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diggA new challenge for human dignity
Britain's fertility regulator has just approved the creation of human-animal embryos for research. What's next?
The
creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for medical research, which
has just been approved by the British government's fertility
watchdog, pushes the needle on the "yuck factor" meter far
into the red. But even more "yuck" is the deception and
manipulation used to justify the decision.
In the United Kingdom, experiments with embryos are closely regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. So when scientists began to lobby for the creation of interspecies embryos in order to create embryonic stem cells, the HFEA's approval was required.
What the scientists proposed was this: removing the nucleus of a human cell and placing the genetic material into an empty cow egg, using technology developed for cloning. The resulting "cybrid" is said to contain 99.9 per cent of a patient's DNA and only 0.1 per cent of the cow's. When it develops, embryonic stem cells are extracted. These can be used for studying diseases, researching genetics or testing drugs. The HFEA has stipulated that the embryo must be destroyed within 14 days.
Scientists would prefer to study cloned embryos which are created with women's eggs and 100 per cent human, but there is a huge obstacle. Thousands upon thousands of eggs will be needed and almost no one is going to volunteer her eggs for research. Payment is banned in the UK, but would be prohibitively expensive in any case.
So the alternative is to use animal eggs, even though the embryos will contain the mitochondrial DNA which floats in the cells' cytoplasm. (That's one reason why the HFEA calls these entities "cybrids", rather than hybrids. Strictly speaking, hybrids result from combining animal sperm with a human egg, or vice versa, an even more controversial step.)
Even in the UK, which may have the world's most progressive embryo legislation, creating and destroying human embryos for their stem cells is controversial and the HFEA knew that cybrids had to be handled with care. So it conducted an inquiry, with focus groups, a public meeting and an opinion poll. The result? Britons feel "at ease" with hybrid embryos.
Really? How much "at ease"? The HFEA's own documents tell a different story: "when further factual information was provided and further discussion took place, the majority of participants became more at ease with the idea, although as one participant observed, 'The gut reaction is hard to overcome'".
In other words, only after extensive re-education by the mandarins of a guided democracy could average Joes stomach the thought of mingling human and animal genetic material. Furthermore, the HFEA must have been wearing earplugs during its public consultation. The view that all embryo research was wrong was "overwhelmingly represented" in written comments to the HFEA and "dominant" at its public meeting.
Even the opinion poll involved some creative fudging. True, 61 per cent were in favour when told that the hybrids would help scientists to understand diseases, but 22 per cent had never even heard that such a thing was possible. And, to pick one amongst many figures, only 32 per cent were unconcerned about what scientists might do next if they were allowed to create hybrids. Those who were most concerned, in fact, were those who were best informed.
Not for nothing, it seems, is the chairwoman of the HFEA, Shirley Harrison, a lecturer in public relations with two books on the art of spin-doctoring to her credit.
If the results of its own "public dialogue" required such vigorous chiropracty in order to interpret them as public "ease" with human-animal
hybrids, how about its ethical analysis?
Well, research on human embryos has been legal in the UK for some time, so objections on that score were irrelevant. But blending human and animal genetic material adds a new wrinkle to the debate. How about the "yuck factor"? Simple disgust is not a genuine moral objection, sniffed the HFEA. In any case, no British scientists have ever sought permission to create the half-human, half-beast monsters in H.G. Wells's sci fi classic The Island of Dr Moreau. Excessive sensitivity to primitive taboos might stifle scientific progress.
How
about human dignity? The HFEA documents do not make it clear whether it
believes that "human dignity" is a meaningful concept. (In fact, many
contemporary bioethicists do not.) "Moral rejections tend to rely upon a
species distinction between animals and humans, but it is unclear
whether such a distinction can be maintained," says the HFEA.
So what's the problem with a bit of animal DNA in an embryo?
Scepticism about human dignity sounds odd in a government document, as most people in a democracy regard this this as the foundation of human rights. Surely a bright line between humans and animals is required to deny suffrage to guinea pigs. One would have thought that bureaucrats in the UK, in particular, would have thought a bit harder about this. Before the rise of Islamic terrorism, animal rights extremism used to be the most serious police challenge in the country.
All in all, the HFEA's arguments to support the radical step of authorising the creation of human embryos contaminated with animal DNA don't stack up. Which shows that everyone, even many supporters of embryo research, has reason to worry. With its self-serving opinion polling and its shoddy ethical analysis, is there anything the HFEA will not approve if scientists ask for it?
