Fabricating part-human-part-nonhuman animals, with features of both, seemed like something out of Greek mythology until the late 20th century. New research then on “geeps,” fully developed, viable mixtures of goats and sheep, showed that constructing such “chimeras” was a real possibility. Still, the warning by H.G. Wells, a century before, in his novel “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” that scientific experiments like this could go terribly awry, seemed fantastical. But this will soon change.
At the end of July, it was reported that the
biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, director of a laboratory at the Salk Institute
in California, produced fetal human-monkey chimeras. He did this in
collaboration with researchers in China. And this month the Japanese government
is expected to give the go-ahead to scientist Hiromitsu Nakauchi, leader of
teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, to
conduct similar experiments with the goal of bringing human-pig chimeras to
full term. These novel forms of life will soon be among us.
Dr.
Nakauchi acknowledges that the concerns of Wells and later writers like Aldous
Huxley, author of “Brave New World” (1932), which similarly envisioned
technologically calibrating degrees of humanness, are not farfetched. The art
of getting the human cells to the right places in the composite animals is
worse than imperfect, as are most manipulations of embryos. Developmental
biology is simply not the kind of science that can guide an engineering
program. Will the resulting mice and pigs have human consciousness? How this
will be ascertained is not clear, but if they do Dr. Nakauchi assures us he
will destroy them and stop the experiments.
The
newly approved human-animal chimera procedures are just some of a number of
scientifically and ethically questionable techniques that are being
soft-pedaled and normalized on a daily basis by panels of experts advised by
financially motivated bioentrepreneurs. In 1997, I applied for a patent on such
part-human creatures. I had no intention of producing a chimera. But as a
biologist whose work requires close tracking of the relevant scientific
literature, I knew that part-human organisms could eventually be produced and
that we were quickly approaching an era of deconstruction, reconfiguration, and
commodification of human biology. The public deserved a heads-up.
The
announcement of the chimera patent application in 1998 was met with derision
and accusations of bad faith by the then U.S. Patent Commissioner, and some
biotechnology executives and scientists as well. The chair of genetics at
Harvard Medical School, for example, asserted that “[t]he creation of chimeras
is an outlandish undertaking. No one is trying to do it at present, certainly
not involving human beings.” A little over two decades later, however, a once
grotesque development has been normalized and approved by experts.
In fact,
there are numerous cases in the past four decades of interested parties playing
down individual risk and potential societal impact of medically related
procedures while making inflated promises based on the claimed novelty of the
same methods. Advocates from the entrepreneurial side will often advertise
prospective cures with oversimplifications that attribute undue power and
singular action to favored (often patented) genes. From the scientific side
there have been corner cutting in qualifying patients for treatments and
misleading characterizations of the nature of and uncertainties around
techniques to alter prospective humans.
An
egregious example was one motivated by the understandable desire to avoid
propagation of mitochondrial disease. It involved the renaming of the methods
for transferring one woman’s egg cell nucleus (containing about 20,000 genes)
into a second woman’s egg, leading to embryos constructed from cells of three
persons. What was, essentially, a type of cloning was rebranded as “replacement
of mitochondria” (involving only 23 genes). This procedure was sold on these
deceptive terms to the people of the U.K., where it was approved and is now
under way.
The
“CRISPR” gene modification of embryos is the latest development being dealt
with by expert panels. They will be the arbiters of when the technologically
inevitable will occur. But any
dispassionate consideration of the extreme nature of what these methodologies
can produce should shake us into a realization that the public needs to be made
aware of what is underway and have their voices heard on what will surely
change our concept of human identity.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/16/the-biotech-industrial-complex-gets-ready-to-define-what-is-human/
***Stuart
A. Newman, Ph.D. is a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical
College, and co-author (with Tina Stevens) of Biotech Juggernaut: Hope, Hype,
and Hidden Agendas of Entrepreneurial Bioscience (Routledge).