My $19/month Wall Street Journal subscription is pricey, I admit, but every so often there comes a story that makes the investment worthwhile.
Or at least causes you to do a double take.
Such was Monday’s piece titled “Creation of First Human-Monkey Embryos Causes Concern.”
Excuse me? Do read on:
Imagine pigs with human hearts or mice whose brains have a spark of human intelligence. Scientists are cultivating a flock of such experimental creations, called chimeras, by injecting potent human cells into mice, rats, pigs and cows. They hope the new combinations might one day be used to grow human organs for transplants, study human illnesses or to test new drugs.
In the latest advance, researchers in the U.S. and China announced earlier this month that they made embryos that combined human and monkey cells for the first time. So far, these human-monkey chimeras (pronounced ky-meer-uhs) are no more than bundles of budding cells in a lab dish, but the implications are far-reaching, ethics experts say. The use of primates so closely related to humans raises concerns about unintended consequences, animal welfare and the moral status of hybrid embryos, even if the scientific value of the work may be quite high.
The idea of chimeras brings up images of half-human, half-beast gargoyles.
The bottom line: This story screams for some kind of input from religious leaders and academics. After all, doesn’t the creation of these … things have something to do with the whole concept of what is human or not? Maybe they’re only allowed to be a bunch of lab cells at the moment but we all know that once Pandora’s box is opened, stuff seems to leak out.
After throwing in a bland statement from a Duke University bioethicist, the article continues,
Scientists have been creating partly human chimeras for years. …What makes the latest experiment unique is that the scientists injected human stem cells, which can become any kind of tissue, into an embryo of a closely related primate.
Thus, a team of U.S. and Chinese researchers inserted human stem cells into 132 embryos from macaque monkeys. (If these are embryonic stem cells, remember that a human embryo has to be done away with to produce them. Just saying.)
The next day, the monkey embryos glowed. Human cells had become integrated into all of them, far more effectively than in previous experiments with embryos from other species such as pigs, they reported on April 15 in Cell.
So far, these human-monkey chimeras can’t survive longer than 19 days. “It’s never been our intention and never will be to create a living chimera in a monkey host,” says Dr. Izpisua Belmonte.
Really? That might be the intent now but things change, don’t they?
Further down in the piece, another bioethicist is referred to, but not quoted. And then:
Dr. Izpisua Belmonte says he welcomes oversight. At his urging, the recent experiment was reviewed beforehand not just by institutional review boards in the U.S. and China but also by three independent bioethics experts. “Not everything that we scientists can do should be done,” he says. “Experiments like this certainly raise many concerns.”
But what are those concerns and who might raise them? The Vatican, for starters?
The article never says. One gets mental pictures of humanoid monkeys that are created as a slave race. The folks in the comments section certain grasped the latter possibility.
Do scientists actually need to develop new intra-species creatures, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, in order to convince themselves that the human brain is more intelligent than a mouse or an insect?” one asked. “This is an abomination. We are in real trouble, folks.”
Another: The potential for abuse here is beyond appalling. I'm not a religious man, but there are some things that should not be done.
Why is this an ethical quagmire? The potential is that someday, hybrid animal-humans would have some self awareness while also knowing their existence is purely for experimental purposes. They are born to die.
Maybe the bioethicists are shilly-shallying on this, but the animal rights folks are not. This 2017 essay in StatNews.com talks about pig embryos being injected with human stem cells. By the time the pig fetuses were aborted, they had begun to grow human organs.
Once the science of this is perfected, we’ll have a ready supply of donor organs for those who need them, right? The article says:
The possibilities have many researchers giddy with excitement. But they also raise serious ethical dilemmas about the moral status of these part-human animals. Chimera test subjects must be human enough to serve as effective models for health research, but not so human that they qualify for protection from this research altogether…
A particular area of concern is the creation of chimeras with human brain cells. These organisms may be capable of self-awareness to the extent that they understand their identity and circumstances, which would produce unbearable suffering. Will we know when the subjective experience of such a being has crossed the generally accepted line of decency and morality? If we cannot say with certainty that this will never happen, then we need to stop this kind of research right now before we find ourselves in a world where there is no line.
Which may be closer than we thought.
These concerns about chimeric research add to the already potent ethical issues associated with mainstream invasive animal research. Tens of millions of animals are sickened, injured, genetically manipulated, and killed in biomedical labs every year, even as a robust body of evidence shows that some animals are more self-aware and emotionally and cognitively complex than we previously thought. That leads to the inescapable conclusion that we have already crossed a number of moral lines.
So there’s clearly some major moral — think religious — issues here, starting with an if/when.
Like, if man is created in the image of God, then how many animal cells would it take before that image is erased? And although it’s customary to kill the chimeras after a few days or weeks of research, what percentage of human cells would need to be in these hybrid creatures for them to be considered human and thus kept alive?
But is anyone from the religious world quoted in the Journal piece? Sadly, no. The article ends with a massive understatement.
“As long as it is an embryo in a dish we are not concerned,” Dr. Greely says of the human-monkey chimera. “If you actually try to gestate such a thing, particularly if you can bring it successfully to term, then the issues get more significant.”
Well, no kidding.
Now, there are plenty of religious perspectives on the matter including this piece in favor of chimera production here and another piece arguing against it here. There’s tons and tons of materials out there. The Vatican has been talking about the issue since 2005. The Christian Research Journal, which writes from an evangelical perspective, has a piece here.
The religious world would definitely have a lot to say about chimeras, as our society is built on a moral and ethical and religious framework that has distinct and separate categories for people and animals. In a time when science gets to advance first, then consider ethics as an after thought, a reporter needs to throw in some contrarian points of view.
And that includes the world of religion, which has quite a bit to say about what it means to be human.
MAIN IMAGE: Gargoyle by Dean Moriarty from Pixabay.