In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave new World,” the author posits a chilling future – a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, where the people are genetically designed to be passive and consistently useful to the ruling class.
I always tried to imagine what events and decisions led up to Huxley’s nightmare reality. Did the scientists know that the research they were doing would be used for the nefarious purpose of changing the essence of humanity? Did the people realize that the potential for this kind of mischief was present? What would the ethicists and guardians of faith and religion have had to say?
I bring this up because scientists are now initiating research projects using human stem cells injected into animal embryos with the dual goals of perhaps creating organs suitable for human transplant and the extraordinarily profitable enterprise of creating “cutting edge” lab animals for use in testing a wide variety of new drugs.
Both of these goals have exciting potential to yield benefits that would change the face of modern medicine and pharmacology. But at what price? And are there hidden dangers, unseen trap doors that scientists and ethicists either aren’t aware of or just not bothering to look for?
This project in Nevada, where sheep embryos were injected with human cells to create partially human organs, is not really a big deal. Scientists have been doing similar experiments with mice for more than a decade. What makes this experiment different is that the researcher, Jason Chamberlain, also injected human brain cells into the brain of the animal fetus:
As strange as his work may sound, it falls firmly within the new ethics guidelines the influential National Academies issued this past week for stem cell research.In fact, the Academies’ report endorses research that co-mingles human and animal tissue as vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people.
Particularly worrisome to some scientists are the nightmare scenarios that could arise from the mixing of brain cells: What if a human mind somehow got trapped inside a sheep’s head?
Such a possibility is extremely unlikely. But not so much out of the question that one ethics panel didn’t think carefully about a “what if” scenario:
In January, an informal ethics committee at Stanford University endorsed a proposal to create mice with brains nearly completely made of human brain cells. Stem cell scientist Irving Weissman said his experiment could provide unparalleled insight into how the human brain develops and how degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson’s progress.Stanford law professor Hank Greely, who chaired the ethics committee, said the board was satisfied that the size and shape of the mouse brain would prevent the human cells from creating any traits of humanity. Just in case, Greely said, the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice’s behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior.
At times, it seems scientists have never quite grown out of being the little boy or girl in the basement with a chemistry set who set out to mix two compounds together just to see what would happen and end up with either a toxic mess or a small explosion. This is not necessarily a bad thing as any good scientist will have that same insatiable curiosity as those children. The problem is, this attitude when carried into scientific undertakings with the most profound ramifications for humanity imaginable, should have the most stringent oversight imaginable. And at this point it’s not clear to me that this is the case:
Allegations about the proper treatment of lab animals may take on strange new meanings as scientists work their way up the evolutionary chart. First, human stem cells were injected into bacteria, then mice and now sheep. Such research blurs biological divisions between species that couldn’t until now be breached.Drawing ethical boundaries that no research appears to have crossed yet, the Academies recommend a prohibition on mixing human stem cells with embryos from monkeys and other primates. But even that policy recommendation isn’t tough enough for some researchers.
“The boundary is going to push further into larger animals,” New York Medical College professor Stuart Newman said. “That’s just asking for trouble.”
Newman, along with bio technology gadfly Jeremy Rifkin, actually went so far as to patent a new life form – a combination human and chimpanzee they called a “humanzee” – that challenges the governments policy on both interspecies breeding and a corporation’s ability to patent life forms. The “humanzee” is theoretically possible so the patent office issued a ruling just this year denying their request on grounds that you cannot patent a human in that such a commercial venture would boil down to an issue of slavery.
I have nothing but admiration and respect for scientists like Chamberlain who are pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. My beef is that this is largely taking place below the radar of public discourse. As we seek to unlock the mysteries at the very heart of what it means to be human, are we in danger of redefining human life in ways that should be examined and agreed to by society in general?
Just recently, we got a taste of one kind of redefinition of human life in the Terri Schiavo matter. With little in the way of debate, scientists, ethicists, and proponents of euthanasia have quietly undermined the very concept of what it means to be human. The parameters regarding human life have been changed to include mythical criteria such as “quality of consciousness” and the medical costs associated with keeping someone like Terri alive. Despite almost total ignorance about what actually constitutes “consciousness,” we were told that Terri was less than human because her higher brain functions were disabled. Being less than human, she then became a piece of rotting meat, a sad sack of bones and water easily discarded by both the courts and her husband.
