Religious voices would enhance nanoethics debate

Congratulations to Patrick Lin and his Nanoethics Group, which was just awarded a three-year, $250,000 National Science Foundation grant to study the ethics of human enhancement and nanotechnology.

Patrick, in a news release, says:

"The ethics of human enhancement technologies is widely held to be the single most important debate in science and society and will define the 21st century. Today, human enhancement may mean steroids or Viagra or cosmetic surgeries. But with the accelerating pace of technology, some of the more fantastic scenarios may arrive sooner than people think – such as advanced cybernetic body parts and computers imbedded in our brains – which magnify the ethical issues involved."

I've been saying for years that this issue is going to become more and more politically divisive -- ever since a warning against enhancement popped up in the nanotech bill in Congress back in December 2003. I hope the Nanoethics Group's study goes a long way toward getting some data involved in the debate rather than pure emotion.

I also hope the group allows more than token religious voices in the study. While some opposition to enhancement comes from the far left (don't mess with Mother Nature), a great deal of the political opposition will come from the religious point of view -- and I do not mean only the religious right.

This is no criticism of Patrick's group, but I have noticed a shortage of the voice of religion within ethical debates over nanotechnology. This is due to many factors, but primarily the traditional antagonism between scientists and the religious.

The result, I believe, is often scientists being "out of their depth" when it comes to discussions about the implications of their own work. At worst, this exclusion means that the concerns of millions of people in the world are laughingly dismissed out of hand. Many scientists have simplistic, or grade-school-level, ideas of religion and the role it plays in the public at large and base their debates on science and ethics on these simplistic assumptions.

To exclude the role of religion in ethical debates over nanotechnology would be the equivalent of a group of religious leaders who have a passing interest in physics getting together to determine the merits of string theory vs. loop quantum gravity, and think it ridiculous to let physicists participate in the debate.

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