Dog Clone
South Korean scientist Woo-Suk Hwang made history yesterday when he announced having successfully cloned a human dog. It was a regular dog actually - an afghan hound named Snuppy, to be precise - but some humanitarians seem to think he's two steps away from producing a clone army to overthrow The Republic.Rueters reports that Hwang's research has stayed far far away from human cloning, which is banned in South Korea. His real research is focused on using eggs harvested from human females to create functional cells that can never become human beings, and postively refuses to use the term "human cloning" in reference to his work.
Opponents of human cloning need to stop jumping at every drop of the biological hat and realize that advances in medicine are coming whether they like it or not. Medical research on processes that would never be used on human beings has been done on animals for ages. Hwang's specifically stated that he has absolutely no interest in attempting to clone human beings and that his research is dedicated to producing isolated cells and organs for the hopeful use in healing disabled persons, and this ought to be the perfect humanitarian compromise for those concerned about the ethical ramifications of stem cell research.
If these humanitarians want to stay involved in outlining the parameters of the research involved and have a say in what is and isn't ethical, they need to start praising efforts like Hwang's, which seeks all the benefits of cell growing without crossing the ethical line of performing research on viable human embryos. Hwang should be praised loudly, put forward as an example of a highly ethical scientist in a highly controversial field of research, and these ridiculous sabre-rattling and fear-mongering statements abandoned.
posted by RJ @ 7:45 AM
13 comments
13 Comments:
But should we be cloning dogs?
This is not to say that cloning is wrong or right, but I don't see that it's a giant step away from anything we've been doing. Many of our crops are genetically modified, and many people use fertility treatments when conceiving children. Suppose that cloning people becomes feasible, and that an infertile man wants to have children that are his own genetic material. He clones himself and they implant the embryo in his wife. (Keep in mind that clones are FAR from exact "copies" of the thing cloned.) How is this wrong?
We certainly don't want people cloning their dead children or themselves for reasons other than the one I cited above. The question is whether or not we would actually want such a thing to be illegal.
j. morgan: I don't know--for me it comes down to the question of what our money is best spent on. Should it be illegal for private firms to clone dogs? No. Should it be illegal for anyone to clone humans, for the time being? Yes. Should taxpayer money fund any of this? I don't know.
The goal in all of this is to be able to "clone" not people or entire animals but only certain parts, such as a certain organ. It's entirely theoretically possible to clone yourself only the spare parts you might need; to grow a new heart or liver or kidney to replace the old when in case of an accident or if it wears out. It's much easier to clone an entire organism than to clone only certain parts, so for the moment we're working on cloning more and more complicated species.
Dog's are much harder to clone than rats, mice or sheep, due mostly to their gestation period I guess. The science done cloning this animal was done to learn how to better clone complex organisms. I'm sure part of the reason he chose a dog instead of a kangaroo is for the marketing aspect, and that sort of casual cloning you might argue is immoral. In this case, the guy cloned a dog in research on cloning in general, and so I'd say yes, we should be cloning dogs for things like that, or we shouldn't be doing organ transplants now.
Charles: I agree about the money issue, but I wonder if there isn’t a more basic question we can ask, namely: To what end is all of this? It is a much more difficult question than nearly anyone is willing to grant. I think you are right that cloning is very much in line with existing biotechnology that most Americans would not think twice about. That, however, is part of the problem: should we accept genetically engineered food or fertility therapy as ethically good; or even as ethical neutrals? The implications of such technologies have been, are, and will be enormous and irrevocable in terms of our individual and corporate identity as well as our understanding of life, death, suffering, sacrifice, nature, evolution, time, purpose, etc. From an ideological standpoint, I think that there has to be a morally compelling case to pursue such technologies as opposed to allowing human societies to persevere in a state of recognized limitations and biological frailty. If health care is to meet that standard, there has to be some larger, significant end other than life extension.
redhurt: I agree that this use of cloning is not very different than organ transplants, but, as you may have guessed from my above question to Charles, I wonder if we should be doing organ transplants. What compelling ethical case is there for that sort of medical intervention?
Organ transplants allow us to save peoples lives and vastly improve their quality of living. Concurrently, if cloning allows us to re-grow certain organs or tissues and thus have perfect transplants, it allows us to improve our abililty to save lives and improve people's quality of living. Where medicine is concerned, I don't see that there is any more compelling ethical case. To ask whether or not organ transplants are ethical seems to me to draw all of medicine into question, and unless you're going to advocate living like an amish luddite, I'm going to assume we agree that medical intervention to preserve life is ethically acceptable.
