India is becoming a leader in biotechnology, not least because of its Hindu-based tolerance on such issues as stem cell research and cloning that has influenced even minority Christians, reports Science & Theology News (March). Along with its rising reputation in information technology, India’s biotechnology industry has also sprouted in the last few years Chhavi Sachdev writes that stem cell research in both the “public and private sectors has grown considerably in India….where politics or faith has not hindered its expansion.
As a result, India is home to not one but three national stem cell research facilities.” The Hindu-influenced worldview pervading “scientific progress and everyday discourse” in India makes less strictures about using stem cells from fetuses or cloning if no evil is intended, at least as compared to the Christian West. While there are guidelines on stem cell research from the Indian Council on Medical Research (prohibiting the termination of fetuses for stem cells, for instance), “most moral issues don’t come into the public discourse but remain private…People deal with issues like euthanasia in the context of their families,” says Arvind Sharma of McGill University.
The decentralized nature of Hinduism, with each group having its own guru, also encourages people to take a pragmatic approach to these issues. “Hinduism will not have any major conflicts with engineered life forms of any kind [such as cloning] because the tradition has always had multiple life forms and considers any and all of them as co-travelers on the Mobius strip,” Sharma says. Indian Christians are of a similar mindset, rarely talking publicly about biotechnology and “at the level of practice, pretty pragmatic in their use of technology,” says sociologist Rowena Robinson of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay.
(Science & Theology News, http://www.stnews.org)