The Profound Impact of Biotechnology on “Self”
By Randi Garacci
The implications of Biotechnology and humanities are multifaceted. George Eistreich has a unique and personal connection to the way technology affects people with disabilities. The Harvest, a play by Manjula Padmanabhan, discusses the underbelly of organ harvesting in third-world countries. L'Intrus, by Jean-Luc Nancy, shares a personal narrative of how a heart transplant transformed his sense of self and perspective of the world. Biotechnology impacts us in profound ways, as our health is critical to our existence.
Jean-Luc Nancy expresses great existential angst in his book, L'Intrus. He views his new heart as an "intruder." This intruder on his life makes him question what determines who he is as a person. He exposes that his trespasser heart can be of any gender or race. His heart belonged to an entirely individual whole human being, one who lived an entire life. This idea forces him to compare his identity to his physical being, causing him distress. He recognizes the relationship he has to his donor, but simultaneously has an acute awareness of his body's risk of rejecting the foreign heart. The risk of rejection drags him through physical and emotional torment. It sounded like Lymphoma was an iatrogenic effect of his transplant, although that didn't make sense to me. Due to his Lymphoma, he undergoes a treatment involving removing all his blood. Morphine numbed his pain but altered his mental state. It must have been painful and terrifying, starting with his diagnosis. I doubt a Buddhist monk could fare much better psychologically. He explains that humans in the modern age strive to be god-like. His survival instinct led him to pursue a replacement heart and that while it's a foreign organ, he is still essentially himself, but altered in the same way that everyone changes over time.
Conversely, Padmanabhan discusses the perspective of the donor in a world where third world countries are preyed upon by first world Americans. Through her play, The Harvest, she exposes the harvesting of organs in India in the 1990s, but she employs a futuristic dystopic world set in 2010. In this world, a family lives in a studio apartment with a shared toilet two floors down. The family consists of a mother-in-law, two sons, and a wife. The married son, Om, signs up with a company to be an organ donor in exchange for riches. Padmanabhan highlights the inequity of the countries and how disadvantaged the Indian family is.
Eistreich discusses how having a daughter with cerebral palsy has illuminated the need for people with disabilities to be assimilated into our culture and how technology like fetal testing has warped our sense of inclusion. He mentions that some people blame parents for not terminating people who have a more difficult time contributing intellectually and economically to our society. To continue down that ethical epistemology is a bleak world. It would be interesting to know would be how people feel about being born with a disability. If there were a way to eradicate disability before birth genetically, I wonder what individuals with disabilities from birth would think about it. Would they have preferred to be born without the challenges they face, or is it an integral part of their identity, giving them a unique sense of self and strength of character? We don't get a choice on our physicality. Would anyone before birth change their mental or physical abilities if given the god-like opportunity to shape our existence? There's no way to know or guarantee a happy life either way, so maybe it's a realm best unexplored—inclusivity FTW.