The Ramazzini Institute
for Occupational and Environmental Health Research   

Who Are We?

Moral Questions
"The most difficult thing to predict is not the future, but the past"
-- Old Russian Proverb

     Darwin, in The Descent of Man, said, “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.” This is only the second issue of Genes, Ethics & Environment!, yet reading the pages in our very short history, even Darwin might wonder how strongly the moral sense, if there is one, prevails. [There is one.]

     Lingering problems of toxic agent contamination, untended research needs, genetic discrimination, abuse of research subjects, genetic selection instead of worker protection, neglected clusters of those with rare genetic disorders…these are some of the realities documented here. Looking back, we may be prone to find much on the basis of which a shrill future can be predicted.

     Whoever the babushka was who first gave us her proverb was right about the difficulty of understanding even what we have just experienced, or perhaps we should say, especially what we have just experienced. But look a little harder.

     In this issue, we report that Don Mize at Ft. Carroll in South Korea prevailed in at least one battle to get the Army to take asbestos contamination seriously, through an administrative hearing. The Congress and the Department of Energy collaborate on a medical assistance-compensation program for nuclear workers at high risk, or afflicted with, occupational disease. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission believes that Terri Seargent should not lose her job because she needs preventative treatment for Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency. There is progress in finding a cure that afflicts only a few hundred of us: Late Onset Tay-Sachs. The President signs into law “sweeping “ new rules to protect privacy. Yes, we know that all these gains can be reversed. But they happened, and our social conditions now and in the direction in which they are developing support the prediction that these expressions of the moral sense are likely to happen again.

     The moral question is simple. The success with which we behave in the future depends in large part upon how we view the past. To be optimistic is not to play Pollyanna. It is an ethic of optimism that must prevail, Darwin would agree, if we are to survive.

---Sheldon W. Samuels