Blue Collar Scientist

I want to take a slightly different look at the Catholic Church’s new “mortal sins” than the perspectives I’ve seen in the blogosphere over the last few days.

Imagine for a moment that you have a job in a laboratory. You have a very long polymer in your test tube, and your job is to add a chemical to that test tube that cuts the molecule in half and snips a little segment out of the newly-formed ends. Then you add a new chemical that rebuilds the recently-destroyed ends with new sequence, then stitches them back together. When this process¹ is completed, you inject the polymer into a bilayer lipid membrane, go home, and enjoy hearty meal and a good night’s sleep.

If you do this, the Catholic Church warns that you are going to Hell. The long polymer in my example is a piece of human DNA.

Let’s say you have exactly the same job, fiddling with these molecules in test tubes, but your work eventually leads to the ability to grow human transplant organs in pigs. Hundreds of thousands of people’s lives are saved by this capability, who otherwise would have died on a transplant waiting list, or as a consequence of organ rejection.

Well, guess what? If you heal all these people, you are going to Hell.

You would go to hell even if you removed the duplicate 21^st chromosome from a single-celled trisomy-21 embryo (trisomy 21 is the cause of Downs syndrome), thus relieving a human life of considerable suffering and difficulty learning and communicating - to say nothing of helping the baby’s parents. Genetic manipulation is genetic manipulation, and healing people is no excuse according to the church. Split some DNA, and you will meet Satan the instant you die, for the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell.

A lot of the blogosphere’s coverage of this issue has been pretty laid back - just poo-pooing the Catholic Church’s ignorant railing against some obscure scientific discipline. Which is fine as far as it goes. But I want it to go farther:

The Catholic Church hasn’t condemned some vague activity called “genetic engineering.” They’ve condemned people, whose job it is to take some chemicals and use them to alter other chemicals. They’ve condemned some very nice, virtuous people who, by doing this stuff with chemicals, have, and will continue to, alleviate human suffering on a massive scale.

1. which I have simplified to excess. [↩]

Reuters is reporting that

Pope Benedict said on Thursday that embryonic stem cell research, artificial insemination and the prospect of human cloning had “shattered” human dignity.

Practices like freezing embryos, suppression of embryos in multiple pregnancies, embryonic stem cell research, the prospect of human cloning and artificial insemination outside the body had “shattered the barriers meant to protect human dignity”, he said.

Let’s make something really clear here. The Blue Collar Scientist is a human, and he’s noticed no diminishment of his “human dignity” as a result of any of these things. People still, by and large, treat me politely and with respect, just as I, by and large, treat others politely and with respect. Nobody has been running around giving others wedgies while in my presence. Nobody I’ve ever seen has chosen to excrete other than in the privacy of a restroom. People go on wearing clothing, having medical exams behind closed doors instead of in the middle of the sidewalk, making their own decisions, and avoiding being told what to do by some old white guy who wears funny hats and seeks to control the behavior of his flock like the dominant male in a troop of howler monkeys.

I hate to keep slapping down at Catholics here, but seriously, is the Pope in any way in touch with reality?