Advances in technology frequently require us to re-interpret our lives in light of them. It doesn't make you a luddite to question why and where Science is moving, but it's important not to eschew change simply because the status quo is safe.
redhurt: Thanks for your response. I have three comments:
1) I agree that the goal of medicine ought to be saving and improving lives. I think, however, that those goals need to be situated in the larger discussion about what it means to be a human person in society. I think most discussions about medical ethics overlook the axiological value and significance of weakness, imperfection, temporality, suffering, and death. As social conceptions of progress become more closely identified with technological advancement, and as those aspects of the human condition that are unpleasant but historically valuable begin to be avoidable, they begin to loose their significance; eventually reduced to an inconvenient biological oversight that we see as our duty to rectify. In medicine right now, there is a debate about whether or not to pathologize aging! Such a discussion is the result of making life and health a good end of itself without reference to the larger spheres of living. At what point do we, as a society, agree that, despite the possibility of rectifying some inconvenient biological limiter, we will choose to accept it as a meaning-giving part of being human? I don’t know where that point is, but that is the sort of discussion we ought to be having.
2) You said, “To ask whether or not organ transplants are ethical seems to me to draw all of medicine into question, and unless you're going to advocate living like an amish luddite, I'm going to assume we agree that medical intervention to preserve life is ethically acceptable.” I am by no means calling all of medicine into question, but I hope I am calling some of it into question. Don’t you think there is something completely different (both historically and operatively) between curing an infection and replacing a part of the body that has malfunctioned? The former seems to be the aim and means of medicine since such things have been documented, the latter seems to be entirely different. Organ replacement, it seems to me, is corrective, but not curative; and, as such, can be seen as a completely different model of medical intervention.
3) Again, you said, “Advances in technology frequently require us to re-interpret our lives in light of them. It doesn't make you a luddite to question why and where Science is moving, but it's important not to eschew change simply because the status quo is safe.” I think the irony of the technological perspective on human advancement – which this comment exemplifies – is that it portrays “the status quo” as “safe.” I think that is a warped and possibly disingenuous perspective on it all (not that you are either one, redhurt, but that the position itself is). I think that a world in which life were characterized by intense biomedical interventions in order to reduce suffering and distance termininability would be about the safest – and most meaningless – life I could imagine. That said, I understand that advances in human understanding and technological agency require us to reinterpret reality. I also understand, however, that technological advancement is not a consummate good. We need a paradigm of meaningful existence that sets goals and limiters, both on our lives and on our endeavors (in this case, our technological and medical pursuits). Until we have that, the very right and noble pursuit of medicine (and science) becomes meaningless.
What say y’all?
Thanks for the great response. I'll reply to each of your sections separately.
1.) I absolutely agree that our limits are often the life-bringing elements of our existence, and that suffering and physical frustration have been and continue to be one of, if not the, most meaningful experiences we have as human beings.
Yet I don't believe it is ever right for society to dictate when a person can and cannot preserve their lives or quality of living provided that the means to said end doesn't cross certain ethical boundaries. These boundaries might be summed up generally (but by no means conclusively) as "the right to do for yourself what is required to survive provided that it doesn't impair another's right to the same".
So while I agree that suffering is a very valuable element of our existence, I don't believe in society's right to mandate it by preventing people from recieving the best health treatment they can. While suffering through cancer treatments is and incredible experience, if a pill were developed that could conquer cancer in 7 days and reduce it's significance to that of a minor infection, I don't believe anyone has the right to keep that pill from cancer patients.
2.) The distinction between "curative" and "corrective" is shady at best. While organ transplants don't cure an infected organ, they do cure a malfunctioning part of the body. And I don't think you can say that medicine's historic purpose has been curative rather than corrective because until relatively recently the distinction wasn't even possible. And yet, since you've brought it up, I'd argue that medicine was primarily meant to be corrective, since it's purpose is first and foremost to preserve the life and well-being of the patient, healing infected tissues only when this is useful to correct. Again, most cancer treatments are hardly curative in your literal sense, and while a holistic curative solution would be better, the corrective suffices as medicine for the time being.
3.) The status quo only seems safe in so far as we understand our ability to find meaning in it's context better than that of the speculative future. Every advancement in science and technology can be seen as eliminating some previously character-building part of our existence in favor of more comfort, and yet I'd argue there's just as much meaning to be found in the new frustrations of the 21st century than there were in the 11th. My point is that you could make this same argument - that technology eliminates life-giving suffering - against every form of modern convenience. It's my belief that it's our responsibility as people to use our technology wisely to retain meaning without limiting the benefits of our inventions. I don't think it's morally acceptable to live in a McMansion wasting your life surfing the internet and watching TV, but I'm not going to say that capitalism, the internet and television should be rejected wholesale(ok, maybe daytime tv, but not all of it.)
To bring this back to cloning then, I think it's absolutely necessary that society but certain restrictions on what science is allowed to do here, but the science of cloning not rejected outright. Situations like the one portrayed in "The Island", where fully-human clones are grown to be harvested for spare parts, should never happen. But if we can grow a single kidney to save the person dying of kidney disease who can't find a donor, we should.
