works of France's Jules Verne (1828-1905) and England's Herbert George Wells (1866-1946).
The 1900s hailed a shower of varied styles led by the anti-utopian form such as Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, and 1984 (1949) by George Orwell. These important works warrant a pause. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the product of a famous English family of scientists wrote poetry and short stories, before he embarked on his distinguished career of witty and sophisticated novels, satirising English as well as American life. His major work, Brave New World, is an expression of total scepticism of science and the good it can do mankind. Huxley describes a cloned totalitarian society that disregards human dignity and worships science and machines. Orwell's society punishes love, destroys privacy and distorts truth. Even in Russia science fiction was gaining respect. In 1928, famous author Maxim Gorky praised it for displaying "the amazing ability of our thought to look far ahead of actual events".
Because of the scientific method of tedious and time consuming data collection and classification, science has been slow in evolving, causing it to lag way behind science fiction. Since the 1950s however, there has been a rapid and exponential rise in scientific knowledge, and this, coupled with the sophistication of computer technology, has made all of man's imagination practical and attainable.
Haley Joel Osment
Science has finally caught up with science fiction, leaving the latter scampering for novel ideas. To clone or not to clone? To research or not to research with stem cells? To transplant or not to transplant? etc, etc, etc. Those are today's real dilemmas. Our inadequacies leave us baffled and tormented. We tend to deal subjectively as they affect us personally. Scientific innovation and discovery are moving at such a rapid pace, they are not giving us the time they used to, to savour, digest and finally incorporate these innovations into our lives. Films are a big help.
Since film mirrors society, or is it the reverse, cinema has enthusiastically embraced a great number of scientific works that lend themselves to visual creation and flights of the imagination. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is a regular favourite. Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984, Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth and H G Wells's Island of Dr Moreau and Time Machine, which is currently being directed by Simon Wells, the author's great grandson, are some of the popular choices. Most contemporary science fiction authors see their works in vivid colour. There was the intriguing 1978 film, Boys from Brazil, with Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck, where 10 German blond boys were cloned in order to disseminate the Aryan race. Ray Bradbury has seen more than one book alive on the screen, Something Wicked this Way Comes, and Fahrenheit 451. J R R Tolkien's Hobbits are screen heroes, and The Lord of the Rings is under production with director Peter Jackson at the helm.
Michael Crighton, a physician by training, has abandoned his medical career for an incredibly lucrative one in science fiction. He is by far the most popular author in screen adaptations. Among his many successes are the three Jurassic Park films (1993-2001), Coma (1978), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Twister (1996) and The 13th Warrior (1999).
The remarkable Steven Spielberg, a great fan of science fiction, devoted more than 30 per cent of his films to the unnatural and the supernatural, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E T the Extraterrestrial (1982), three Jurassic Park films and the latest outing A I Artificial Intelligence (2001), hailed by critics as his finest effort. It is the story of a robotic Pinocchio who longs for human love and stars the incredible child talent, Haley Joel Osment, already nominated for an Oscar for The Sixth Sense (2000).
The line drawn between science and science fiction has become blurred. Last week I dreamt I saw Dr Panayiotis Zavos, with his colleague Dr Severino Antinori, promising, or rather threatening to clone a human by 2003. The presentation took place at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington and was met with a contemptuous outcry -- "You're a disgrace!" I heard myself cry :"what about the common cold?" - But no one could hear me! This is no dream- only a scene in a made-for-TV sci-fi film. But there is no escape. It was real!
Do infertile couples have a right to clone if this is their only chance for a baby? Does a couple losing a child, have a right to clone it? We are at the threshold of a dilemma of gigantic proportions that we are hardly equipped to grapple. Our ethics are not absolute. They are as changeable as is our environment and our communities. What was impossible yesterday becomes indispensable today. A glaring example is pregnancy by "in-vitro fertilization" while widely accepted now, caused a storm of debate in 1978. It is the awareness of the "known" rather than "the unknown", that breeds fear into our hearts.
While Egypt does not, many countries do allow abortions and euthanasia. Why do some of us wish to play God? If we can so easily destroy human life are we then not allowed to create it? Is that the last piece in the human jigsaw puzzle? With all our preoccupation with cloning and reproduction we forget that Mother Nature has already shown us the way. Are not identical twins, in a sense nature's demonstration of cloning? But never fear. Tinker all we must, Mother Nature will have the last word!
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