No limits to science? That question was asked by us to a number of experts in various fields for a report published in 1987. Here, in short, are the answers we received.
LUCIANO TIEPOLO, biologist: "No limits, for better or worse." ANNAMARIA MIRAGOLI, gynaecologist, expert in sterility problems: "A doctor should not become a skilled craftsman". GIORDANO INVERNIZZI, psychiatrist: "The psychosis of a thorny triangle." NICOLA ABBAGNANO, humanist philosopher: "A boomerang." PIERO PAIARDI, jurist: "Mater semper certa est? ... Juridical viewpoints are changing." FATHER VIRGINIO ROTONDI, theologian: "Roma locuta est ... Causa finita est." Almost all the personalities who were interviewed expressed some worry and declared themselves against certain aspects of research, the possible developments of certain experiments and the actual applications deriving from them. The questions asked regarded subjects such as laboratory-enhanced insemination, cloning, etc.
A few years have gone by since 1987 and science has not given itself any limits, so that conferences and conventions today are dedicated to discussing bioethics more than scientific results because of the ensuing ethical problems that arise, and even from the first practical applications there is a demand to stop these lines of research. The reaction to the recent laboratory cloning experiments performed in the United States has in fact been unanimously unfavourable. One thing is certain: man will not stop, and in his growing desire to attain immortality he is obliviously heading toward self-destruction.
And this self-destruction will not be brought on by war, and neither by an egoism that leads to ignore those who suffer and who lack means of support, to ignore the problems of the environment, but by the will to achieve omnipotence at all costs, to become immortal like God. In order to reach his goal, man interferes with the biologic birth of life while at the same time legislating in favour of the self-determination of death. What can be done to survive, without too many damages for mankind, this millennium influenced by the constellation of Aquarius, which according to the more serious astrologers will bring epoch-making conflicts and transformations? The question remains without answer, but can we just leave "the judgement to posterity"?
We cannot. We must take it as an element on which to meditate, and to realise that even if it will be possible to clone human beings, it does not follow that this will make them immortal. Scientists fail to explain how a physical clone can be supplied with a psyche and a character, with a moral individuality, with an acquired culture and all the features that characterize a particular being. Meditate! That also means awakening to the fact that we are yet a nothing: however great, however intelligent, however strong man may be, a single little microbe, invisible to the naked eye, can land him under two feet of earth. The fundamental error is a long-standing one, and it is borne of the common expression that man was made in the image and likeness of God. Then why not be God? What makes us different from God is death, and so according to many, whether scientists or not, we must engage all our resources to the goal of bypassing death and realizing the dream of Faust: to become at last, completely like God. There lies the paradox - that this belief is shared and these efforts attempted by many who, paradoxically, while trying to become like God, profess their atheism and declare that God does not exist. In a famous novel, Ernest Hemingway writes: "You may not believe in God, Robert, but He is there in search of you, and in the end He will find you my dear boy, you'll see that He will find you." We may not believe, but the answer is one: there is one way only to save mankind, to hope that God may not cease to search for us, and that, weary of man's perseverance in his errors, He may not leave us to vanish in the infinity of the universe or to sink down inside a black hole.