Cyborg Bugs and Glow-in-the-Dark Cats

By Dov Fox

That’s what CNN called yesterday’s report with science writer Emily Anthes about her new book, Frankenstein’s Cat, which examines “genetically modified this, or cloned that,” as she put it, or “creatures that combine electronic bits and biological ones.” Wrestling with the ethics of such cases, Anthes explains, “reveals that we’re deeply conflicted about the role that animals play in our lives.” Yet she laments that this tension supplies no satisfying answers to underlying questions like “Is this unnatural?” and would “that make it wrong?”

Our confusion lies, I’ve suggested, in the failure of animal welfare discourse to capture the sense many of us share that animal “nature” has value apart from its happiness or well-being. If its welfare were all that mattered, then we shouldn’t be troubled by animals designed to experience less frustration living in the conditions for which they’re destined. Consider three examples of designer animals that are currently being developed: cows with stunted sentience, less apprehensive of going off to slaughter; chickens that lack nesting instincts, more satisfied to a life confined to laying eggs in a battery cage; and pigs without legs, better suited for a sedentary existence as ham and bacon in potentia.

The dominance of the animal welfare view obscures a reason to resist such creations: to preserve animal integrity. Cows should be able to fear danger, pigs to play in the mud, and chickens to peck about in the sand, according to this view, less because those capacities make the animals happy than because they are integral to an intrinsically valuable way of being. To deprive a cow of its responsiveness, or a pig of its limbs, or a chicken of its proclivity for pecking would, on this account, violate its essential “cowness” or “pigness” or “chickenness,” even if those animals were perfectly content in their designated roles.

For thoughts on why animal nature may indeed be worth preserving, and implications for conventional breeding (e.g., dogs for companionship, or horses for racing), and what all of this  means for designer children and embryonic stem cell research, check out the article.

Twitter Round-Up (1/20-1/26)

By Casey Thomson

Though simply the consequence of bad translation, the story of the Harvard geneticist George Church looking for a woman to act as surrogate for a Neanderthal clone shocked the internet bioethics world. A look at the problems with this hypothetical situation is just one of the components of this week’s Twitter Round-Up.

  • Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) linked to an opinion piece discussing the reasoning behind the United States’ place in the world rankings of life expectancy at different stages of life. The news is a big hit to ideas of American exceptionalism: according to a report by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, Americans have a substantially higher death rate for those younger than 50 as compared to Western Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, and Australians, but once they reach the age of 80, they have some of the longest life expectancies globally. (1/20)
  • Arthur Caplan (@ArthurCaplan) shared his article on why Neanderthal cloning is a bad idea, both in terms of safety and in terms of avoiding cruelty. (1/22)
  • Arthur Caplan (@ArthurCaplan) posted a news story on the reopening of bird flu experimental procedures for vaccine creation. Caplan was quoted in the article as stating: “I have no issue with restarting the research but some issue with where they are going to publish it and where they present it because bad guys can use it too.” (1/23)
  • Daniel Goldberg (@prof_goldberg) included an evaluation as to the medical disparities occurring in Colorado, particularly between races. The article emphasized in its conclusion that the existence of the disparities themselves is quite clear, but discussion on how to erase such differences is noticeably absent. (1/23)
  • Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) retweeted a post that attempted to quantifiably compare the quality of care in Medicare options, namely whether Medicare Advantage plans 1) will eventually shortchange patients by skipping out on care quality because of profit motive or 2) have incentives to improve care quality because of the newly implemented systematic quality monitoring, where poor ratings impact them financially. The author found that most existing data makes the second theory more compelling, though the amount of data regarding the subject in general is largely lacking. (1/24)
  • Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) also shared a link to an explanation of the intricacies of “personalized regulation” in medicine, which aims to preserve patient choice in an era leaning more and more towards paternalistic medical oversight. Understanding that patients may choose to make rational decisions that diverge from the community or committee consensus is key towards improving medical care to better reflect patient wants, and rights. (1/24)
  • Arthur Caplan (@ArthurCaplan) included a story on the large imbalance in misconduct reports in research between the genders. Men overwhelmingly led the charge, with only nine women out of the 72 faculty members who committed research misconduct. (1/24)
  • Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) additionally shared a letter written by the Editor of The Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum on the reasoning behind publication of a controversial article on the social pressures leading to obesity. The letter calls for the importance of recognizing that publication means that an article contributes to the larger debate on an issue, though does not affirm that the publication medium agrees with the views espoused within; it also encouraged responses to the ideas of the article. (1/25)
  • Stephen Latham (@StephenLatham) posted a video link from Comedy Central on the perils of WebMD and vegetarianism. (1/25)

Note: As mentioned in previous posts, retweeting should not be considered as an endorsement of or agreement with the content of the original tweet.

Fixing Genes Using Cloning Techniques

One more from Art Caplan:

Fixing genes using cloning technique is worth the ethical risk

A team of scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center and the Oregon Health & Science University are reporting a remarkable advance in the treatment of inherited genetic disease in the journal Nature.

They show it is possible to repair a tiny part of a human egg cell that, when broken, causes a host of awful inherited genetic diseases.  Those diseases cause disability and the death for many children and adults.  What is equally remarkable is that the treatment they report is illegal in Britain, Germany, Costa Rica, Norway and Sweden and would be illegal to provide using federal dollars in the United States.

What did the Oregon scientists do?  And why is it so ethically controversial?

Keep reading…