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Last week, during the discussion of Spain's new animal rights legislation, I pointed to an article by Donald McNeil Jr. in the July 13 New York Times. McNeil asked whether the most advanced animals, the great apes, deserved the "most basic right—to not be killed for food." My answer was yes. In fact, I'd argue—hypocritically—that it's wrong to kill animals for food, period. It's brutal and unnecessary.
But let's make the question a bit tougher for you animal lovers. Is it wrong to grow and kill animals for transplantable tissue?
I ask because a report out of England this week suggests that animals may become a rich source of tissue for repairing human bodies. "Currently, the use of animal tissue for human transplant is restricted, and of limited effectiveness," the BBC observes. The Daily Telegraph explains why:
Surgeons have been able to transplant heart valves from pigs into patients for more than a decade, but these have a limited life span as they do not become populated by the patients own cells and are unable to repair any damage, meaning they must be replaced every 10 years. For young patients this poses a particular problem as the valves do not grow with the child and so must be replaced frequently.
But scientists now think they may have figured out a solution. Professor John Fisher, a biological engineer at the University of Leeds, explains the method they've been successfully testing:
We can take a tissue from an animal, remove all the cells that carry the signals that trigger the immune system so just the biological scaffold is left. When this is implanted, the patient's own cells then grow in to replace the original cells we have removed. This has advantages as the transplant can then grow with the patient. ...
The patient's own cells then grow in. The transplant can then grow with the patient. I hope you "human dignity" fans on the right realize the import of what he's saying. He's talking about an animal tissue structure incorporating human cells and growing inside a human body. The code words are recellularization (PDF) and in vivo regeneration. In other words, interspecies integration. You can read all about it at the Web site of Fisher's company, Tissue Regenix.
But the harder question is for animal rights advocates. Fisher and his colleagues are collaborating with a British agency "to develop the technique so they can create new heart valves for children," the Daily Telegraph reports. Their research "opens the way for a range of new procedures using animal parts." So while tissue regeneration in vivo reduces the need to repeat each transplant, it will apparently increase "use of animal tissue such as blood vessels, tendons and bladders" overall, according to the BBC. The point of all this work, according to Tissue Regenix, is to "address the chronic shortfalls in donor tissue availability."
We're not talking anymore about killing animals for food. We're talking about killing them for transplantable body parts. Animal rights vs. children's lives.
Liberals often challenge pro-lifers with a dilemma: In a burning fertility clinic, you can save either a 5-year-old girl or a tray of 10 frozen embryos. The point of the challenge is to test whether pro-lifers really believe that an embryo is equal to a child. Now animal rights advocates, the pro-lifers of the left, face their own dilemma: save the girl or spare the pig?
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If you're tired of reading about how dead Hillary Clinton is or how long it'll take her to admit it, fly with me across the Atlantic for a couple of minutes. A monumental debate is going on in the British House of Commons over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which will influence how governments around the world regulate family and reproductive issues in the next century.
Everything's on the table in this free-for-all: late-term abortions, human-animal hybrids, and IVF for lesbians and unmarried women.
The liberals are steamrolling the conservatives. None of the proposed restrictions has passed. But what's really intriguing is the difference in vote counts among the various issues. It tells us something about which values people care about most. Is it life? Sex? Human dignity?
Here's how many members of Parliament voted for each proposed restriction:
A. Ban abortions after 22 weeks instead of the current 24 weeks: 233.
B. Require clinics to consider the "need for a father" in approving women for IVF: 217.
C. Ban abortions after 20 weeks: 190.
D. Ban the use of gutted animal eggs to make human embryos for research: 176.
E. Ban genetic testing of embryos to choose (for implantation and birth) those that could grow tissue for transplant to an already-born sibling: 163.
F. Ban abortions after 16 weeks: 84.
So the most popular restriction was on late-term abortions. Chalk one up for life.
But wait: The number of votes to prevent lesbian parenthood beat out the number of votes to prevent abortions after 20 weeks. From this, you could make a pretty good argument that feminists are right: Some supporters of abortion restrictions care more about regulating sex and family structure than about protecting life.
Personally, I'm sure of this. The proof is that most people who support abortion bans also support exceptions for rape and incest, where the life considerations are the same, but the sex and family-structure considerations are different.
