This book is based on events.
Some of these events have happened,others are not yet inevitable.
The events that are not yet inevitable will govern the use or abuse of what we can -- or should not -- do with the molecules that underpin the very nature of our humanity, our genes.
The United States, Japan and the European Community have embarked on a multi-billion-dollar mission that has been likened to the biological equivalent of the Manhattan Project: the Human Genome Project. This multi-national research program has as its goal nothing less than decoding the book of life: determining the molecular sequences of every gene that makes up a human being.
What we know about, we can lay our hands on. We are nibbling away -- once again -- at the tree of knowledge. Knowledge has blinded humankind before, and the results have been the stuff of nightmares. The world's top experts in biomedical ethics can cite substantial evidence that the conditions that produced the medical atrocities of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan still exist today, stalking laboratory aisles and high-tech containment rooms of the world's human genetic research institutions.
This book is based on actual events. Dr. Shiro Ishii, the "Japanese Mengele" you will read about in the Prologue was a Lieutenant General in the Japanese army, Dr. Ishii headed an official government program that authorized medical atrocities on Allied POWs and Chinese civilians, atrocities equal to the Nazi's worst medical evils. Yet few people know about Dr. Ishii.
Why have we forgotten?
We remember that the Nazis murdered more than ten million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, retarded and handicapped people, political dissidents and others judged undesirable by the Third Reich. Yet few people know that the Japanese slaughtered more than six million innocent civilians during World War II. This, too, puts them on a par with the Nazis.
Why have we forgotten?
In the Balkans Civil war of the 1990s, the Serbs were internationally condemned for making rape an instrument of war, but we've forgotten that the Japanese institutionalized rape as part of their military policy more than half a century ago. They forced world hundreds of thousands of women into organized Army-run brothels so that Japanese troops could come each day and take comfort from raping them again and again.These women were forced to service the basest needs of the Imperial Japanese Army were mothers, wives, sweethearts, daughters and sisters?
Why have we forgotten them?
Why did the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials so firmly etch the horrors of Nazi Germany into our consciousness while few people are aware, even today, of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials that saw war criminals equally evil?
What does all this have to do with the Human Genome Project?
Everything.