Dangerous Arrogance
First published in the print column Strictly Haresay
I recently watched the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl, recounting the horrific nuclear disaster that occurred in the Soviet Union in 1986.
I’m old enough to remember when news of the actual event played over U.S. television channels and headlined our newspapers. Though tragic to hear about, the whole thing happened very far away from U.S. soil (and air), and didn’t pose any immediate threat to our safe and privileged American lives. The miniseries does a good job of pulling back that curtain of separation, and brings the horror of the risks associated with nuclear power plants right into your living room. Not only that, it does an impressive job of depicting the oppressive nature of life under a communist regime—even for high-ranking, well-educated public officials. The governing body, at that time led by Mikhail Gorbachev, had very little accountability and even less regard for the lives of its own people, let alone their individual rights.
Watching the chain of events unfold leading up to that monumental debacle I just kept thinking, How can some of the world’s most intelligent humans—scientists, nuclear physicists and engineers—be so stupid?
To be fair, stupid probably isn’t the right word. Arrogant. That’s really what it is. And it’s a dangerous characteristic that’s as prevalent now as it was 36 years ago when the world watched as Chernobyl blew up and melted down, killing thousands.
And though hubris isn’t exactly an anomaly in the political realm, this trait stands out quite noticeably in the scientific field.
One recent example is the announcement by biotech company, Colossal Biosciences, of their plan to resurrect the wooly mammoth species by performing gene-editing processes on DNA of the Asian elephant in an effort to duplicate DNA collected from the molar of a frozen mammoth. The idea is being referred to as the “de-extinction” of the mammoth, as if bringing back a long-extinct species were possible. What they’re really doing is designing a franken-version of a mammoth by creating an elephant with enough mammothy characteristics to enable it to live in northern climes. Colossal Biosciences’ goal is to try to create a ‘cold-resistant elephant’, which it was claims would be ‘functionally equivalent’ to a mammoth. So not a mammoth.
The eventual goal is to repopulate parts of the Arctic with this Woolly Mammoth 2.0 and strengthen local plant life with the migration patterns and dietary habits of the beast, thereby combatting global warming.
Right. Maybe if we cloak the whole thing with some politically charged rhetoric and dress it up in New World ideology we can avoid facing any questions on the ethics of handling these creatures, and scientists playing god.
If Colossal proves successful on reincarnating a version of the mammoth—they already have plans to do the same with the Tasmanian tiger. Even more disturbing and god-like are the semi-serious, profoundly problematic proposals involving the recreation of Neanderthals—extinct humans who lived in Europe, Asia and the Middle East before us.
An important question we all need to ask (egos aside) is: Just because maybe we can, does that really mean we should?
