Science Matters

Does "chemical man" follow chemical ethics?

Boyce Rensberger

(7/2024) Last month I introduced you to Jacques Loeb, the researcher at the turn of the last century who, more than anyone else, turned biology into an experimental science. People said he was trying to create life in his laboratory by doing various chemical experiments. In a way, he was. Loeb believed that living organisms were nothing more than combinations of molecules that reacted with one another in specific ways. The total combination of the many ways amounted to life itself without benefit of anything supernatural.

What impressed me about that episode more than a century ago was the public reaction. It seems that most people welcomed it and had no problem buying into Loeb’s view that life is molecules reacting with one another. That was evident in newspaper and magazine coverage, and even letters to the editor. There was very little of the "playing God" allegation that we hear nowadays when, for example, American scientists put human genes in pigs or, more surprisingly, when Chinese scientists created genetically engineered human babies. Designer babies, critics call them. Both of those events are real, as you may have read.

Religious objections have been prominent. Roman Catholic popes have issued encyclicals warning that altering the genomes of human beings amounts to playing God. Pope John Paul II called it an "attack on the dignity of the human being." More recently Pope Francis condemned the "technological paradigm" and "indiscriminate genetic manipulation" of human life.

As for Protestants, there is the Southern Baptist Convention in its 2023 Resolution on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, saying "no innovation or emerging technology will ever be able to usurp the sovereignty and power of God."

By contrast, when Loeb’s experiments came to public view, they were welcomed as steps toward "creating life in a test tube."

The Chicago Tribune story even explained in great detail Loeb's experimental procedures. It cited several of his other experiments. In one, for example, Loeb had removed a frog’s leg muscle and chemically treated it in a dish, eventually causing it to beat rhythmically like a heart muscle—a very different kind of muscle and behavior from that of the leg. To Loeb, that proved that the behavior of a whole tissue, like that of the cells that make up the tissue, was controlled by chemistry.

"Step by step," the newspaper concludes, "the scientists of Woods Holl [an older spelling] are learning from the marine animals causes of the phenomena in the bodies of mankind." The story said that the outcomes of Loeb's research "will revolutionize theories of life held even by eminent students of natural science up to the present day" and that other scientists are saying "that when the chemical theory of life is definitely formulated, as they believe it soon will be, it will startle the world as it has not been startled since Darwin made public his theory of natural evolution."

To generalize from simple experiments on single cells to whole, complex animals seems ridiculous today, but in that time more than a century ago, Loeb commanded such amazement, optimism and acceptance that his findings were deemed newsworthy many times over many years. And, of course, it was subjected to the hype common in journalism of those days. "Eternal life," as some newspapers called it, was within the power of science to confer on living things, perhaps even on human beings.

Even Mark Twain, who was fascinated with science, wrote an essay titled "Dr. Loeb's Incredible Discovery," with a plea to remain open to new scientific advances.

To be sure, a few people did compare Loeb to Dr. Frankenstein. And some editorial writers ridiculed him for presuming to reduce to scientific terms anything as obviously miraculous as life. But more than one religious leader resigned himself to the belief that while Loeb might be right and science might one day be able to create a "chemical man," it would not count for much because it would lack a soul.

As an anonymous essayist put it in the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1912, "[I]t is not quite plain how the biologists and organic chemists of 100,000,000 AD are going to import a soul into their man after they have successfully usurped the creative role and breathed the breath of life into their protoplasmic amalgamation. … The question is can you have a man when you have produced a physical organism destitute of the primal distinction between the man and the brute."

In other words, even Loeb’s critics conceded that it might be possible not only to create life in a test tube, but eventually to create what they called a chemical man. They didn’t object to that; what they objected to was the idea that a chemical man would lack something supernatural—a soul.

What many commentators missed was Loeb’s implicit assertion that he himself was a chemical man and that all humans are chemical beings.

Eventually Loeb even addressed the question of how chemical human beings—not ones created in the future, but human beings today—could have ethics. The ability to tell right from wrong, he said, was not originally taught by religious leaders repeating the words of a supreme being but, instead, had evolved in the human brain as surely as a green plant’s inborn drive to reach for the sun.

"Our instincts," Loeb wrote in his seminal 1912 book The Mechanistic Conception of Life, "are the root of our ethics and … the instincts are just as hereditary as is the form of our body. We eat, drink and reproduce not because mankind has reached an agreement that this is desirable, but because, machine-like, we are compelled to do so … by processes in our central nervous system. … Not only is the mechanistic conception of life compatible with ethics: it seems the only conception of life which can lead to an understanding of the source of ethics."

A moral compass, Loeb believed, was an inherited web of instincts as important to the survival of the human species as a robin's instinct to migrate south for the winter or an oriole's to weave a hanging nest. Though Loeb’s views gained acceptance among many intellectuals of his day, they eventually faded from prominence only to be reasserted generations later in today’s "new" field of evolutionary psychology.