Government regulation of research to enforce ethical concerns is a good idea, and I support the general idea. I’d like them to be based on reasonable concerns, though. I’m actually glad that the NIH has ended a ban on research into human-animal chimeras, although I know some people are going to freak out over it, pointlessly.
Here’s the basic idea. Mammalian embryos are relatively plastic. If you take a mouse embryo at the blastocyst stage, when the embryo is just a small number of cells in a spherical capsule, and you take a few cells from a human blastocyst and inject them into the mouse embryo, those human cells will be readily incorporated into the developing mouse. They can then be incorporated into the mouse’s tissues, so you end up with an adult mouse that has a liver made up of human liver cells. Or a human pancreas. Or, what really scares some people, human-derived brain tissue. Or human-derived gonadal tissue — the mouse could be making human sperm or human eggs, and if a boy mouse with human testes meets a girl mouse with human ovaries…well, you can imagine the concerns.
One issue is that scientists might inadvertently create animals that have partly human brains, endowing them with some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities. Another is that they could develop into animals with human sperm and eggs and breed, producing human embryos or fetuses inside animals or hybrid creatures.
That was the thinking that led to the moratorium on such experiments, now lifted. Which is good.
All of those troubling possibilities are rather easily prevented, and also rather unlikely.
The concerns about animals with “some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities” is simply silly. They already do, and you could also argue that humans have some semblance of animal consciousness. Mice aren’t going to be able to construct whole human brains in their tiny little skulls, although maybe a pig chimera could; but even there, our brains have co-evolved with all kinds of circulatory adaptations, and I rather suspect that a chimera with a significant amount of human brain tissue isn’t going to be viable. And most importantly, the point of such research isn’t to make a human brain in an experimental animal — it’s to get human nervous tissue that will have human-like responses to, for instance, pharmacological treatments.
It’s the same with the reproductive tissue. Making male and female pigs with human reproductive organs would be cool and useful, but bringing them together to do something as mundane as producing a human baby is not — and would be a catastrophic result of the research that would probably lead to the shutting down of the lab and massive legal consequences, all to produce a totally useless result. These are labs that are interested in studying the mechanisms of human sperm maturation, or oocyte development, not the mad scientist nonsense of creating ManBearPig.
Of course, some people don’t like the idea of ending the moratorium.
But critics denounced the decision. “Science fiction writers might have imagined worlds like this — like The Island of Dr. Moreau, Brave New World, Frankenstein,” says Stuart Newman, a biologist at New York Medical College. “There have been speculations. But now they’re becoming more real. And I think that we just can’t say that since it’s possible then let’s do it.”
Let’s do what? That’s the crux of this disagreement — no one is interested in creating The Island of Dr. Moreau in reality. Moreau was an idiot who didn’t do anything practical or informative with his imaginary technology, and using dystopian science fiction as your counter-argument really says you don’t understand the motivations behind this research.
Besides… if we need to counter chimera technology, we still have torch-and-pitchfork technology.
And, think of the SyFy movies!
I’ve long suspected part of the fear here is creating a non-human animal with any human nervous tissue whatsoever and the chimera continuing to very obviously just be a non-human animal without any greater cognitive ability than usual. The most terrifying challenge to human exceptionalism isn’t sharing our specialness: it’s making it painfully obvious that we’re not special at all. We’re made of the same stuff as everybody else. Having to face that and the fact that our brains are just tissue, not a magical substance, must be horrifying.
One could argue that lifting the ban might lead to enough of a refinement
of technique that mad billionaires like Peter Thiel could later fund
illegal research into bears and pigs with human consciousness, etc.
But the question is then: what is wrong with creating bears and pigs with
human consciousness?
More importantly, isn’t this a step towards humans with wings?
Well, using sci-fi to try to scare scientists from doing research kind of parallels using “24” to prove a point about terrorists. The republican mindset allows fiction to become fact.
Indeed. The mildly deranged penguin is using an existing island (well, planet — same thing)…
So far, the only apparently viable critter is an Ozone-breathing “starfish” which tends to explode. Not toxic or venomous (not even to peas (unfortunately)), but the shrapnel is very sharp. Before exploding it tastes rather like one imagines moldy cardboard tastes (after exploding, it’s the usual burnt ash taste). She hasn’t quite worked out how they reproduce, but suspects it involves toothpaste.
What about increased possibility of, uh….
… disease vectors?
So I’m guessing that the people who want to keep the strong laws against human-animal research are the same as the people who say there’s no point in passing laws against guns, because criminals will just ignore them anyway.
If a scientist had the ability, the resources, and the lack of ethics to want to conduct Dr. Moreau-like experiments, couldn’t he or she could have found a third-world country to build a lab a decade ago and have been working peacefully all this time? In other words, if ethics aren’t enough to stop this, then a law probably won’t either.
