Would God Be Pissed If We Brought Back The Dinosaurs? Or, Alternatively: My Unsolicited Thoughts On Bioethics by Moe Frank-Niyogi
“Hi Krishna,” the email begins, “I hope your week is going well.”
On average, my father receives a probable approximate of ten correspondences per day, all dedicated to begging him for things. As a professor and researcher of algae biology at UC Berkeley, there is a laundry list of things worth begging for - grade bumps, extra credit assignments, and, in the case of this particular email, interviews for documentaries. A woman called Lindsey wants my father to provide his thoughts on “de-extinction”. On “reengineering life”.
In other words - poet’s words - they want my father’s thoughts on playing God. It does strike me as somewhat sensationalized; undoubtedly the reality of these topics is less cliche-mad-scientist and more “let’s sort through hundreds of samples and try to wrangle CRISPR into submission”. But the phrasing, as well as the video sample attached, have a certain allure to them. A certain heresy. Louis Lasagna says: Above all, I must not play at God. My father has a doctorate, but appears wholly uninterested in the field of medicine. So what could it mean, in science’s case, to play God? I was diagnosed with autism at the age of sixteen. My dad tells the story - with a certain self-deprecating twist - of his own, related realization like this:
So the doctor was asking us about what you were like as a kid, right? And he asks whether or not you organized your toys, like in lines or patterns. And I said, well, he didn’t do that - but I sure did! [Cue wry laughter.]
The household in which my father was raised was, as a general rule, intolerant of any talk of mental health. His parents, both esteemed biochemists, one an immigrant originally from Kolkata, saw mental health - especially in relation to work ethic - less as a topic worth considering and more of an obstacle to neatly sidestep in pursuit of pure, unadulterated productivity. Additionally, they were in Tennessee - meaning, in the case of his father, assimilate or you’re fucked. The one word I was taught in Bengali was মশা, meaning “mosquito”.
When my father thinks of his parents, he tilts his head. Considers for a minute, then two. He is a man with which conversations are composed of large chunks of silence, interspersed occasionally with smaller chunks of speech.
Of his mother, he says: She was hardworking. Less present than my dad, but when she was around she made me and Dev great food. She was a good cook. Sometime after I left for college she had a nervous breakdown, had to take time off work.
Of his father: He coached my soccer team until I graduated high school. He was Hindu, a man of faith, but it was the South so, y’know - what can you do? He sang, though, whenever people from the lab came over. He would sit right at the heart of the party and sing.
Was his father like God to him, I wonder? He was for me. Sixteen and sobbing, my misery relentless, immovable - I had just gone through the barbed, tearing tunnel of my first real breakup and come out the other end bloodied, blinking at sunlight that seemed more punishment than relief. He found me crying at the kitchen table, made me a bagel with cream cheese and apricot jam, my favorite. He just sat with me while I ate it, the silence like a softness, cool balm over my burning.
The email goes on to elaborate: “I came across your work plant work [sic] through this Science News article and would love to hear what you're currently excited about.”
The article in question is about genetically engineered crops. GMO is tricky for me - I hear a lot of people talk about it as unnatural, something to be feared, avoided at all costs through convenient little stickers on one’s bag of potato chips. Why is this the case? Is it the same knee-jerk response that arose in me - someone generally skeptical re:matters of religion - upon hearing terms like reengineering life?
For me, what really comes to mind with terms like that is a frame from an obscure issue of Spider-Man I saw on the Internet at the age of twelve or so. In it, the webslinging hero faces a massive (and undoubtedly paleontologically inaccurate) pterosaur, imploring “You can rewrite DNA on the fly, and you’re using it to turn people into dinosaurs? But with tech like that, you could cure cancer!” The pterosaur, rearing on its hind legs, claws curled into fists, declares “But I don’t want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.”
Of course, CRISPR is not (and likely never will be) capable of dinosaur transmogrification of any kind, nor can it cure cancer (yet!). But it does make one wonder: if “tech like that” were possible, who would be in control? Who gets, in a broad, hypothetical sense, to play God? And how much can we interfere with what is considered “natural” before it is no longer so? If the wooly mammoth is brought back from the dead, a process the email claims is already underway, is it considered blasphemy? Are we thwarting - perverting, even - the laws of nature? If God is real, will this be the tipping point? In all likelihood, my father will not give the interview. (Despite his achievements warranting it, he has steadfastly refused to have a Wikipedia page written on him for over ten years.) Still, it’s worth chewing on. When I called him to ask why he forwarded the email to me, he laughed.
I don’t know, he said. I just thought you’d find it funny.
Radiance Is A Really Nice Way To Say Transgenderism by Moe Frank-Niyogi
From this moment forward, the Sun is trans. He is a woman. She is a man. You can’t argue, because you’re wrong, and you always will be, til the end of time - and after for that matter. What do you know of gods? What do you know of God, capital-G? It wouldn’t want you pulling shit like that. Trust me - I know God. I know God made me the same way it made wheat but not bread, the same way it made leather and wood but never drums; for man and woman and whatever to share in the act of creation. What I’m saying is that I’ve met it. It lives under my skin.