| Volume 6 No. 2 - 2002 | |||
Bioethics Through a Comic Book Lensby Irene Helmke |
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Claudia, a leggy young blonde, and Javier, her bushy-haired companion, huddle together in front of a computer. Both wearing bulky 3-D headsets, they are struggling to "get into virtual reality." "There you have the results of progress," quips Javier. "But atomic energy has peaceful uses," counters Claudia. Javier disagrees: "They should never have messed with the atom. It's a nightmare! I want out of this world! I want to go to virtual reality!" These must be the magic words, for suddenly huge metallic tentacles reach out from the computer and seize the pair, dragging them into the screen and thrusting them into cyberspace. "I regret to inform you that you have activated Aleph!" sneers a digitized voice. "I am a program that holds the entire memory of humanity, and from time to time I have to remind you humans about it. . . ." "So prepare yourselves to travel!" barks Aleph the computer program, adding a menacing "heh-heh-heh!" for the road. Thus begins the saga of Claudia and Javier, the heroes of Virtual Travelers: A Bioethical Exploration of the History of Science (Santiago, Chile, Editorial LOM, 2001). It is not exactly Spiderman, but it is a far cry from American bioethicist H. Tristram Engelhardt's classic The Foundations of Bioethics and is much likelier to achieve its mission of engaging a wider audience, specifically 12- to 17-year-old students throughout Latin America. Virtual Travelers is the first volume of a new comic book series from Chile, the effort of a small group of scholars in philosophy, psychology, and science to make bioethics understandable to and engaging for the region's adolescents.
"Young people today cannot even imagine what World War II was like," says Dr. Lolas, who is also a founding member of the University of Chile's Interdisciplinary Center for Studies in Bioethics, which initiated the project in collaboration with PAHO. "They know nothing of war efforts, the mindset of earlier generations caught up in fear, hostility, and pain. They don't know that science, in addition to its civilizing mission, had a destructive mission that has also been a motor of change." Why is it important for them to know? The simplest answer is that of Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are destined to repeat it. But for Dr. Lolas and his colleagues, there is more; the answer lies in the nature of bioethics itself. To put it simply, technological change has given rise to the discipline of bioethics because people have come to realize that not everything now possible is necessarily desirable. Technological advance will occur, but its uses must be subject to some socioethical control. At the same time, rapid social change has meant that bioethics must be more than an academic discipline; it must be rooted in social dialogue, because today's societies are so heterogeneous. "The most distinctive feature of contemporary societies is their diversity; even the most integrated ones show signs of fragmentation," writes Dr. Lolas in the series' prologue. "We have become atomized into groups, subgroups, minorities and majorities that define their identity not by identifying with others but through differentiation and antagonism." He borrows the term "moral strangers," coined by Engelhardt, to describe those of us who occupy the same planet, even the same geographical space, but who have widely differing religious and ethical orientations. The challenge for bioethics is to find common ground that will allow us to achieve mutual understanding, as well as a sense of mutual obligation, on the issues that are central to modern human happiness and discontent, pain and suffering, life and death. >>>> Continue: [Preparing for Bioethical Dialogue] |
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The Pan American Health Organization Promoting Health in the Americas |
