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The genetic structures of living beings are the last of Nature’s creations to be invaded and altered for commerce…. Does anyone think it’s shocking [that the] infant biotechnology industry feels it’s okay to capture the evolutionary process, and to reshape life on earth to suit its balance sheets?…to take over Nature’s work?…Whether you give credit to God, or to Nature, there is a boundary between life forms that gives each its integrity and identity.

“To God, or to Nature”—an intriguing choice. It is certainly true that Christianity and Judaism have an uneasy relationship with biotechnology. After all, in the first pages of Genesis, the Bible makes the essences of species paramount:

And God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind…. And God created great whales and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind…. And God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so.

In Leviticus, humankind is instructed to keep those distinctions clear: “Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed.”

The one kind of life most important of all in the Bible is, of course, our own. Made in God’s image, we must never come close to blurring the distinction between us and animals: “Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.”

For many conservatives today, biotechnology’s threat to human nature, rather than to nature, is most alarming. “Using human procreation to fuse animal-human runs counter to the sacredness of human life and man created in the image of God,” writes Nancy L. Jones of the conservative Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity.

Some conservatives don’t cite chapter and verse, but they agree that crossing the species barrier degrades human nature. The most prominent of these critics is Leon Kass. After his encounter with Paul Berg in the early 1970s, Kass continued to write and speak about bioethics, and from 2002 to 2005 he was the chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics. In his arguments against chimeras and cloning, he says that the gut feeling that there’s something disgusting about them is its own evidence that they’re wrong. Kass calls this reliable disgust “the wisdom of repugnance.” We just know that certain things are wrong, such as incest and mutilating a corpse. Our inability to give a rational explanation for our feelings does not deny their importance.

In fact, Kass argues, this disgust is a valuable guide to what we should embrace and reject. There’s something horrifying about an army of human clones or human-animal chimeras. In an age when technology can provide us with so much, Kass has written, “repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”

Theologians and philosophers are not the only people making these sorts of arguments. In January 2006, President Bush called for a ban on “animal-human hybrids,” adding that “human life is a gift from our creator, and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale.” A bill to ban chimeras, introduced by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, states that “respect for human dignity and the integrity of the human species may be threatened by chimeras.”

To tamper with the essence of human nature—by introducing human brain cells into a mouse, for example, or by altering the genes in a fertilized egg—would be to degrade what it means to be human. In the words of Robert George, a Princeton political scientist and a member of Bush’s Council on Bioethics, “A thing either is or is not a whole human being.”

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