Now look at the vote count on banning human-animal hybrids. The hybrids in question aren't equal mixtures of human and animal. They're fully human cell nuclei cloned inside eviscerated animal eggs, for lack of available human eggs. In other words, the animal contribution is minimal, almost inconsequential. Furthermore, the embryos are just for research and cell derivation, not for procreation. I'm not saying this is unobjectionable. I'm just pointing out that the degree of mixture is trivial.
Nevertheless, the number of votes to ban it is more than double the number of votes to ban abortions after 16 weeks. To that extent, "human dignity" beats out life. It seems that keeping our DNA separate from that of animals is more important than saving those second-trimester babies.
But that's still not the headline, in my book. The headline is that restrictions on lesbian IVF and trivial species mixture outpolled restriction of genetic testing to choose embryos for tissue harvesting. The common term for this practice is "savior siblings." Here's the prototypical situation: Your daughter has a serious disease. She needs compatible bone marrow. The best way to get it is for you and your spouse to make another baby and transplant its bone marrow to her. But not all your offspring will have tissue that matches hers. To guarantee a match, you need to make a batch of embryos, implant one that matches, and forget about the rest.
The happy ending is that your daughter is saved, and you've made another child to love. But you've also crossed a line. You've made a bunch of human embryos and then flushed them not because of anything wrong with them, but because they weren't useful. And if there's no tissue match, you've crossed that line for nothing.
In my view, the rise of this mentality -- the reconceptualization of human beings as medical tools and resources -- is way more dangerous than gender upheaval, species-mixing, or even abortion. Abortions, no matter what you think of them, are defensive. Tissue harvesting, on the other hand, carries an affirmative mandate. It entitles you, and arguably obliges you, to deliberately create new human life, which will then live or die based on its utility to others.
Contrary to pro-life rhetoric, there's no broad incentive to increase the number of abortions. But there's plenty of incentive to increase the number of sibling saviors. That's why sibling saviors scored so well in the House of Commons. This is one thing I've learned from covering biotechnology: Bad things don't happen because they're bad. They happen because they're good.
Keep an eye on this utilitarian mindset as we continue to take ourselves apart. As the British debate illustrates, it'll be hard to stop.
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The genetically engineered humans are here! The genetically engineered humans are here!
I didn't believe it when I heard the report was in the Sunday Times of London. This, after all, is the paper that butchered the gay sheep story and can't find any evidence to back up its disputed paraphrases of James Watson. But the original report, which the Sunday Times neglects to mention, turns out to have been published in a scientific journal, Fertility and Sterility. It's titled, "Genetic modification of preimplantation embryos and embryonic stem cells (ESC) by recombinant lentiviral vectors: efficient and stable method for creating transgenic embryos and ESC."
For those of you who don't have access to the pricey journal, the New York Times boils down the experiment: Scientists "put a gene for a fluorescent protein into the single-celled human embryo," and "after the embryo divided for three days, all the cells in the embryo glowed."
What's new in this experiment isn't genetic modification of humans. We've already done that in limited doses, through the same viral technique. What's new is that because this was a single-celled embryo, every cell it went on to produce, including egg and sperm cells, would (except for the diploid-haploid transition, which gets complicated) carry the same genetic tweak. If the embryo were implanted and grew into an adult, its fluorescent gene would be passed down like any other. This is called germline modification. If you wanted to transform our species or give your offspring an advantage that persists through generations, this is how you'd do it.
Naturally, genetic watchdog groups are freaked out. Human Genetics Alert calls it a prelude to "eugenics" and "designer babies" and demands an "international moratorium on such experiments." The Center for Genetics and Society says it "could push us toward a GATTACA-like world" dominated by "the genetically enhanced."
The scientists, based at Cornell University, offer several responses. First, they used no U.S. federal funds, so no legal restrictions were violated. Second, the gene conveyed no enhancements; it was just a green "marker" to help them see whether it was replicated in subsequent cell divisions. Third, the experiment "was done on an embryo that was never going to be viable," due to pre-existing chromosomal defects. Fourth, they destroyed the embryo after five days, as required by a Cornell review committee.
The watchdog groups are alarmed because Britain's parliament is presently debating legislation to lift restrictions on human embryonic genetic modification. (See yesterday's post about the bill's pregnant-man loophole.) But proponents of the legislation point out that the law would still ban growing such embryos beyond 14 days or transferring them to a womb.
