Are Sevolites (or worse) inevitable if we study stem cells?

On the STIMULUS side of this issue, Dr. Miller calls for a science fiction reading list that supports scientific research through positive portrayals of its outcomes, instead of admonishing mankind for meddling with things better left alone.

I was surprised and disappointed to realize that Okal Rel Universe stories, featuring our bioengineered Sevolites, might weigh in on the wrong side of the argument. How, I wondered, is that possible when I am an advocate of stem cell research?

I think there are two reasons.

• The first is simple. It is more fun to scare people than reassure them. Larger than life super beings sell books and make for interesting yarns. I am as guilty as anyone on that score. Sevolites are larger than life because they appealed to me that way, especially in my high school days. Who hasn't thought: If I was Sevolite (or whatever) I could ace this exam, or knock that annoying jerk across the room.
  
  As I matured, however, I found the conflicts generated by the existence and nature of Sevolites interesting. They evolved informed by a sense of irony and pathos intrinsic to actually embodying ideals (or their opposite) in human form, under the pressure of my co-author's more rigorous scientific training. Our regenerative highborns, for example, are prone to regenerative cancer.
  
  
• The second reason bears more directly on Dr. Miller's call for supportive sci fi stories. We have stories, incomplete in most cases, which chronicle events on Earth that led to the creation of Sevolites. The gist of the history goes like this:
  1. Dr. Lorel founded the Self Evolved Society to offer deserving couples babies with improved potential, still based on the parents natural genetic contribution with a few tweaks. The screening process focused on selecting good parents with good motives. The research was inspired by a dream of bettering the lot of mankind by ensuring that the leaders of the future would possess compassion and a sense of social conscience as well as enhanced health and talents.
  2. People realized they would have to bioengineer themselves to succeed in space exploration.
  3. Reactionaries attached Dr. Lorel's very open and overtly humanitarian organization, even persecuting the original "Lorelites". This resulted in the Sanctity of Man laws, forbidding any research on humans or human genetic material.
  4. Commercial motivation to do the research anyway helped Dr. Lorel's disillusioned son Damien find a loop hole in the Sanctity of Man laws by defining rules under which the products of his company, Self Evolved Limited, could be non-human for legal purposes. In the early days they were non-human in reality, for the most part, as well. Damien's goal was--like Magneto's in the X-Men--to reject mankind and secretly plan for its conquest.
  5. Damien's wife, Amanda Lorel (also a product of the Self Evolved Society), quietly subverted Damien's plans by reintroducing humanity into the Sevolites as they became increasingly abused by the appetites of legal humans for a variety of purposes.
  6. When things got very bad, a group of Sevolites and their human allies the Beyonders, broke away and founded Gelion.
  7. Eventually there was a terrible war, in which modern Sevolties believe Earth was destroyed, which becomes the ancestral myth underpinning Okal Rel's horror of unlimited warfare.

  
  To make a long story short, all the evil that comes of bioengineering human beings, in the Okal Rel Universe series, is a consequence of letting it happen for the wrong reasons. And THAT happens because people were too blinded by ignorance and fear to let it happen openly, for the right reasons.

In real life, stem cell research is unlikely to be wrestling with questions such as how to create a genetic predisposition for compassion in the near future. It will more likely concern itself with pure research to understand what makes things tick and with the medically meaningful solutions that might generate for people unfortunate enough to have been dealt a sour hand by nature.

For nature is blind. Evolution selects for survival and nothing more. Only we, as thinking sentients, can evolve ourselves with eyes wide open and a mission statement other than mere success in breeding as our goal.

Should we do that? Absolutely. We must. Should we do it indiscriminately, or even worse should be do it solely for the sake of short term profit motives? That prospect does fill me with horror.

It is time to start educating ourselves to make distinctions between WHAT and WHY that are meaningful, and stop struggling to apply our approval or outrage to the WHATs.

Nearly every critical decision before us as a species depends on achieving the maturity to see the good and evil not in terms of what we do, but why we do it. Stem cell research to enrich the rich or empower the empowered would be evil. Stem cell research to create a Golden DM as an ideal of beauty, or a VR to fly for us and fight to the death for our entertainment, would be evil. Stem cell research that led to conquering genetic disease, improving health and extending human life might be very good. We'll have to think about it.

But the thinking is mandatory. Not once, in the history of mankind, has any reactionary force been successful at permanently stifling a fertile field of knowledge: only fouling things up so that those with the worst motives get the best chance to exploit what results. Or, sometimes, delaying the inevitable.