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COVER
STORY: ESSAY
Romance
of the Chromosome
After
Moses and Marx, the molecular biologist
By
S. Prasannarajan
On
the sixth day of creation, the first scientist said, " Let us make
man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle,
and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon
the earth." And He the Biblical God "created man in his own
image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he
them..." Mission accomplished, after closing the cosmic laboratory,
he had gone to rest. Zillions of days later, man has taken on the Father,
and from his terrestrial laboratory, unravelled the enigma of creation
and unleashed the vision of a brave, brash, new world-perfect, happy,
and genetically manipulative. He has reduced the distance between the
cosmos and the chromosome.
 A
four-letter word has become the first word of a salvation text that promises
the ultimate utopia, as beguiling as Eden, as ambitious as the promised
land of ideology. So we are in the fourth stage of the evolutionary saga
of Man the Magnificent: in the beginning was God, then God's kingdom on
earth as envisioned by religion, then Good Earth as scripted by revolution,
and now the immaculate liberation as authored by science. Each was a repudiation
of the other, only the methods varied-and the promise was always the same:
a world without warts, inhabited by perfect citizens, their perfection
programmed by a superior authority. What's in religion, after all, especially
in Christianity? His kingdom will come ... justice for everyone ... a
classless, raceless society of equality, fraternity, and of course, love.
Man is in need of permanent modification.
The New
Man was the modified version, modified by the post-Moses architect of
promise: Marx. Communism was Christ without the cross, salvation without
martyrdom. It was not without reason that the novelist called the communist
the engineer of human souls, a description more apt for God. But the communist
was as ambitious as God; rather, he was the challenger with the blueprint
of an alternative universe. As a fictional comrade argues, "The church
has held man in doleful contempt. He is a fallen creature, doomed to sweat
out his life sentence. Dust to dust. Marxism has taken him to be almost
boundless in his capacities, limitless in his horizons, in the leaps of
his spirit. A reacher to the stars. Not mired in original sin, but himself
original." The all-encompassing scientific Weltanschauung of Marxism,
the Service of Man was a rejoinder to the Worship of God: Eden on Earth
is possible without the sacred scripture, the New Man of the Great Tomorrow
can be created in the laboratory of socialism. Though, the liberation
theology of the second Jehovah-bearded and German-has succeeded only in
creating the Dead Man, still lying beneath the detritus of twentieth century's
biggest hoax.
Now, we
are in thrall of the fourth stage: life as an intercellular thriller,
authored by the geometrician of genomes. After Moses and Marx, the molecular
biologist. His utopia is as seductive as his predecessors'. It's Huxley
redux, and this time not as science fantasy. As definitive - and defining
- as your genes. Remember his Brave New World, published in 1932, set
in the distant future, in the "year of stability", A. F. 632,
i.e. 632 years after the advent of Henry Ford, with its Hatchery and Conditioning
Centre and Alpha-plus mandarins and Epsilon-minus morons? That genetic
utopia is here and now, and from the post-modern centres of hatchery and
conditioning, dictators of our genetic destiny are promising us-not so
distant from a fly or a worm or a mouse (what control, God, does man have
over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth and every flying
thing that flies over the earth?) - eternal happiness, even immortality
and reincarnation.
The same
utopia, but different architecture. At the end (?) of the chase for the
so-called Holy Grail of human biology, the "code of codes",
the possessors of the genome secrets are in no mood to tolerate dissent,
a trait they seem to share with the earlier utopians. Bioethicists may
say it's the vulgarity of science, but the engineers of our cells will
call it "another chance, man"-and it's the ultimate genetic
bliss, cloning, the cellular equivalent of reincarnation. Already, the
religion of biotechnology has got its own cult in the Raelians, the metaphysicians
of genes who believe that humans were created in a lab by aliens from
a superior civilisation. So who says you are one of your kind, singular
and exceptional, irreplaceable? The end of uniqueness and the beginning
of genetic socialism? Cells have no class, they may say, but can you rule
out a genetic underclass if capitalism and chromosomes conspire to create
Genome Inc? The end of suffering, they say, but isn't it a scientific
variation of I'll-make-you-happy arrogance of the erstwhile revolutionary?
In the revolution
of the microbiologist, too, the romance of chromosomes camouflages the
fallacies of eternal bliss.
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