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How can we lobby lawmakers on these issues?

We ought to call on lawmakers first to address the needs of the suffering and the poor and people who have diseases before we talk about making them "better." I think as long as we have unjust systems of health care provision in this country, and as long as we have many people in poverty and children who suffer, it's a luxury to talk about enhancement technologies.

But the government is already spending about $1 billion per year for nano research.

Part of the answer is that we first have to build an informed citizenry. My guess is that average Christians don't know about the federal nanotechnology project. Or, like a lot of us, they didn't pay attention in science class in high school, and their eyes glaze over when you talk about DNA.

An informed citizenry can elect officials who can make good decisions. But I don't know of a quick fix.

What other groups, besides conservative Christians, are concerned about abuses of nanotechnology?

Feminists see a lot of these technologies as oppression of women by big businesses and other interests preying on the population. Some members of the Institute for Bioethics and the Human Future include those who work with environmental concerns, people from the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. There's also Judy Norsigian, who's head of the Boston Women's Collective and co-author of [the feminist manifesto] Our Bodies, Ourselves. On the other side of the table, as friends, are people like Wilberforce Forum bioethicist Nigel M. de S. Cameron and C. Christopher Hook. It's a very odd but hopeful coalition.

What can churches do to prepare to deal with the enhancement dilemmas?

We have to begin talking about technologies not as something we can consume without thinking about it, but as something that requires scrutiny. Some of us suggest that Christians should perhaps be the new techno Amish since the Amish don't reject every technology, but they realize that the use of a technology alters the way you inhabit the world.

Most of our churches have wonderful resources in the persons of doctors, nurses, and other educators who could help us understand these new developments. What some of us have chosen to do is get our information about science and technology only from the secular community, and then we think we can throw a Bible verse or two at it and all of a sudden we have Christianized the technology. But how you understand the technology and how you talk about it informs the ways that you use it.

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January 2004, Vol. 48, No. 1