Probably not. The HFEA's guiding principle has always been adamant opposition to all violations of human dignity which are not currently on scientists' shopping lists. No scientists have sought permission to extend the lives of their embryos beyond 14 days, so the HFEA opposes it. No scientists have sought permission to mingle animal sperm with human eggs, so the HFEA opposes it. No scientists have sought to implant a hybrid embryo in a woman's womb and bring it to term, so the HFEA opposes it.
But scientific inquiry may someday take these paths. That's the way science works. As Dr Moreau explained in the novel:
“You
see, I went on with this research just the way it led me.
That is the only way I ever heard of true research going.
I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer,
and got a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible?
You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator,
what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine
the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!... To
this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter.”
No scientists have sought permission to reproduce Dr Moreau's experiments, thank goodness. But when they do, the HFEA is sure to announce that the public is "at ease" with them.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.
Lydia, I agree that many technological advances have been grossly misused. And clearly there is tremendous danger that genetics applied to humans will be similarly misused.
However, technical advances also have the power to do great good - they have done such good in the past, and will do it in the future. Drugs, vaccines, clean water, agriculture - all of these enable more people to live more healthily for longer. It is not easy (I would say often impossible) to balance the pros and cons of a particular technical development - particularly in advance of it’s being widely adopted. So let’s not be too certain that genetic technology must be an unmitigated disaster.
I must also disagree with you about the separation of species. No doubt there are reasons for such separation, but we need to know if they are such that all attempts to overcome them must be resisted. England used to be physically separated from France, (which had certain advantages as well as disadvantages): was this part of the divine plan or merely an accident of geography? Should the Channel Tunnel have been opposed because it might interfere with some important purpose that we hadn’t understood? If we simply assume that there are reasons for everything being as it is, and resist all change, we will waste our energies and lose important opportunities to make things better. If there are good reasons for resisting all genetic science, we must make them clear - they can’t just be assumed. I certainly agree with you that many applications of genetics to human beings are dangerous and need to be considered carefully and controlled - but others may emerge which could be perfectly acceptable and of great benefit.
R.S.Crespi asks “...how can we be certain that a cloned embryo could give rise to a true human being if implanted in utero?” i.e. “whether the cloned embryo has a soul”
The short answer is that the idea of a soul is meaningless to a materialist. The soul is only credible to those whose world view encompasses an actual, real “spiritual” realm that interacts freely with the physical realm where our bodies exist. Hence a true human being exists in both realms, and the soul is that part of us that is in the spiritual realm.
Given that premise, does the soul arise from the physical body--is it created by the body? If so, then any cloned being that had enough human DNA to reproduce the physical attributes that give birth to the soul, would have a soul. Note that this is a materialist view of the soul, implying to me that this kind of soul is ultimately meaningless and unimportant.
If the soul comes into existence independent of the body or physical realm, then we are dealing with something beyond science’s capacity to answer. This is because science by definition excludes causes that are non-physical. Much, but not all, of science has become essentially materialist. This does not mean the answer is beyond the reach of reason, just of scientific method.
There are three possibilities. Knowledge of the spiritual realm may be: a) intrinsically unknowable, b) available through our own soul c) revealed by intelligence(s) that exist principally in that realm.
If you believe a) then the existence of the soul is a matter of blind belief and is not verifiable. If you believe b) then there is a consensus that the soul exists, but none about how it comes to be. If you believe c) then we can know the clone has a soul if the spiritual intelligence(s) know the answer and tell us, if we are prepared to listen and if they are not lying.
Before we can answer R.S.Crespi, there are clearly a lot of other questions to be resolved first!!
This is horrifying, not just because we all have, in the backs of our minds, the stories we used to listen to about werewolves, mermaids, and other “halflings.”
Possibly even more frightening is the fact that human nature has consistently taken situations of great technological advancement and used them for evil purposes.
[Notwithstanding that the entire premise of cloning (that humans have some right or obligation to mess with genetics) is flawed. We have not the slightest right to meddle with genetics: They are designed as they are - each species separate from the other - for a reason.]
I CAN JUST HEAR AGED NAZIS LAUGH…
For the US and BRITAIN…
are heading down a path ALMOST like the Nazi’s eugenic style genetic manipulation....
(Only the Nazis did not yet have access to the more advanced technology...but their ANTIMORALS were firmly in place).
And the moral is Whatever works (whatever sells)
The woman or man selling themself on the street at least doesn’t PRETEND to be on a “higher moral plane”.
