Genetics, Ethics, and Spirituality

The ITI invited Prof. Matthias Beck of the University of Vienna to give a lecture this evening on the subject of Genetics, Ethics, and Spirituality. A new study in England has concluded that "also the brain has direct influence on which genes in a cell are activated and how the cell functions." That is to say, simply what genes are contained in a cell do not yet determine how the cell will function. Genes within the cell must be turned "on" or "off". How this happens is not yet well understood at all, but the research shows that our thoughts, feelings, interior (spiritual) life, all play a role in this. The upshot of this is that finding the roots of a disease in the genes might not yet be finding the root after all. Because the further question must be asked, Why did the genes function the way they did leading to the disease? Was there a psychic reason? Man is, after all, a physic-somatic unity. Or was there an even deeper spiritual reason? This is not to say, of course, that every disease is directly the effect of personaly sin (although in its origin this is true).