Back in the ’90s, I read an article (I think in the Wall St Journal – I looked later but couldn’t find it) about experiments in making lower-fat pork by splicing human genes into pigs.
It didn’t work – the GM pigs all got crippling arthritis for some reason – but it creeped me out most thoroughly with visions of a future of industrialized cannibalism. (After all, the closer the match in amino acid proportions to that of humans, the more optimal a protein that would make for human consumption, right?)
For certain purposes – producing human insulin, say – I can see a lot of benefits for such processes (even though I’d like to consider them as interim steps towards a basically in vitro biochemical manufacturing system). But the core purpose behind all such “advances” remains the same: PROFITS!!! – and that tends to overwhelm ethical considerations day after day.
Approximately twenty years of consideration later, I remain creeped out.
Wait, really? Is that possible?
Apparently I hadn’t.
Wait, but is that even theoretically possible?
Create the Island of Dr. Moreau? Have you seen a Trump rally? Its too late.
I think that is at the root of all the objection to science
including creationism, global warming, even anti-vax and GMO’s.
we are made of the same stuff everything else is as far as we can see (13B years or so) and recoiling from that because we are not supper special without stopping to consider what we are looking at and the fact that we are looking
uncle frogy
@2 TheMellowMonkey
Not so.
Cell paper from 2013 : Forebrain Engraftment by Human Glial Progenitor Cells Enhances Synaptic Plasticity and Learning in Adult Mice. It’s a very interesting paper. The human glial progenitor cells differentiate into astrocytes and human and mouse astrocytes have measurably different morphologies and biochemical properties that are retained in the chimeras. Result is a mouse which performs better than non-engrafted controls in certain learning tests.
I’m sure that there are many fascinating things to be learned by experimenting with the DNA and tissues from a broad range of animals including humans, but I too remain extremely skeptical of the cost benefit ratio (see golden rice) and deeply creeped out by the possibility of corporate profit mindset getting invested in this type of research.
The BBC sci-fi series Orphan Black is entertaining, and raises many of the same sorts of ethical considerations albeit the main premise is human cloning rather than scientific research using gmo’s. I think they mostly get the science right, and I appreciate the casting nuance in that the main egomaniacal Dr. character happens to be played by the same actor who was used to create Max Headroom.
chris61, is this the paper then?
@14 The Mellow Monkey
Yes, that’s the paper.
@15 chris61: Cool. Thanks for the heads up. That’s very interesting.
Ok, so, please hear me out here. I’m not JAQing off or derailing I swear (not intentionally anyways). But as I’m reading this, my mind goes go to grotesque animal experiments, and I do have a pang of guilt there, because I know that grotesque animal experiments play some role in modern technology. These descriptions of genetically engineering mice and how some percentage die early or how some percentage will be smarter, all of this infers that some mice suffer in this process right?
I’m not sure that faced with a decision between a mouse suffering and me being able to type this message… and a man on the moon… and millions of lives saved, or maybe just extended… or just made better…. I’m not sure that I would rank that mouse’s suffering as more important, but I do think we should consider that? Shouldn’t we?
Is there a quantity or quality of suffering that represents the boundary that we will not cross to advance science? I think this is the problem.
I understand that what we’re actually talking about is much more mundane and is cells in a dish and that there aren’t any horrible Mouse Centipede experiments going on behind locked doors. I understand that most science is done transparently and that if a majority of scientists agree on some something, it’s usually a good idea, but most people don’t.
They don’t trust “scientists” anymore than they trust “Politicians” or “rich people” or their sketchy neighbor.
So maybe I’m building to my grand point here that I didn’t even know I had when I started. I think trying to educate the general public about science is folly. Americans were only behind the Apollo program because it was going to help us beat the Russians. That sparked a generation of people that cared about and appreciated scientific advancement, because in many ways, it saved their lives.
This generation doesn’t have that sense that scientific advancement is good for everyone involved. On both sides of the political spectrum we see people that are offended by or diametrically opposed to scientific ideas and scientific solutions to difficult social problems. This to me is the fundamental difference between what made America a super power and what will ultimately bring it crumbling to it’s knees, the lack of scientific wonder and enthusiasm.
I should briefly add that I don’t think America being a super power or on it’s knees are either a good or bad thing, or that we have some unique claim to ignorance either.
Hey, if you’re going to reference dystopian sci fi, at least refer to something recent. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake abounds with chimeras and GMOs, including neohumans genetically engineered to be better–or at least more gentle and peaceable–than we (and, yes, they are.)
@mehh (#17)
Ethical Review Boards are already a thing, so this:
is based mostly in the same “dystopian sci-fi” argument previously discussed.