Mr. Speaker, I am delighted you are in the chair because your great love of literature is well known to us all and I will take the House on a literary voyage this afternoon.
First, I will make a few remarks on Bill C-47 which address how the government and this country will manage the reproductive and genetic technologies that face us in the next century.
It is to a great extent a bill I support but it is a bill based on fear. We now realize we have attained the technological ability to actually manipulate the human entity, the physical human being.
There are some prohibited practices which are particularly horrifying. I think I speak for most Canadians when I say we are very nervous when we read of this type of thing being possible, the actual genetic alteration of genes and changing the very character of the human being which may be born in next generation. The cloning of human embryos is something that is straight out of science fiction novels. It is something that we may see in "Star Trek". Now as a government we see this as a possibility and it is something we want to prohibit.
One prohibited practice is the creation of animal human hybrids. It gives us shivers to think of the possibility we now have the technology that may make it possible. The transfer of embryos between humans and other species is something which is horrifying. The creation of embryos for research purposes seems to lower human dignity to the point where only scientific endeavour is important and not human dignity.
We are all concerned about and abhor these things to a greater or lesser extent. Fear sparks the bill, a very legitimate fear that has its origins in our culture and in our literature.
I will take the House back to Frankenstein , a novel by Mary Shelley in 1818. Frankenstein is probably one of the most well read or distributed novels in the English language. It has probably been translated into every imaginable language.
The story deals with a scientist in the early 19th Century who harnessed electricity. As as result he found he was able to animate a human being that he created out of body parts obtained from cemeteries. He was engaged in body snatching. At the time that Mary Shelley wrote the novel-and she did it in about three days-body snatching for medical research was a common and accepted practice in Britain although the public was horrified by it.
In any event the monster was created. He was not a monster initially. He was seen by Dr. Frankenstein, the scientist, as something he could create as a result of science. He could put these body parts together and give this being life. For a moment Dr. Frankenstein became like God. He animated life.
We know what happened. The human being that was created by the scientist became a monster in the eyes of humankind. He was an individual with a sense of emotion, a sense of wanting to belong, who eventually committed murder. He was so horrible and monstrous to look at that he was pursued and destroyed.
The picture of Frankenstein is something that has echoed down through the years. It is a part of our culture. It is a part of the francophone culture as well because the Hunchback of Notre Dame , for example, is about another monster in our society that could be created by humankind.
Another novel comes even closer to the type of prohibited practices we talk about in Bill C-47, The Island of Dr. Moreau , which was written in 1896 by H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells is famous for having written the novels The Time Machine which involved going back in time and War of the Worlds which involved an invasion of earth by Martians. The Island of Dr. Moreau is less well known. In this novel a young man is marooned on an island where experiments are being undertaken by a surgeon-scientist by the name of Dr. Moreau. Dr. Moreau takes creating human beings a step further. He has travelled to a remote island and he is in the process of taking animals and reshaping them by surgery into human beings. The island becomes filled with various types of beasts who resemble humans.
The theory at the time was that if body parts were changed around to make an animal look human it would acquire human characteristics including speech. On The Island of Dr. Moreau these various animal humans had the power of speech. Our hero on the island is very frightened by them.
Let me read a bit from the novel. This part describes the hero encountering the creations of Dr. Moreau. It reads:
The two most formidable Animal Men were my Leopard-man and a creature made of hyena and swine. Larger than these were three bull-creatures who pulled in the boat. Then came the silvery-hairy-man, who was also the Sayer of the Law, M'ling, and a satyr-like creature of ape and goat. There were three Swine-men and a Swine-woman, a mare-rhinoceros-creature, and several other female whose sources I did not ascertain.
One of the most chilling moments in the novel is when the hero on the island tries to escape from the compound of Dr. Moreau and enters the jungle. He encounters these animal humans and is chased by all nightmarish creatures that are half animal and half human. There was a chillingness. I would like to read the passage but it would take too long. It was a chilling to imagine this man going through the dark and moonlit forest and being chased by various creatures that were half leopard and half man.
This image of horror achieved by H. G. Wells just about 100 years ago entered the psyche of English speaking society of the day just as the novel Frankenstein and similar novels dealing with cloning and the creation of human animal creatures have done. We have this sense of horror when we even contemplate the concept of marrying the human being with the animal, with a creature.
Obviously both these novels spring out of Christian traditions from the Middle Ages, medieval paintings of the devil's creatures as being half man and half beast. Literature and the arts have an effect on culture like a pebble thrown into the pond. The ripple goes down through the ages and touches all people. We do not need to have actually read the novels. We do not need to have read The Island of Dr. Moreau to have felt the effect of the story told by H. G. Wells at that time.
The reason we react so negatively and we feel Bill C-47 is necessary is that we see the possibility of creating animal human hybrids. We experience the same fear innate in the novel Frankenstein or the novel The Island of Dr. Moreau . In many respects we are reacting to something in our culture as a result of our literature and our religion.
There is one problem. What will happen in the future when we pass these laws, when we forbid as we will do genetic tinkering? What will happen a decade from now when a married couple want to have children but carry the cystic fibrosis gene or the muscular dystrophy gene? Will there not be a huge pressure to do something to prevent these couples from having children who will die by age 30? I had a friend who had a daughter with cystic fibrosis. It is a terrible wasting disease of children. Their lungs fill up with fluids, a thick mucous. Muscular dystrophy is similar in a sense that it is a wasting disease. It is a tragedy to see young people suffer from it.
In both instances they are genetic illnesses. It may be possible through genetic tinkering to prevent the embryos from carrying that genetic defect. There will be a huge pressure to go around the essence of this law when it comes to tinkering with human genes. There will be people who will be wanting that change to have healthy and whole children.
There is another aspect. Science marches on. Science is something that humans at various points in history have tried to stop. They have tried to stand in its way because they feared the results coming down the road. We are not the first ones who have tried to pass legislation that prevents the development of new technology. In this case it is human technology but there are many times in the past when there has been an effort to prevent changes we are afraid of.
I will quote again from the book The Island of Dr. Moreau''. This is the doctor himself speaking. He is explaining why he has undertaken this fearsome experiment of creating human beings out of animals. We should all take note of what he said:
You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me. That is the only way I ever heard of research going. I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him!
While I support Bill C-47 absolutely, we will never be able to stop the progress of science that heads in directions of which we are fearful. The very technological possibilities we fear will nevertheless become subjects of curiosity and research. Ultimately I am sure research will continue on those subjects.
I have a few more words of Dr. Moreau. He was talking about these beast humans he created. He said:
To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes man at last as remorseless as Nature.
I will use the opportunity of speaking to Bill C-47 to make a prediction. There are a number of prohibited practices here including those I have mentioned. I predict that in 50 years two-thirds of these prohibited practices will be legal in this country and one-third will have been tried somewhere in the world.