The Ethics of Crossing Humans with Animals | Glenn Cohen | Big Think

The Ethics of Crossing Humans with Animals |

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Harvard bioethics specialist Glenn Cohen considers the complex question of whether humans should mix their genetic material with other animals to create chimeras.It is really, really fun when Harvard professors play ‘What If…’. This is a regular part of Glenn Cohen’s work as a law professor specializing in health policy, bioethics and biotech. Invoking the Jurassic Park rule of ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’ and imagining all eventualities is how Cohen explores the fascinating and sometimes twisted intricacies driving our ethical dilemmas.

It’s particularly fun on the topic of chimeras, which broadly defined is research that mixes human and animal genetic material. Cohen lists some real cases as examples: mixing human brain cells into mice brains, or humanizing a mouse’s immune system to carry out studies that yield results relevant to humans. Former U.S. senator Jesse Helms had a pig valve placement in his heart many years ago. To make a more imaginative leap, what about a gorilla with a human face? How would we feel about that?

Cohen discusses a few key ethical arguments surrounding our hesitancy to mix interspecies genetic material, then moves onto a hypothetical concerning Sesame Street’s Big Bird, and surmises that when it comes to this ethical area, decisions can really only be made on a case by case basis. Some changes simply are more unethical or sociologically disturbing to humans, and here Cohen cites his friend and colleague at Stanford Law School, Professor Henry T. Greely, who sums it up nicely with three words: brains, balls, and faces. Those are the things that make us most uncomfortable in genetic mixing, perhaps because they are definitive markers of what it is to be human.

The jury might be out on chimeras, but at least you have some insight into how a bioethicist’s mind works.

Glenn Cohen's book is Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics.

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PROFESSOR, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL :

Prof. Glenn Cohen is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called "medical ethics") and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. From Seoul to Krakow to Vancouver, Professor Cohen has spoken at legal, medical, and industry conferences around the world and his work has appeared in or been covered on PBS, NPR, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the New York Times, the New Republic, the Boston Globe, and several other media venues.

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TRANSCRIPT :

Glenn Cohen: So a recent set of controversies has to do with the funding by the federal government about a research that mixes human and animal genetic material sometimes called chimeras, but there's actually a broader – so again, the method is to think about a large number of cases; it's helpful to think about very different cases. So to use some real cases imagine you mixed human brain cells, so human brain stem cells in the embryonic stage into a mouse to create a mouse with a humanized brain and it wouldn't be a human brain. It isn't exactly the same. It's much smaller, for example, but has humanized elements. Another example is imagine you took a gorilla, treated the gorilla exactly as it is but were able to generate a human looking face, so a gorilla with a human face, how would we think about that entity?

Third example, humanized immune system. Took a mouse and we do this with, we have these at Harvard, for example, and created an immune system in order to test drugs, think about HIV, for example, that was humanized. So not the brain but just the immune system was very human like. And last example is actually valve replacements, heart valve replacements. So Jesse Helms, a senator had a pig valve placement years ago so there's a piece of an animal in him. So these are four examples of different kinds of mixing and the question is which are okay and which are not okay? Why can we generate some principles? So what might be wrong with mixing human and animal parts? So one thing that might be wrong is that we think it will confuse the boundaries between humans and animals, that right now we have a pretty clear distinction. Many people love their dogs and their cats like members of the family. They are able to say this is not a member of my family. This is not a member that has the same rights as my family member. In a world where we had much more of a continuum between animals and human beings those distinctions would become difficult.

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