And now we’re faced with another ethical dilemma, this time regarding the very real possibility of human-animal hybrids being created so that we can harvest their body parts. While I’m not opposed in principle to the use of animals to save human lives, are we proceeding with all deliberate caution in this research effort? I’m heartened by the National Academies’ call for stringent oversight by sponsoring institutions of such projects. But the issue begs the age-old scientific question; just because we can do it, should it be done?
It used to be that an individual scientists’ ethics alone determined whether or not a scientific undertaking was moral. Reading about scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Leo Szilard who wrestled mightily with their own consciences when it came to their work on the Manhattan Project and the building of the first atomic weapon, one is left with the impression that, in the end, the exciting science being done outweighed any moral ambiguity the project may have caused.
Today, ethics panels across the nation are empowered to examine scientific inquiry and determine whether or not moral guidelines are being violated. These panels are made up of people who’ve studied ethics for a living and can cite chapter and verse in subjects like metaphysics and moral philosophy. But is it enough? Or perhaps a better question, are the issues involved too complex, too morally ambiguous to be resolved in this manner?
I don’t know the answer, being a layman. I do know that I’m unsure if all the physical and ethical ramifications of this kind of research are under scrutiny as they should be.
We can only hope that there are people like Dr. Newman and yes, even the moonbat Jeremy Rifkin, who will be there to put the brakes on if we go too far too fast. Otherwise, when this Brave New World comes to pass, we’ll be cowering in the shadows afraid of whatever society we’ve created as a result of these truly wondrous advances in human understanding.
3:48 pm
This reminds me of “The Fly”. Gives me the creeps, just like the Body World exhibit. And I can’t even define why.
8:19 pm
I went to Body World…took my son….fascinating stuff….as to mixing brain cells:
What happens when we do get mice that display human traits, and some scientest just can’t kill them because he loves them, and they escape, and breed with other intelligent escaped mice, and pretty soon they are like the mice from the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy books, and start interdimensional travel, and then they find out about The Secret of NIMH, and they come back from another dimension to exact their revenge for all the testing done on their ancestors, but by then the MrEds, (intelligent horses that used the equal protection clause and the ACLU to take over the world by melding human and horse, creating the once mythical Centaur) have already put humanity to work growing the most delicious oats ever concieved, and so the mice strike a deal to stay out of the oat sack IF they get to take some humans back to their dimension for testing, and since the only humans that ended up not fighting for their freedom from the oppressive MrEds, hence surviving, were of french stock the tests go badly because the humans whine all the time and then the history of humanity gets besmirched forever in the history books of the inter-dimensional mouse text books and we look bad to all that read about us forever.
I bet none of those smart scientests thought of ruining history with all their research huh?
10:57 pm
Superhawk, I’m really glad you wrote on this. (And, I’m sorry my comment is so damn long!) I can tell from this and your other science posts that your respect and admiration for biomedical research comes from deep within. It’s a difficult subject for anyone, scientist, ethicist, or lay. All dramatic hyperbole from that AP article aside (and c’mon, whom among us really trust the MSM to offer a fair and balanced report on anything, let alone science?), I am at once supportive of pushing the boundaries of biomedical research AND working within the boundaries of ethical norms.
I’m coming at this as a scientist who, on ethical grounds, is very much against use of human embryonic stem (ES) cells derived from new embryos, and I have a huge problem with the use ES cells from “leftover embryos” in in vitro fertilization clinics… in fact, I oppose IVF on moral grounds. Thems ain’t embryos, thems is people. However, in the research described, I am pretty sure (I haven’t looked up the source material) that ES stem cells weren’t involved. More likely, they were stem cells from adult tissues, which carry no ethical baggage. The stem cell debate is constantly mischaracterized in the MSM and even good cable news and science, because people pretty much don’t understand the difference, they just hear STEM CELL and think CLONING.
