Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In Mary Shelly’s famous 1818 story, Frankenstein’s Monster , how the monster is created is left hazy, “an ambiguous method consisting of chemistry and alchemy” . Today, with our understanding of DNA, our ability to clone, to write custom-DNA and then to make it come alive by growing it in the womb of an existing species, we are much further down that road (Saving grace so far? The custom DNA still needs to be grown inside the womb of an existing species, which puts constraints on how different it can be from the mother). With great power comes great responsibility. But biology seems to operating the way Dr.Ian Malcolm lamented in Jurassic Park : “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” A recent example of this was when David Evans in Canada resurrected a virus called horsepox using genetic material they ordered from a company that synthesizes DNA. Harmless though it is to humans, it a close cousin to sm...

Matt Levine wrote this article on the characteristics of professions like lawyers, journalists, data scientists and bankers. About lawyers, he says, these are their ethics: “Oversimplifying massively, the basic rule for a lawyer is that your obligations are to your client, and you have to act in her best interests, even if that is against the interests of accuracy; legal ethics is then mostly a set of exceptions to this principle.” Journalism, on the other hand, has the opposite set of ethics: “Oversimplifying massively, the basic rule for a journalist is that your obligations are to the public, and you should be accurate even if that is against the interests of the people you talk to; journalistic ethics is then mostly a set of exceptions to this principle.” If, like me, you are wondering how any of this can be called “ethics”, then you’re not alone. Levine clarifies: “It is weird to think of them as "ethics." They are both functional systems adapted to the wo...

Is there an absolute standard of ethics? About everything, not just many things? Obviously not, and no, the reason people don’t agree on issues of ethics isn’t always politics or religion or bigotry or one side being stronger than the other. I will cite a couple of instances. The first one is the miners scenario : “Imagine 100 miners who are stuck in a mine. They are divided in two groups. You can either rescue 50 (with certainty), but then the other 50 will be lost (this is strategy 1). Or you can try a different rescue strategy, which may potentially save all of them, but only at a 50% probability; there’s another 50% chance that all will die (strategy 2). Which strategy would you choose?” Many variants of this question exist. But here’s the key point: people have conflicting views on which is the more ethical choice and neither side can cite a reason to convince the other! The other instance I have in mind is about medical trials. Joanna Monti-Masel wrote a great artic...