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not because there are no better ways of doing so, but because of a bacteria, and micro-organisms. They are not psychophysical lives
strong tendency to treat animals as a commodity, without a care
for their pain. This then becomes a strong ground for objection to
biotechnology. Of course, proponents of biotechnology argue that
their treatment of animals is much better than that of conventional
breeding and farming but this should not be the justification to
continue with such acts.
One of the major concerns of Buddhism is the destruction
of lives in biotechnology and life sciences. In the Five Precepts
observed by Buddhists, the first precept is, “I take the training
rule not to kill any psychophysical life” (pāṇātipātā veramaṇī
sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi). Buddhists observe this precept because
they view lives as precious and see the destruction of lives as an evil
action that will bring about bad results. In observing this precept in
biotechnology, the major consideration is when life first begin.
In the Buddhist canonical text, the Buddha gave a definition for
the actual beginning of human life: “Monks, there are three factors,
when fulfilled, pregnancy arises. They are, namely, the union
of father and mother, the mother is having her ovulation, and a
gandhabba is present.” Gandhabba refers to the final consciousness
of a dying being. Based on this definition, embryos are considered
living beings. Although embryos are not fully developed, they
nonetheless have the potential to become fully grown living beings.
Therefore Buddhists would find it abhorrent to terminate these
embryos. Currently, many fertility clinics keep their overproduced
embryos frozen under sub-zero nitrogen without any specific plan to
deal with them. For that matter, experimentation and manipulation
of genetic codes of embryonic cells are also considered immoral.
The ethical problem of killing is not applicable to plants,
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(pāṇātipātā) in the Buddhist context. They do not have minds that
have the potential for spiritual development, and they do not feel
pain, like human beings and animals do.
In more advanced medical biotechnology, where research
and development is conducted at the molecular level, the ethical
issue of killing is less acute. Molecular human parts, such as
monoclonal antibody and cells are hardly seen as human beings. In
nanobiotechnology that deals with tissue engineering at the atomic
level, (which is even smaller than molecular level), the problem is
even less.
“Genes for Sale”
Assuming that biotechnology is perfectly safe and does not
involve violation of basic ethical principles like harming or killing
living beings, the social aspects of the technology pose equally
challenging ethical issues. One objection is that humans and animals
who are subjects of experiments in biotechnology are viewed as
commodities. It has been argued that biotechnology makes use of
living organisms or parts of the human body to produce goods or
services. As this resembles trading in human parts, there is much
hostility to what biotechnology is doing.
The hostility can be reduced if biotechnology is properly
explained to the layman. It can be defined as “Any technique that
uses living organisms, or substances from that organism, to make
or modify a product, to improve plants or animals, or to develop
microorganisms for specific uses.” (The use of yeast, a living
organism, to produce bread is an example of biotechnology.)
Nevertheless, such semantics is unlikely to repair the damage
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