Unfortunately, technology threatens to move beyond ethics once again. But sci-fi has a way of messing with our sense of what is really possible, and then giving us neuroses. Since the present topic involves biomedical science (which is arguably the American public’s most misunderstood scientific field, next to physics), Jeremy Rifkins and ignorant biased reporters can easily scare folks into unreasonable palpitation, to further their own antitechnologic ends.
If this stem cell research is going on “below the radar of public discourse”, IMHO that is largely the fault of: (1) our educational system which pollutes young minds with too much crap and not enough science; and (2) the waning but still numerous scientific elite who rarely deign to explain their work in a language that the science illiterate can comprehend.
In the case of mice with “human brains”, I will get skewered for this analogy but consider the human stem cells like a different brand of potter’s clay being put into the mix so that the potter can learn how that new clay behaves, so she can ultimately learn more about pottery as a whole. These Frankensteinish researchers will probably be watching to see how the cells develop, mature, and ultimately could be used to heal damaged brain tissue, for example. Scientists obviously can’t do the human experiment now (in fact Chinese researchers killed some Parkinson patients by putting human ES cells into their brains, which then turned into really nasty tumors).
But experiments with rat olfactory stem-cell transplants have already shown promise in spinal cord repair. In the scientific mode, it then makes sense to try transplanting similar human olfactory stem cells into injured rats, to see if the same repair occurs. If the answer is yes, you’ve learned something potentially valuable about human health. The stickler is when you consider the brain as the target tissue. That changes everything because at once we so cherish its power and fail to understand it’s workings.
Yes the image is creepy. But human-mouse chimeras with Mickey tearing up and crying “Why me?” are not about to happen by a long shot. I seriously doubt that the fascinating and wonderful neurodevelopmental process that flows from the union of a human egg and sperm and makes us—in the likeness of God—can be replicated in the experiments described in that AP article (though I would like to read the original research first to see their real aims and techniques, not as filtered through the oh-so-trustworthy media lens of the AP).
As noted in the article, scientists have been creating genetic chimeras (e.g., human genes plopped into mice or even yeast) and have injected human cells into other critters for at least two decades. These experiments, once thought horrifying to behold, have yielded tremendous knowledge about the molecular basis of many genetic diseases like Alzheimer, cystic fibrosis, and cancer. Such work has led to the development of effective pharmaceuticals and other treatments, even simple diet-related cures, for what were otherwise devastating illnesses.
Doubtless, there are ethical concerns, as there damn well should be, and the experiments should be closely monitored because we really DONT know what is going to happen. However, I wouldn’t worry too much about this technology being taken to some Huxleyan, nefarious end. People were freaking out when the first gene splicing experiments were being done in the 70s and 80s, and ethical panels were wisely installed to monitor research. We are seeing the same for stem cell research. What we SHOULD worry about are ivory tower scientists who might indeed, despite practically all cultural and ethical norms, attempt human cloning. Very unlikely, yet possible and truly gruesome to ponder. Cloning—be it therapeutic or full-blown “let’s bring back old Aunt Edith”—is simply WRONG. Despite the best grab-your-gut sci fi, I have faith that legal, ethical and moral standards of the funding agencies and academia (and hopefully industry) will continue to evolve, which will utterly prevent at least the latter type of cloning.
12:45 am
Brave New World or Nightmare of the Future?
RightWingNuthouse has a very thoughtful and incisive article on the ethics of human and animal cross-genetics, especially as it relates to the “harvesting” of organs for transplants. Definitely worth a read.
4:33 am
The Bible says we should praise God, not play God. I hope you will stop by and answer a question I posted.
God Bless America, God Save The Republic.
5:17 am
Why worry about stem cells when the Bushian Warfare Cult is so hell-bent on toppling governments and invading countries?
5:36 am
Collin: In the immortal words of Neo: woa. I sit, aghast, to ponder this profound non sequitur whilst slurping oatmeal.
7:41 am
Collin is an example of highly evolved moonbattery…at least we know that Superhawk has “arrived”, lol…since Collin was trolling over at the Java report making a total ass of himself, why should he stop there? Too bad he didn’t post on the Marvin Moonbat thread. It’s really more appropriate there.
11:58 am
TMH: Whew! I seriously thought of posting your outstanding comments as either an addendum to my own post or as a separate post all by itself. But as you know, I’m much too selfish for any kind of crude display of generosity or sentimentality. Besides I hate being shown up on my own blog!
