Word: molecular
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OTHER MENTAL problems may well succumb to molecular biology. Many therapists resist the idea that emotional problems have biochemical equivalents; yet Freud himself believed that they do and that they would one day be identified. Researchers are already convinced that schizophrenia has some genetic basis, although, as Psychologist David Rosenthal explains, it is not the disease that is inherited but a tendency to it. As a match must be struck before it will burn, so must the tendency be triggered by something in the environment. No one is yet sure whether the trigger is cultural or familial, electrical or chemical...
...drug caf�s" that would replace bars and coffeehouses. There, perhaps with the help of "dream machines," one might order a menu of "enhanced vision, sensory hallucinations and self-awareness." One might also be able to experience the mental states of a great man, or even of an animal. Molecular Biologist Leon Kass of the National Academy of Sciences projects a world in which man pursues only artificially induced sensation, a world in which the arts have died, books are no longer read, and human beings do not bother even to think or to govern themselves...
That temptation?to be "like God"?is at the root of the ethical dilemmas posed by molecular biology. In one sense, the new findings have continued the work of Newton, Darwin and Freud, reducing men to even tinier cogs in a mechanistic universe. At the same time, it was man himself who deciphered the code of life and who can now, in Teilhard de Chardin's phrase, "seize the tiller of the world." If he is only a bundle of DNA-directed cells, more sophisticated but hardly dissimilar from those of animals and plants, he can at least...
...could be the means for a sterile mother to bear a child, even if not from her own egg. But he draws the line at artificial wombs, which, he says, "would produce nothing but psychological monsters." Others emphasize that the family itself must survive to fill important psychological needs. Molecular Biologist Leon Kass, who left the research labs to become executive secretary of the National Academy of Science's Committee on the Life Sciences and Social Policy, puts it effectively: "The family is rapidly becoming the only institution in an increasingly impersonal world where each person is loved...
...decided by the technical men who understand them. Even if government does enter the field, points out Daniel Callahan, much of the success of any ethical policy will depend on a responsible professional code. "If you depend solely on laws, sanctions and enforcements," says Callahan, "the game is over." Molecular Biologist Francis Crick is confident that basic morals and common sense will prevail. Some of the wilder genetic proposals will never be adopted, he claims, because "people will simply not stand for them...