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Examining genetics through the lens of faith
Sunday, July 16, 2000 By Byron Spice, Post-Gazette Science Editor
Ronald Cole-Turner has always associated religion with healing. His father was a minister in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination that incorporates healing as part of its mission.
"I grew up with the notion that people of faith ought to be interested in healing," he said, recalling the prayers and laying on of hands that occurred in his father's congregations in Indiana, North Carolina and Ohio.
His interest persisted when he became an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. But today, as a professor of theology and ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, it's not just the power of prayer that interests him, but where our emerging knowledge of the human genome is leading us.
"As medicine progresses," he said, "do we just let everything fall into place, or do we need to rethink what's going on?"
Cole-Turner, 51, of Fox Chapel, has carved out an international reputation for his work on the religious aspects of genetic technology. He is an adviser to the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science, Ethics and Religion program, which most recently addressed issues surrounding potential genetic engineering of human beings. He also advises the John Templeton Foundation, which promotes scholarly studies of the moral and spiritual dimensions of life, and is the author of several books on cloning and the genetics revolution.
"He's one of the real leaders," said Brent Waters, a longtime friend. Before joining the seminary last year as director of the Center for Business, Religion and Public Life, Waters studied for four years at Oxford University in England, where he said Cole-Turner's books were on the reading list.
Many theologians who specialize in science tend to condemn technology, to the extent that they consider it at all, Waters said. But Cole-Turner has made the effort to understand the science behind technology as well as its moral and ethical implications.
"He's tried to take technology on its own terms," he said.
Famous for a hymn
Despite his growing expertise as a genetics and technology ethicist, Cole-Turner is probably best known for writing "Child of Blessing, Child of Promise," a popular baptism hymn.
When he wrote it 20 years ago in his backyard in Syracuse, N.Y., he and his wife, Rebecca, were just building their family; daughter Sarah was 3 and daughter Rachel was yet to be. "Obviously, it was a time when we were focused on the next generation," he said. "I wasn't even thinking about genetics at the time."
But in retrospect, the hymn seems to touch on themes that would recur as he began to address genetic issues.
"It borders on the mysterious that [human reproduction] even works," he observed. "It's so complex, with so many different genes and sequences. Only a third of all conceptions make it. How is it that this complex system actually works? For me, that's the moment of awe."
Cole-Turner began delving into genetic issues a few years later, when he was a campus minister at Michigan Technological University. The university was thinking about launching some genetics research, so he started reading what he could find on the subject.
"One thing led to another," he said, and he was hooked.
"It's easy to exaggerate the downside of genomics," he said, with concerns about privacy violations, the stigma associated with genetic defects and the potential misuse of genetic information by employers, insurers and others. And while he agrees there are reasons to be apprehensive about the technology, he also sees enormous potential for good coming from genetic insights.
"Religion does a great deal to cultivate the impulse for therapy," he explained. And genetic advances hold the promise of curing diseases for which there is no treatment today, for preventing many chronic diseases and for increasing the safety and effectiveness of therapies in general.
But Cole-Turner is quick to emphasize that though he understands the scope of the technology, he's not a scientist adept with the details. "I have no formal training. What I know I've learned from a combination of reading and logging hour after hour in discussion groups with really top people."
Knowledgeable friends say he's too modest.
"He has a superb knowledge of genetics," said Dr. W. Allen Hogge, a reproductive geneticist at Magee-Womens Hospital who has worked with him on genetics education programs. "He hasn't needed my help at all."
Concentrating on science
Cole-Turner made the leap to academia in 1985, joining the faculty at Memphis Theological Seminary. In 1996, he was able to focus more of his energy on science issues when he joined the Pittsburgh seminary. There, he is the first professor to hold a chair endowed by the late H. Parker Sharp, former chief legal counsel at Jones & Laughlin Steel, for the study of theology and ethics related to science and technology.
Though genetics has been a primary concern of Cole-Turner, he said that's not the technology that is posing the biggest moral questions today.
He is increasingly concerned with the implications of nanotechnology -- the ability to create autonomous, microscopic machines -- and the coming ability of computers and robots to replicate themselves. Technologists such as Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems have argued that these developments may threaten humanity's survival, and Cole-Turner agrees that those fields deserve greater scrutiny.
Whether he is studying the genome or robotics, though, Cole-Turner steers clear of dogmatic stances.
The role of the ethicist is not so much to keep scientists in moral check, he said, as it is to help sort through the dilemmas inherent in the technology as everyone tries to find the best solution. "You don't have the good guys -- the religious people -- over here and the evil scientists over here whom we have to keep an eye on.
"We're all in a muddle together."
In fact, Cole-Turner has been impressed with the sensitivity to religious and moral issues displayed by genetic researchers, such as Dr. Francis Collins, a born-again Christian who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute. "And [Magee-Womens'] Hogge is somebody who I know thinks religiously about what he's doing."
In contrast to the physicists of the Manhattan Project, who plunged into the challenge of developing the atomic bomb, biologists have shown a willingness to at least contemplate ethical and societal issues before proceeding with research.
In 1975, microbiologists gathered at Asilomar, Calif., to discuss whether they should pursue genetic engineering experiments. And from its beginning, the Human Genome Project has included a well-funded Ethical, Legal and Social Implications program.
Legacy of eugenics
This sensitivity, Cole-Turner suspects, is a response to the abuses of the eugenics movement that was popular in America early in the century and later in Nazi Germany, including efforts to improve humanity by eliminating the "unfit."
"I think it's that legacy that rightly haunts leaders of the field," he said. "How could they have been so wrong? And, in the case of the Nazis, how could they have so easily served the interests of the state?"
Aside from the impact on medicine, genetics research raises several other interesting issues for the religious community.
Behavioral genetics, for instance, suggests that genetics may affect free will in certain circumstances. While genes play less of a role than the general public tends to believe, he noted, scientists are nevertheless accumulating evidence that genes may create predispositions to depression, anxiety, homosexuality and other traits.
And there is the fact that humanity's imperfections are literally spelled out in each individual's genome, which typically includes between 5 and 10 potentially lethal defects.
"Theologically, I think what that says is that there is no perfect child, there is no perfect human being, there is no perfect genome. We have to live within that imperfection."
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