Seriously, you raise several interesting points. First, I support the use of all lines of stem cells for the purposes of research. I think controls are strict enough that no woman is going to sell her fetus for the sole purpose of having it harvested for its stem cells. I don’t agree it’s a woman’s “right” to do this any more than a woman has a “right” to an abortion. Roe v. Wade clearly establishes a right of privacy between patient and doctor – and by extension an implied constitutional right of privacy for all of us – one of the few “implied” rights I can see the Founders would have covered if they were alive today. But there is no implicit right to abort one’s fetus.
Sorry…but we disagree there.
As for why this activity is going on below the radar I’d have to agree with both your reasons with special emphasis on #2. Carl Sagan (God rest him) was a passionate advocate for scientists taking the time and energy to explain to the public what they were doing. His reasons have to do with the fact that science is now pretty much of a public endeavor. The days when a Rutherford could unlock the mysteries of the atom in a dank basement with a few graduate assistants are gone. To do the kind of science today that allows for breakthroughs in human understanding, scientists need public monies. Even though the U of Nevada study mentioned in the article appears to have been privately funded (or perhaps funded with general grants from the University whose origin could be public like NIH or NAS) I’m sure you know that not much in the way of real science gets done in this country that doesn’t have the hand of government somewhere.
That being said, with few exceptions scientists act like Democrats – they think they’re so effing brilliant that we mere mortal peons couldn’t possibly grasp what they’re trying to do. In fact, Sagan documented cases where scientists actually felt it wasn’t the publics business what the hell they were doing with their money. Needless to say, that kind of attitude must change.
As for Mickey Mouse wailing “Why me” as his little mouse brain develops human characteristics – well, nice image but I agree not likely. Actually, I sort of imagined the researcher walking into the lab one day to find mice standing on two feet leaning against the cage having a conversation about breakfast. Neither one is a likely outcome.
The fact that the Stanford ethics panel felt it necessary to instruct Dr. Weismann to immediately euthanize any mouse that started to “act human” (whatever that means)was something I found extremely interesting. Which brings me to the real point I was trying to make.
Are ethics panels up to the task? Professor Greely of Stanford was a law prof! That may explain the panel’s thought that there was a possibility the mice would start to ask for something besides hamster turds for breakfast. The expertise and knowledge to deal with bio ethical issues was lacking on that panel or at least not in evidence. Is this a problem – even though as we push forward with this kind of research the possibility that some day we’ll be looking at not a human/animal hybrid but a “Superman” whose perfect organs and superior brain have been constructed using this kind of research? The law of unintended consequences is what concerns me – and my belief that without ethics panels examining these consequences, we’ll be faced with a fait accompli some day and Huxley’s world will have hit us with a vengeance.
Clones don’t worry me as it appears that something starts to go horribly wrong just before middle age with cell structure – an interesting and from a scientific point of view fascinating problem. But I think you’re right…other countries are apparently going ahead full bore with a human cloning program. The legal status of such people will be a nightmare. Will someone be able to leave his wealth to their own clone? Or will clones evolve into servants of some kind, doing the scut work that oppressed minorities always seem to do. The issues are mindboggling and we’ll not be ready when the first one appears on Good Morning America.
Finally, when you say “we really DONT know what is going to happen” that scares the beejeesus out of me. Again, it’s the little kid in the basement with a chemistry set….and not enough thought is given to the consequences.
12:15 pm
When Collin hits ya up ya have indeed arrived ‘Hawk…...congrats.
5:08 am
I posted a link on my blog, but couldn’t send the trackback (Haloscan said it couldn’t find it).
7:33 pm
Truly, incredible post (and comments)!
/TJ
7:45 pm
Marquis of Belligerent Psychiatrists
Today’s dose of NIF - News, Interesting & Funny … It’s Kerry-180 Tuesday!
9:14 am
[...] d interchangeably — nothing could be more incorrect. “Cloning” — a Brave New World buzz word — is constantly [...]
1:55 am
COWERING IN THE SHADOWS OF “THE BRAVE NEW WORLD”
COWERING IN THE SHADOW…