Bioethics Through a Comic Book Lens

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."
"It's not working," moans Javier. "Try another program!" urges Claudia. The best they can do is access an international news Web site. As a photo of a firing missile downloads, the Web site warns: "Fanatical nationalist leaders could take control of the nuclear arsenal of the ex-USSR."

"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.

Dr. Fernando Lolas, a psychiatrist and director of the Regional Bioethics Program of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), is the first to acknowledge that learning the history of science and technology is not a top priority for young Latin Americans.

"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.

This should be challenge enough. But as Dr. Lolas points out, we are more than "moral strangers." We are in many cases also "epistemological strangers," with differing levels of education and exposure, and even "generational strangers," that is, "ever-changing human groups who know nothing about the past and are immune to advice and warning."

For Dr. Lolas and his colleagues, the first step toward preparing so many types of strangers for bioethical dialogue is education, and the people to start with are youths. "Preparing the people who are going to be the dialogists of tomorrow is this book's mission," he says.

The project grew out of two essential convictions, described in Dr. Lolas' prologue. "The first is that science and technology are not solely a matter for experts. They are the responsibility of all members of society," he writes. The second is that "becoming literate in science and technology does not arouse much enthusiasm. The masses remain silent; experts think it's a waste of time to explain their concerns."

As for young people, "they think that conventional instruction is just that: instruction," says Dr. Lolas. Traditional teaching "doesn't delve deeply, leaves no room for fascination. It does not form, it just informs."

Virtual Travelers is designed to engage teenagers in a process of self-education in which dialogue-and the motivation to engage in dialogue-plays a central role. Indeed, dialogue played a central role in the series' development.

To reach their final stage, the comics were presented to different groups of young people, "to boys and girls, rich and poor, who judged them for interest and quality," says Dr. Lolas. "They were critiqued. They were de-bated. More than a final product, these comics are part of a social process-the process of dialogue so fundamental to democratic society."

Scriptwriter Darío Oses, a Chilean novelist, used idiomatic but universal Latin American Spanish in the dialogue and narrative to ensure accessibility to young readers throughout the region. The series' editors, Clara Misrachi and Felipe Alliende, professors at the University of Chile who have wide experience in designing educational materials, point out that the comic book format, through its use of irony and caricature, helps put complex issues into stark relief. "By presenting problems through images, they lose their abstract character," the editors note. "They become localized, they get a face, they provoke emotions, they make you want to take a stand on them."

The series' protagonists, Claudia and Javier, are themselves embodiments of opposing viewpoints on the issue of scientific progress. Although both are computer- and Internet-savvy, Javier is skeptical of scientific advance, fearing that its attempts to alter nature threaten human welfare. Claudia is pro-science, believing that it overwhelmingly benefits humanity. The computer program Aleph, who constantly plays with the pair's emotions, embodies their ambivalent attraction to technology.

"The series attempts to recreate in words and images specific episodes in the history of science and technology that posed serious ethical dilemmas," says Dr. Lolas. Transported back to 1939 and Nazi-era Berlin, Claudia and Javier confront the origins of weapons of mass destruction. Was the United States' development of the atomic bomb justified by the knowledge that Germany's Nazis were developing it themselves? The two also visit France in 1885 and discover the dilemma of French scientist Louis Pasteur: whether to risk using on humans a rabies treatment that he had only previously tried on dogs and rabbits.

Then Aleph takes the pair to Bhopal, India, on the eve of the Union Carbide plant's lethal release of toxic gas in December 1984. The dilemma: Do the undeniable benefits of pesticides for agricultural production and human nutrition justify the risk of death, illness and birth defects such as those that occurred at Bhopal?

Other historical dilemmas include the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which poor Alabama sharecroppers were denied treatment for syphilis as part of a decades-long study of the disease; the first heart transplant and the dilemma of harvesting organs from brain-dead patients; and cloning, with its inherent dilemma of whether people have the right to manipulate animal life and open the way for direct genetic engineering of humans.

The comic books first appeared as freestanding inserts in Chile's daily newspaper La Nación, which circulates nationally. Initial distribution was financed by Chile's National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT), through its Explora program, which aims at increasing young people's interest and participation in scientific and technological innovation. Impressed with the initial results, the Ford Foundation also stepped in to finance Virtual Travelers.

For the longer term, the comics will be distributed in book format, with extensive supporting text, to schools and universities throughout Latin America through PAHO's country offices. Ongoing seminars are being offered to familiarize teachers with bioethics and the project's methods and goals. "Teachers were perhaps the missing link in our previous attempts to bring attention to these issues," says Dr. Lolas.

Among students, the series has been well received. In an evaluation session, Rosa Toledo, a public school student from Santiago, found Virtual Travelers to be "very out of the ordinary, very distinct from what we usually get. It makes us more interested and more motivated to really get into the material."

Encouraged by their success, the proj-ect's sponsors have more recently embarked on a second comic book series, this time dealing with sexuality and sex-ual responsibility. With funding from the Ford Foundation, PAHO, and the University of Chile, the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Bioethics is this time coordinating efforts with other educational centers in Argentina and Peru that also promote the use of comic books in science teaching.

"The second project has found more difficulties," admits Dr. Lolas. "We deal with contraception, impotence, sexually transmitted diseases and other topics not easily talked about in certain places."

Not prone to shrink from controversy, Dr. Lolas and his colleagues plan to distribute the second book at least as widely as Virtual Travelers, hoping to spark a debate as broad and lively as it is controversial.

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