Happiness and Pride

It is with a feeling of happiness and even pride that I welcome you to this conference on behalf of IHEU. My happiness and pride are mixed with an even deeper felt gratitude to those who have made this center a reality: first and foremost the man whose generosity has made it possible, Louis Appignani, and thereafter all who have extended a helping hand in getting the center established. And we are grateful to the Center`s director, Ana Lita, who has given herself a flying start by arranging this conference.

When I took a course in philosophy at the University of Oslo in the 1960s, I never heard the word bioethics mentioned. I have looked in my old textbooks and notes, my student dictionaries and encyclopaedias. The word did not exist - at least not in my part of the world. When I recently made a search on Google on my computer one morning, I got 1.462.340 hits. In the evening there were 50 more.

Of course the philosophical questions connected to biology, life and death are as old as humanity itself, but with the fantastic development of biotechnology in the last couple of generations, completely new perspectives and possibilities have been opened. Can human beings be designed? Can embryos be manipulated to become intelligent babies? Can life be prolonged - and by how long? Can severe sicknesses be eliminated?

Brave New World?

Aldous Huxley raised similar questions in his book Brave New World in 1932, and when my generation read it 20 years later we were all happy that science fiction like this was just as unthinkable in real life as fantasy stories about human beings landing on the moon. How we were mistaken - in cosmology as well as in biology!

It was UNESCO that made bioethics an international item of general interest. Already in the 1970s UNESCO understood that ethical questions of these dimensions were global and not the responsibility for individual scientists and scattered laboratories alone. By the way, UNESCO's first Director Julian Huxley, was not only a biologist, he was also a humanist and a humanist philosopher, and he presided over the founding congress of IHEU in Amsterdam in 1952. Julian Huxley was the brother of Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, and both of them were grandsons of the great biologist Thomas Huxley - Darwin's contemporary and defender. I mention these facts to show you that our new Center for Bioethics is part of an intellectual and humanist tradition that few Centers for bioethics can claim, even if there are hundreds of them, not least here in the US. My impression is that many of them are run by people of a rather different origin, with roots even in the Old Testament, the book of Genesis. Also in my own country, several of those who claim to be specialists in bioethics are theologians or at least belong to religious communities. These scholars and their friends have a strong influence on politicians and governments - to the despair of humanist scientists and researchers who feel that they are stopped or hindered in developing solutions for the sick and the suffering or for childless couples - stopped in their urge to seek knowledge.

The excitement of bio-science is the challenge of the future. What will the brave new world really be like? What do we want it to be, and how do we get there? Since we are not only scientists but also parents, grandparents, citizens and humanists, the question about what we want the future to be is just as important as what the future can be.

The Defence Lines

But we cannot only look forward. Bioethics has not only frontiers - it has also its defence lines. Stem cells and cloning are foreign words for many of the women in Poland and Ireland - women who are despairing and even risking their lives because of restrictions on abortion rights: rights that have been fought for by generations of women, rights that are under attack in countries where popes, cardinals, evangelical leaders and their political puppets are using their kind of bioethics to suppress women and families, and hinder social development. Some time ago I visited an institution for family planning and reproduction in Nigeria, a very successful one that has helped thousands of poor people to a better life. But it was now closing down because the President of the United States of America had forbidden American organisations from financing or supporting NGOs in the third world that performed or endorsed abortion.

Another cause that has obtained support by organised humanists all over the world is euthanasia. But even if clear majorities support euthanasia in most countries, only a few countries give the right of self-determination to suffering and dying patients. New technology means that the process of dying can be prolonged in absurd ways, while the patient's only wish may be to end his miserable life.

Matters like these traditional bioethical problems will hopefully not be forgotten in this Center`s agenda and activity. One advantage of including them is that every person will understand what it is about - which cannot be said just as obviously about the mystery of the human genome and the Deoxyribonucleic acid - also called DNA. Thank You.

Levi Fragell is former President of IHEU, and currently Chair of the IHEU's Committee for Growth and Development.