Message from the Director
Religion & the Genome
Huntington F. Willard, PhD
"Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift."
Thus Bill Clinton—in June 2000 at the time of the announcement of the nearly complete draft sequence of the genome—brought science and divinity together, finding a common ground in his own beliefs: the genome as lexicon, God as the Great Author.
"For many, the long list of social, legal and policy issues that the genome sciences promise to shape have at their roots a deep ethical, moral and personal code, not just a genome sequence."But Charles Darwin himself, some 150 years earlier, was less sure of how to reconcile theistic beliefs with "this view of life," his term for a new world order, fueled by genetic variation and shaped only by evolution and natural selection. "This view," which ushered in the Genome Revolution as surely as the completion of each new genome sequence today adds dramatic emphasis, went boldly beyond that of other naturalists of the day.
Evolution is not purposeful. Genetic variation is random and blind, not (to use Stephen J. Gould's phrase) "prepackaged in the right direction." What room is there in that for a Divine Being? The question is said to have haunted Darwin. Our thinking, according to Darwin, "revolts at such a conclusion." He was so bothered by the potential implications of "this view" for our own species (or at least its reception) as to be hesitant to introduce more than a single vague sentence on human evolution into his opus On the Origin of Species.
Should we care? Can't scientists just do science and the others do, well, other stuff? No. The Genome Revolution is not just about science anymore, and the lead article in this issue of GenomeLIFE shows why. Sigmund Freud, of all people, stated it well, pointing out the "outrage" that humanity suffered at the hands of science, "when biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created." It is precisely a reflection of this outrage that stem cells have become such a hot political item, with sharp lines drawn thus far largely on the basis of moral arguments, not scientific ones. Stem cells get the headlines, but there are also new reproductive technologies, genomic testing on a society-wide scale, genetic discrimination, the concept of race, and a host of other issues that touch at the intersection of the genome sciences and our view of humanness and humaneness.
As we welcome in a new academic year here at Duke, it is worth reflecting on the "particular privilege" of being at an institution that believes as strongly in debating the personal and societal consequences of science as it does in making the fundamental scientific discoveries that those consequences reflect. For many, the long list of social, legal and policy issues that the genome sciences promise (or, some might say, "threaten") to shape have at their roots a deep ethical, moral and personal code, not just a genome sequence.
Darwin himself wrote that "the feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one." The debate is hardly over; it has barely begun. But the good news is that, at least at Duke, it has begun. As I look out the window of my office in CIEMAS, I can see the Chapel and the new Divinity School addition. From "this view," it doesn't look that far.
Huntington F. Willard
Director