The Question Berg Could Not Answer: On the Moral Weight of 'Should We?'

The pause before the cut

Sometime in the early 1970s, Paul Berg stood at the edge of an experiment that would change medicine forever. He had the enzymes, the plasmids, the technical means to splice genes from one organism into another. What stopped him — briefly, famously — was not a failed protocol. It was a question: Should we? The Science Communication Lab's short documentary on recombinant DNA recovers that hesitation: the moratorium, the Asilomar conference where scientists voluntarily paused their own work to ask whether the world was ready. That is a genuinely admirable episode. The essay around the film, however, treats the hesitation as a political and social phenomenon — shaped by 'diffuse and collective efforts' and the pressures of public alarm — without ever asking what kind of question Berg was actually posing.

He was not asking a question about public relations. He was asking a moral question. Moral questions have a different structure than empirical ones. They do not yield to peer review.

What biochemistry cannot supply

The documentary's framing reflects a recognizable secular intellectual posture: science generates power, society negotiates its use, and ethics is the name we give to that negotiation. On this reading, the Asilomar moratorium was essentially a regulatory achievement — scientists getting ahead of public panic, then returning to the bench once the protocols were deemed safe enough. The story ends with Berg's Nobel Prize and biotechnology's triumph. Progress resumes.

But notice what this reading cannot accommodate. Berg's original hesitation was not about safety protocols. It was about whether the act itself — the deliberate recombination of genetic material across species — was something human beings were entitled to do at all. That is a question about the nature of the thing being manipulated, and about the nature of the being doing the manipulating. Safety procedures can tell you how to do something less dangerously. They cannot tell you whether a category of action is consonant with human dignity and the order of creation.

Aquinas understood that natural law is not a list of prohibitions derived from biology in the abstract. As Gabriel Zanotti explains in his commentary on the Summa Contra Gentiles, for Thomas the natural law deploys itself through the cardinal virtues — above all, prudence — applied to concrete circumstances.[^5] The question is never simply 'is this chemically possible?' but 'does this action, here, now, by these agents, for these ends, accord with what human beings are and are ordered toward?' That is a richer question than the Asilomar conference was equipped to answer, because it requires an account of human nature that biochemistry does not provide.

The dignity the genome cannot name

The film gestures at something important when it notes that Janet Mertz's contribution was 'vital yet less celebrated' — a quiet acknowledgment that science, like all human endeavors, is shaped by power, recognition, and the contingencies of who gets to be in the room. The Catholic tradition presses further: the genome itself does not tell us what a human being is worth. That determination cannot be read off the double helix.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his Wednesday audiences on Thomas Aquinas, drew precisely this connection: when natural law and the responsibility it entails are denied, 'this dramatically paves the way to ethical relativism at the individual level and to totalitarianism of the State at the political level.'[^3] The bioethics that emerges from pure negotiation — from consensus, regulatory bodies, and shifting public tolerance — is always vulnerable to being renegotiated when the political winds change. A moratorium is not a moral prohibition. It is a pause. Pauses end.

Certain values 'no individual, no majority and no State can ever create, modify or destroy, but must only acknowledge, respect and promote.'[^3] The dignity of the human person is among those values. So is the integrity of what it means to be a living thing made in a particular way. The recombinant DNA debate never asked those questions with sufficient seriousness, because the secular framework available to Berg and his colleagues had no vocabulary for them. They could speak of risk. They could not easily speak of sanctity.

The crisis the moratorium obscured

The strongest version of the documentary's case runs like this: the scientists were right to hesitate, right to convene Asilomar, and right to resume. The system worked. Public deliberation, scientific caution, and regulatory oversight produced a framework under which recombinant DNA research proceeded safely and beneficially. Insulin for diabetics. Vaccines. Cancer therapies. The fruits are real.

The Catholic tradition does not oppose biotechnology as such. It does not hold that every intervention in biological processes violates the natural order. Aquinas himself understood that human art participates in and extends natural processes — medicine, agriculture, craft — without necessarily defying them. The tradition's concern is more precise: it addresses acts that treat the human body, or human genetic identity, as raw material for unlimited redesign according to purely technical criteria, without reference to the ends for which human beings exist.[^4]

The problem Berg could not solve — because he lacked the right conceptual tools — is the difference between using nature and replacing the nature of nature. The Zanotti-inflected Thomistic reading makes this concrete: natural law is not heteronomous constraint imposed from outside. It is the internal logic of what things are. Freedom, as John Paul II insisted, 'submits to the truth of creation' — meaning the human being discovers what human nature is, made by God, and freely chooses to follow it.[^5] When that reference point dissolves, freedom does not expand. It becomes weightless.

The question that outlasted the moratorium

Berg's pause was a moral instinct looking for a moral framework. The Catholic intellectual tradition offers one — not as a barrier to discovery, but as the only thing that can tell us what discovery is for. Without an account of the human person that precedes and exceeds the laboratory, 'Should we?' collapses into 'Can we afford to?' or 'Will the public accept it?' Those are political questions. They are not the question Berg was reaching for when he stopped.

The documentary ends with triumph. But the question at its center never received an answer equal to its weight. Not that science paused and then proceeded wisely — but that the wisdom required to answer Berg's question was never fully assembled. It is still waiting, patient as an uncut strand, for someone to pick it up.

<p style="font-style:italic;">Disclaimer: The views and content of this post are the author's own. AI was used to help edit grammar and improve clarity.</p>

[^3]: Pope Benedict XVI, Wednesday Audiences on Thomas Aquinas, WednesdayAudiences.pdf, p. 1.

[^4]: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, p. 205.

[^5]: Gabriel Zanotti, Comentario a la Suma Contra Gentiles.