This coincided with the reviews of the San Francisco Opera's world premiere of "Doctor Atomic", John Adams' opera about J.Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb, "The enormous silvery, gray bomb hanging over a baby's cradle at the beginning of the second act" was the image that began one review. The editorial inspired by the opera ended with "the voice-over at the opera's end--a Japanese woman asking plaintively for water, portent of impending death by radiation--a chilling reminder to us in this nuclear age that the first country to develop the atom bomb remains the only one to use it."
It is chilling to juxtapose news of the re-creating of the flu as a scientific accomplishment with its potential for destruction, and these images from "Doctor Atomic". it would be like a quest to find where Dracula was buried with a silver stake through his heart and bringing him back to life.
Dr. Johan Hultin was given a huge amount of credit because he unearthed the sample of the virus which made this accomplishment possible. Hultin is the San Francisco physician who at age 73, journeyed to a remote burial ground in the subartic permafrost in 1977 and took from a preserved body, two intact lungs containing the 1918 Spanish flu virus. He had been haunted by his personal failure to accomplish this when he was a medical student fifty years before.
When the focus is scientific, logic and intellect--the rational side of the brain is called for. As a consequence of one-sided development, qualities to do with the imagination, feelings and intuition are either disdained or not developed. Creating the atomic bomb was a scientific accomplishment, as is re-creating the deadly flu virus--but after Hiroshima and Nagaski, we need recognize the potential consequences. The CDC now has a biological equivalent to the makings of the first atomic bomb. On the positive side, it probably will lead to developing a vaccine. This doesn't make it less a danger to the world or America less feared, because those with access to the vaccine will be safe. That we can develop a biological weapon from this virus that would be lethal only to the unvaccinated, is not good news.
In the news report: "The science behind the re-creating of the 1918 flu virus is a triumph for Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, MD, who began the seemingly quixotic quest to reconstruct the virus ten years ago." Such research can only be done when well funded and this Institute undoubtably would receive Department of Defense funding. It is not "quixiotic" to develop potential biological weapons.
I shudder that this virus has been brought back to life, even though I can appreciate that it is a scientific accomplishment. I wonder if any ethical questions were raised when decisions were made to go ahead with this project. There is an ethic of relationship that was overlooked by men experts on ethics until Carol Gilligan at Harvard noted that both principle and relationship are elements of ethical behavior. The systematizing mind, more common in men, can design brilliant protocols to further the goal of re-creating the virus. The empathic, intuitive mind, which women are noted for, can envision re-creating another epidemic and imagine how it would feel to be dying or to see loved ones die of this.
Within hierarchal systems, people are often under tremendous psychological pressure to go along. I wonder if there were men and women with ethical doubts about this project who kept silent as this deadly virus was brought to life. If the next step is creating stockpiles of the virus, the parallels with the Manhattan Project need to be heeded.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D, Jungian analyst, UCSF Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Author Urgent Message From Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World
