Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light, and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight! – Isaiah 5:20-21

In the early 1840’s, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote two short stories – “The Birth-Mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” [1] – expressing his moral misgivings about the claims of scientists in his day who, in the flush of rapid and exciting scientific advances in the 19^th century, were promising to solve many of mankind’s perennial problems. Both stories depict the work of mad scientists who aim to “[correct] what Nature left imperfect” – an inordinate desire for achieving a power over Nature which one character in “The Birth-Mark” sees as a sign of a dangerous and deadly hubris.

In both stories, the scientists experiment on people whomthey claim to love: Aylmer tries to purge his wife, Georgiana, of her one imperfection (a tiny, hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek), while Dr. Rappaccini makes his only daughter, Beatrice, poisonous in order to make her invulnerable to life’s dangers. While both women die from these experiments, there is one significant difference: Georgiana volunteers to be her husband’s lab rat, while Beatrice is denied a choice. From childhood, she is the involuntary object of her father’s twisted plans. For that reason, Rappaccini’s story is the more disturbing and sinister in its implications, especially for modern readers.

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Good or Evil?

In order to attain his objective, Dr. Rappaccini creates a garden full of poisonous plants, which he uses to produce medicines (a form of chemotherapy) and which only Beatrice – with her equally poisonous nature – is able to care for. In this “Eden of the present world,” a post-human Beatrice lives an isolated and lonely existence – her breath and touch fatal to any living creature – until her father tricks a young man into falling in love with her. Through repeated exposure to Beatrice’s tainted breath, Giovanni is physically transformed until he, too, shares her curse. When Beatrice asks her father why he has inflicted “this miserable doom upon thy child,” Dr. Rappaccini is genuinely surprised. In his mind, he has given her a marvelous gift “against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy.” Not only will he turn out to be incorrect in his assessment of her invincibility, he is also morally incapable of seeing the evil he has committed against both these young people by changing their physical makeup without their knowledge or consent.

Playing God

From a literary point of view, the story is a masterpiece of reverse Bblical symbolism: Hawthorne firmly makes his case that the arrogant and short-sighted Dr. Rappaccini is playing God through the creation of his deadly Eden, in which a woman is the first inhabitant, and a man is created as a fit helper (an obvious reversal of the order found in the Genesis account of creation). The Tree of Life is represented by the shrub with the purple blossoms (ironically, the most lethal plant in the garden); and there’s even a Satan figure, Baglioni – a jealous rival of Dr. Rappaccini’s who brings death and destruction to the mad doctor’s creation. Beatrice’s fate underscores Hawthorne’s warning about the danger of limited, finite men attempting to usurp powers that only belong to an omniscient and omnipotent Creator; for while Rappaccini succeeds in making his daughter immune to Nature’s poisons, he cannot foresee that she will then become vulnerable to Nature’s antidotes. Hoping to reverse her father’s curse, she drinks an antidote which Baglioni has provided, and dies.

One hundred years later, another writer, C.S. Lewis, perfectly captured the truth at the center of Hawthorne’s tale when he wrote in Abolition of Man, “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”

Preventing or enhancing?

The story is also a masterpiece because of its continued relevance: the warning Hawthorne issued to 19^th century readers is even more critical today. We have a dizzying array of 21^st century technological and biomedical advances, both actual and potential, available to would-be parents who – like Dr. Rappaccini – might argue that they only want to spare their children unnecessary suffering and give them the best shot at being successful and happy. It seems like a reasonable desire. And given the cost – measured in both human suffering, and dollars and cents – it’s hard to argue against research scientists who are looking for ways to alter genes which “cause” cancer, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, Alzheimer’s disease, Down’s Syndrome, birth defects, or fatal genetic illnesses such as Tay-Sachs. [2] Yet however noble this may sound on the surface, technologies which may be used to prevent certain genetic defects may also one day be used to offer parents another choice: to enhance or not to enhance?

If, for instance, you are a man who is crazy about professional sports, why not insure that you will have a son who is endowed with Olympian-worthy size, strength, and quickness? Want a child as smart as an Einstein? A daughter who is beautiful enough to win Miss World? A musical prodigy? No problem: just visit your local geneticist and IVF provider (sizable check in hand, of course) and get the child you’ve always dreamed about! [3]

Sound far-fetched? According to many bioethicists, the possibility of creating such GenRich children is closer than we think. And in a competitive world where parents are enrolling their children in exclusive private schools even before the child is born, isn’t it likely that once such choices are made commercially available, parents – especially super-rich ones – will provide their children with that edge? In fact, if such technology becomes available, won’t conscientious parents feel compelled to insure their children are not handicapped in a world where they must compete against the genetically-enhanced?

Gift or commodity?

Scripture tells us that children are a gift from God (Psalm 127:3), and some would argue that they are a gift “as is”: in other words, whatever their abilities or disabilities as measured by the world’s standards, children are precious in the sight of their Creator, and they should be precious in the sight of their parents as well.

How will this change when parents no longer see their children as a unique gift from God, made in His image, and instead view them as made-to-order commodities? Will they love and value their children only because – or if – their kids deliver the goods (musical talent, athletic ability, beauty … whatever the parents “paid for”)? And how will these genetically-enhanced children come to see themselves? As haughtily superior to those not so gifted? Or as lab rats whose lives have been pre-determined by their parents’ expectations, rather than as individuals with the freedom to follow their own dreams and aspirations?

Right now, these questions still fall into the realm of science fiction. But like those old sci-fi stories about men going to the moon, the science is becoming a reality faster than we might imagine. The time is now to determine how we need to limit the use of genetic and reproductive technologies, long before this post-human, dystopian future is upon us.

Hawthorne warned us about the dangers that come when men try to usurp powers which rightly belong only to God, and about the moral depravity involved when we make our own children the unwilling objects of our experiments. Will we listen?

For more insight to this topic, get the book, by Gilbert Meilaender, from our online store. Or read the article, “The Way They Were, The Way We Are,” by Richard John Neuhaus.Bioethics,

[1] “The Birth-Mark” (1843) is available at http://bioethics.georgetown.edu/pcbe/background/birthmark.html. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) is available at http://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/Hawthorne/Rappaccini.htm.

[2] Even such preventative goals are not without ethical problems. Technology is already being used to test and discard “undesirable” embryos, or to abort babies in the womb that are deemed unwanted, whether due to birth defects or even gender, as in China where millions of female babies are aborted each year. Statistics indicate that more than 90% of babies with Down’s Syndrome are currently being aborted in America – a trend which greatly alarms advocates for the mentally and physically impaired, who say it fuels the belief that some people’s lives are not worth living. As history has sadly shown us, it’s a small step from preventing them from being born, to killing them after they are born.

[3] A 1997 film, Gattaca, tells the story of a future time when two classes of human beings have emerged, the GenRich and the GenPoor (those born “the old fashioned way” without the intervention of a geneticist). In that world, a single drop of blood drawn at birth is considered sufficient reason to pre-determine a person’s future – either opening doors for education and jobs, or closing them. It’s a world where discrimination has been made legal.