Call American handyman

ND Batra, Norwich University, Vermont, The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta

While the whole world is watching how the Americans are fighting terrorism and helping to rebuild torn societies in Afghanistan, the Philippines and Indonesia, and hopefully in the Middle East, there are some other extraordinary events taking place that would affect our lives in ways so fundamental that religious fundamentalism, whether Muslim, Christian or Hindu, would not be able to stop their impact.

Eighteen months ago, an American woman gave birth to a girl whose genetic system was cleaned up at the embryonic stage to rid her of the certainty of Alzheimer's disease, an extreme kind of dementia that turns a human being into a vegetable existence.

President Ronald Reagan is in that terrible condition now. Without doing genetic tinkering at the embryonic stage, the girl would have been destined to get the defective gene of her mother, a 30-year-old woman with the Alzheimer gene, who is destined to become victim of the disease within a decade and when that happens, she won't be able to recognize her daughter.

Genes are our destiny, nevertheless, now you can eliminate the bad gene and have a different fate on earth, well, to a great extent.

What it means is that there's hope when life seems hopeless and that's why everyone wants to do what the American handyman (with an MD or PhD) is doing, that is, look to science and technology, not astrology or the Holy Book, to solve the problem of human suffering and make living better.

When in trouble, who would you call? The high priest of Ayodhya or the American handyman?

The procedure as explained by Harvard Medical School professor, Dr Jerome Groopman, in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, seems very simple to me. It is called "preimplantation genetic diagnosis" (PGD), a technology that is nothing more than doing quality control before a machine, let's say, an automobile, is built. An in vitro fertility doctor harvests eggs from the prospective mother, mixes them with her husband's sperms in a petri dish, and lets the embryos grow.

At this stage, the doctor could select an embryo from the cluster of test tube embryos for the purpose of sex selection of the child; or he could go further. He could do genetic testing of all the embryos for a disease and select an embryo that's free from the defective gene. Just as an automobile quality control engineer would reject a defective carburetor from a car on the assembly line, the fertility doctor in the case of the American woman chose an embryo that had no Alzheimer gene and threw away the rest that were defective, though they too had potential life in them.

If your are thinking whether in the future fertility doctors might develop methods of discovering violence-prone genes that could be eliminated in embryonic stage so that the Sabarmati Express is never set on fire again and there would be no Genghis Khan, Hitler or Osama bin Laden, or other human scourges that burn the innocent alive, as it happened in Gujarat, that would be expecting too much from the genetic handyman.

But this is not the only ingenious work that the American handyman has been doing lately. He went to space to repair the Hubble space telescope, the humankind's spy on the cosmos for the last eight years.

A week and half ago on Friday, seven astronauts rode the shuttle Columbia to rendezvous with the Hubble to replace its aging solar wings and upgrade its other instruments, and after two days of chase at 17,000 mph, they finally caught up with the space observatory 360 miles above the earth over the Pacific Ocean.

Using the Canadian-built robotic arm, the astronauts dragged the Hubble to the shuttle's cargo bay area for repair and renovations, much like marine biologists would tug a sick whale to shore to nurse it to health and then release it to do God's work in the ocean.

After hours of working in space, the space-walking handymen installed the new wings that will give the Hubble 20 per cent more wattage and enable its instruments including a new powerful camera and power system to work more efficiently, that is, "to see the planets, stars and the universe better."

In spite of the leak in Columbia's cooling system, it was not such a mission impossible, after all, the repairmen had been up into space in 1999 for a tune-up service on the Hubble. I do not see any difference between a genetic handyman repairing an embryo to rid an unborn girl of a breast cancer-causing gene and a space handyman implanting new eyes, heart and nervous system on the old man Hubble, so that we could understand the universe.

It is absolutely ethical and courageous to do so. And the handyman impulse is unstoppable, even in an orthodox Islamic country like Saudi Arabia, where doctors at Abdulaziz University and the King Fahad Hospital and Research Center in Jeddah, performed in 2000 the first ever human uterus transplant.

What intrigues me the most is the eternal optimism in the USA that the handyman could make the world better. Perhaps, the source of this self-renewing hope is the bastion of the nation's core value, the free marketplace of ideas, a force so overwhelming that religious fundamentalism

seldom raises its ugly head in the USA. Watch out: That's what might happen in the Indian subcontinent one day.