Money and Power are the root motivating causes
I take Tim Roberts’ point about a thought experiment but you have to try it to answer my basic question. We wouldn’t do it but someone in Korea or Japan or even closer might well do it one day (some have claimed to have tried it already).
is it safe to produce Cybrid ? If 0.01% part of cybrid is of animal than what will be the future consequences?
Yes. Obviously you must not try it, except as a thought-experiment. But, as a thought-experiment, how would you tell if the result was human or not? “There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face” and the same applies to souls. You must, surely, give the benefit of the doubt - the really serious mistakes arise when you deny human rights to people who are entitled to them, as a whole range of historical errors testify.
As to moral experts, Socrates said that there are no moral experts and ethics is not a science which accumulates knowledge to be passed on to future generations. Even a training in philosophy does not inevitably equip anyone to answer ethical questions. All these bioethics guys invent their own arbitrary basic standpoints from which they proceed to make moral judgments e.g. as to when an embryo/foetus/baby becomes a “person” entitled to rights.
But I still wonder whether the cloned embryo has a soul and would, if implanted in the womb, become a real human being or just a zombie.
It seems to me that scientists want permission to do these ethically undesirable things just to get a nobel prize and to hear their own names mentioned in the same breath as the true greats—those who discovered germs, antiseptics, inoculation, antibiotics and even the structure of DNA.
I don’t want to change the topic, but I have to say these scientists (and the HFEA) who reject the existence and importance of a spiritual reality alongside the physical are as misguided as the religious people who reject science out of hand. Without a reasonable connection with both the physical and spiritual, how can they ever see above the mechanics of existence to the meaning?
It was only in the last week or two that I read a news item of this pending review and decision in Britain. The passage below motivated me to comment:
“Moral rejections tend to rely upon a species distinction between animals and humans, but it is unclear whether such a distinction can be maintained,” says the HFEA.
This statement is just short of breathtaking and reminds me of a quote “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder” from Leon Kass.
I wonder frequently at the qualifications of those who pass themselves off as “bioethicists”. A growing number of these so called bioethicists in fact are scientists or medical doctors with little if any real training in Philosophy, Ethics or Bioethics. Unfortunately, in many arenas they are given full access to comment or worse yet formulate guidance in many areas of research.
I’ve long thought that Medical Schools should require an ethics course as part of the M.D. curriculum. Now I’m inclined to say that the same ethics course would be necessary for all those intending to pursue scientific research.
... and see the comments of Michael Henderson, Science Correspondent, in the London “Times” on Saturday 8 September. He explains that if you ignore (on principle) all those opposed to this kind of research on principle, you find that a clear majority of the public favours this research. This is certainly an efficient way of disposing of awkward moral objections. It might be interesting to apply it to other contentious questions, past or present - capital punishment, or slave-owning, say.
It would be at least as logical (and maybe preferable) to ignore the opinions of those who were unable to see (and hence properly assess) any moral objections to the procedures.
Time has revealed the HFEA to be a token resistence group aimed to pacify any ethical oposition to scientists’ demands. Repeatedly the HFEA has opposed requests from the scientists only to cave sooner or later.
But how can we be certain that a cloned embryo could give rise to a true human being if implanted in utero ? This question is difficult to answer even when human eggs are used, let alone cows eggs ? The cloned embryo is a pure artefact as opposed to one deriving from the natural process. The yuk factor is insufficient as an argument against this. I want to find a real moral argument but unfortunately I have not yet discovered one.
Perhaps the only moral position one can take is that humans should not assume the right to create something that may be true human life even for worthy purposes.
The scientific establishment will argue that articles such as this one fail to grasp the significance of new technologies and that appeals to the ‘yuck’ factor and to literature are puerile at best and at worst, reactionary (surely the capital sin in the positivist’s worldview). Luddites like Michael Cook, they say, are ignoring the science.
The problem is that they are ignoring everything but science. The most irritating foible of the scientific establishment is their over-inflated sense of self-importance. “We are helping people and advancing civilisation and nothing else matters” they seems to say. But other things do matter and until those concerned realise this they won’t be able to appreciate the prescience of articles such as this one.
Two questions and a comment:
Has anyone actually managed to manufacture a cyrbrid?
If a cybrid is brought into existence, how would we define this being? As a human, with a soul?
This frankenscience has all come from contraception. If there is universal acceptance of devices and chemicals which block conception and which secretly, sneakily abort newly-conceived human beings by starving them to death, why should we be surprised by any other forms of embryo abuse?
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