Scientific Ethics and Abuse Theme Analysis

The medical advances in the futuristic country of Opium in The House of the Scorpion show the miracles science could achieve, as well as the high human costs of those miracles. In the novel, scientific advancement allows society to overcome diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, but at the cost of the lives of clones. The country of Opium has created the most efficient workers by robbing illegal immigrants of their free will. Dictator and drug lord, El Patrón, is able to live for over 140 years thanks to medical advancements, but only at the cost of cheating and continuously fearing death. The widespread abuse of science in the Opium shows how, when one disregards the underlying ethics and human cost of progress, scientific advancements can create horrible consequences.

Opium creates clones for the sole purpose of harvesting them for organs. This allows powerful people like El Patrón to live long lives but causes great suffering and eventual death for the clones. The novel’s first introduction of questionable scientific ethics happens as the scientist who grew Matt (El Patrón’s clone) as an embryo wonders if he is doing the right thing by not destroying Matt’s brain as a newborn. The scientist knows this will allow Matt to be aware of his situation as a clone, living only to die later in an organ transplant. This shows that the scientist is aware of Matt’s future suffering, and yet grew him as a clone anyway. When scientists choose to ignore the consequences their work might cause, they ultimately perpetuate human suffering rather than creating progress. Positioning a clone, Matt, as the protagonist of the novel allows the reader to experience the intense suffering of a victim of the future’s scientific advancements. At first, Matt denies the horror of his fate, believing that because El Patrón had him educated, he must not plan on using him for organ transplants. When Matt comes to terms with his predetermined purpose, as El Patrón plans to harvest his heart, Matt feels an intense sense of hopelessness and betrayal. By giving the reader’s a firsthand account of the emotional tole of the scientific process of creating clones, the reader can understand the emotional distress brought about by compromised scientific ethics. The horrors of cloning science are further detailed when Matt encounter’s a clone of MacGregor, another powerful drug lord. Unlike Matt, scientists destroyed this clone’s mind at birth. The narrative describes the clone’s restrained, soiled body, made even worse by the sense that a life force is trapped within that body. The details highlight the cruelty of the scientific advances which knowingly created this doomed, tortured individual.

The drug lords of Opium are able to amass great wealth through the use of eejits, humans who have had computer chips placed in their brains by scientists, so that they can do nothing but follow simple orders. Matt witnesses firsthand the loss that comes with using science to rob these people of their free will. Science has completely robbed the eejits of their ability to act without orders. Eejits can’t even drink water when they are dying of thirst if they have not been ordered to. The horror this scientific abuse is shown when Matt and Tam Lin pass the body of an eejit who needlessly died in the poppy fields due to dehydration. Celia, Matt’s caregiver, confronts El Patrón about the cost of his use of eejits, when she speaks of the thousands of bodies buried out in the poppy fields. Here, the reader sees that while scientists created the eejits which allow El Patrón to obtain great wealth, they were only able to do so by causing the death of thousands.

El Patrón uses science to avoid his own death, but the novel details how this turns him into an unnatural being. Thus, El Patrón’s use of medical advancements costs not only the lives of others, but El Patrón’s own humanity. Multiple characters refer to El Patrón as a vampire or a chupacabra, a mythical creature who sucks the blood of animals. This is not only a reference to El Patrón’s withered, aged appearance, but also to how his attempts to use medicine to prevent death have separated him from the natural world. These mythical creatures also live off the life force of others, emphasizing how El Patrón uses science to live off the suffering of others. After Matt escapes to Aztlán, he witnesses a Day of the Dead celebration. When he questions how one could celebrate death, Consuela, an Aztlán native, says it’s because death is a part of everyone. This argues that death is a natural part of life, and El Patrón and the scientific experiments he enforces are unethically denying the natural order by avoiding death at all costs. The House of the Scorpion presents a future where one could live forever and where workers labor without objection, but the narrative also presents the horrible human cost of these advancements. Science, as the novel argues, when unchecked by considerations for human suffering, can create just as many abuses as it does miracles.