When you line up the points made by scientists and liberalizers, it's easier to understand what's really going on here. It's not that we're plowing unimpeded toward genetic engineering of children. To the contrary, we've drawn lines to prevent that: the 14-day limit and the no-implantation rule. What's going on is that by drawing these lines, we've created a zone where virtually no legal or moral rules apply. Look at the American and British treatment of cloning, and you'll see the same pattern. You can clone embryos, mix species, and engineer all you want, as long as you don't implant the embryos or grow them beyond 14 days.
Maybe this system will allow us to make important scientific discoveries and conquer diseases without crossing the lines we've drawn. On the other hand, maybe it'll turn embryos into a testing ground for techniques that we'll use for people-engineering when we're ready to go there. Or maybe we'll relax the rules a bit at a time, extending our techniques to more advanced embryos as we test and refine them. We'll tell ourselves that we're curing genetic diseases in the womb so that babies and their babies will be born healthy.
The argument for the latter scenario is that, far from being diabolical, the idea of loosening the 14-day rule makes a lot of sense. The Cornell scientists point out that genetically modified embryos "could be used to study how diseases develop" and that "in order to be sure that the new gene had been inserted and the embryo had been genetically modified, scientists would ideally need to grow the embryo and carry out further tests." The longer you grow the embryo, the more you learn.
How long could we grow genetically modified embryos if we lift the 14-day rule? According to the New York Times, "A spokesman for the National Institutes of Health said the Cornell work would not be classified as gene therapy in need of federal review, because a test-tube embryo is not considered a person under the regulations." Roughly speaking, U.S. law confers personhood at viability. That's five months or so. Plenty of time for good work to be done.
I don't mean to make this scenario sound imminent. But as we ease ourselves into the world of genetic engineering, let's notice what we're doing. We're chalking off a zone where the ethics of human manipulation don't apply, on the grounds that the human entities we're manipulating aren't human beings. Seven years ago, scientists and supportive ethicists set up a similar ethics-free zone based on origin: Human embryos produced by fertilization were protected, while those produced by cloning were fair game. Now we've shifted to lines based on age and location.
Will these lines hold? You can't dismiss the fear that they won't as slippery-slope nonsense from the anti-abortion crowd. Embryo research is fundamentally different from abortion. If you're a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, you have no incentive to prolong it. But if you're a scientist with an embryo modified for research, you have lots of good reasons to keep growing it and studying it. The only things holding you back are your conscience, your review board, and the law.
Here's my prediction: We won't end up extending species-mixing beyond the 14-day line. Nor will we end up deliberately growing embryos past that point for harvestable tissue, as I previously speculated. But we will extend germline genetic engineering all the way through pregnancy and beyond, and our grandchildren will wonder why it was ever controversial.
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Today I've been reading up on the trans-Atlantic news about a genetically modified human embryo. I'll have some thoughts on that shortly. In the meantime, while reading Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill as part of my research, I noticed what might be a loophole. I'll point it out here, since the bill is being debated by the British parliament right now.
The bill proposes to lift previous restrictions on tinkering with human embryos. To reassure critics and the public, it promises to prevent altered embryos from growing into people. Here's the relevant legislative language:
No person shall place in a woman—
(a) an embryo other than a permitted embryo (as defined by section 3ZA), or
(b) any gametes other than permitted eggs or permitted sperm (as so defined). ...
No person shall place in a woman—
(a) a human admixed embryo,
(b) any other embryo that is not a human embryo, or
(c) any gametes other than human gametes.
Now, here's my question: Is Thomas Beatie a woman? Here's his first-person account, published seven weeks ago in the Advocate:
I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy. ... Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. ... I always wanted to have children. However, due to severe endometriosis 20 years ago, Nancy had to undergo a hysterectomy and is unable to carry a child. ... [So] I stopped taking my bimonthly testosterone injections. ... My body regulated itself after about four months, and I didn't have to take any exogenous estrogen, progesterone, or fertility drugs to aid my pregnancy.
How did he get pregnant? By using donated sperm, as millions of women have done. He reports:
On successfully getting pregnant a second time, we are proud to announce that this pregnancy is free of complications and our baby girl has a clean bill of health. ... Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant.
Beatie says his initial attempt at pregnancy produced ectopic triplets, which cost him a fallopian tube and could have killed him. So he has good reasons to do IVF and screen his embryos. Suppose doctors find a genetic flaw in his next embryo and can fix it. That's human germline modification. The British bill says the altered embryo can't be placed in a woman. But under the law, Beatie isn't a woman. He's a man.
I'll let you lawyers sort it out. But it sure looks like a loophole to me.