In conclusion, Jesus never went up to a healthy person and struck them sick that their character might be better developed through the ensuing suffering. If you or I were given god powers, we probably would, but not Jesus.
Thanks redhurt. I would like to respond to a few things in your post:
“Yet I don't believe it is ever right for society to dictate when a person can and cannot preserve their lives or quality of living provided that the means to said end doesn't cross certain ethical boundaries.”
For the most part, I agree with you. The ideal medical climate, in my view, would be a world in which life could be sustained indefinitely and pain could be avoid entirely, but that everyone chose to forego that possibility. With that said, I think it is highly unlikely that such a moral climate would ever exist. In that case, we need to make some tough decisions about what ought to be allowed (or, in many cases, developed in the first place).
“The distinction between "curative" and "corrective" is shady at best. While organ transplants don't cure an infected organ, they do cure a malfunctioning part of the body.”
See, I think it is a great distinction. Some bioethicists have adopted the Therapy/Enhancement model by which to differentiate between warranted and “cosmetic” medical interventions. While I think that is a fine distinction (and, in fact, I think that organ transplant could easily fall on the Enhancement side of that model), I think that a functional model is much better for most routine interventions. There is a functional difference among preventative, curative, corrective, and augmentative interventions. You are actually doing different things with different means for different aims. By definition, transplantation is not curative (i.e. it does nothing to restore the organ in question to health), but corrective. Nothing is being cured, only circumvented.
“My point is that you could make this same argument - that technology eliminates life-giving suffering - against every form of modern convenience.”
I completely agree with that argument, which is why I think we need to be very purposive and sparing in our use of technology.
I can't agree with your argument that since people won't take the steps required to limit the application of medical techonology to the impairment of their sense of meaning that society can do that for them. I don't see how society can be given this right. People have the right to survive, dictated by certain terms, none of which includes society's right to limit it for the good of their soul/character. Your soul is your responsibility, and preserving life is medicine's.
Transplanting an organ cures the condition of having a faulty organ. Medicine is only intended to be curative in the sense that these "cures" correct a faulty condition. If you want to argue that the purpose of medicine is foremost to repair failing tissue and not to save/maintain life, I'd be interested in hearing your justification.
Why sparing? I'd rather see a world where technology was used responsibly rather than sparingly. Technology itself does nothing to impair our ability to "find meaning" or "live life" - our abuse of it is what matters. Thinking historically, I feel thrilled and privlidged to live in the age of information, communication and media. I thrive and develop, challenge and create through and with technology - it's become another medium through which life is lived.
redhurt:
“People have the right to survive, dictated by certain terms, none of which includes society's right to limit it for the good of their soul/character.”
I just wouldn’t make this a soul/character issue. I think this goes way beyond the individual’s choice about how to order his/her medical care. Allowing certain technologies to be developed and/or used signals a shift in what our human community is and is all about. See, this isn’t really about survival (statistically, we are surviving at an unprecedented rate as it is); this is about redefining human existence as something not dependent on or limited by biology. Survival may be a right, but self- and communal- redefinition masked as survival is not.
“If you want to argue that the purpose of medicine is foremost to repair failing tissue and not to save/maintain life, I'd be interested in hearing your justification.”
My justification is simple: medical researchers (as opposed to medical practitioners, who are irrelevant to this discussion) do not treat (and do not believe that they treat) human persons to make them well – they rectify specific pathologized irregularities or processes in specific systems, resulting in a hopeful return to health for the person. That is not a semantical distinction – it is a huge methodological debate in medicine right now. Modern medicine is strikingly different than previous eras in medicine for precisely this reason. If you don’t believe me, check out some of the articles in a recent JAMA issue – none of them are about saving or maintaining life, they are all about specific systems or processes.
1. I still don't see how this allows society to say, "letting you restore your body to it's natural stable functioning would impede us from having the necessary degree of suffering in our community. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to stick out these next few years with prostate cancer, and then die." I don't believe our desire to define "human exisitence" supercedes the right of an individual to survive in a functioning body if possible.
I think you're dangerously universalizing your perception of how cloning technology will change the human condition. From my perspective, 200 years of booming technology hasn't changed humanity too much. It's changed the way we live but not the root of the things we struggle with, and those are the issues that bring meaning to life. I simply don't agree that cloning requires a "redefintion" of the self or society on the grand scale you're imagining.
2.) Medical practioners aren't relevent to the discussion of cloning but absolutely are relevent to the discussion of the purpose of medicine. Medical research is done so that medical procedures can be developed and medicine be practiced with the express purpose of healing people. While medical researchers are often involved in the purely academic and curative pursuit of healing tissue, the field of medicine exists to correct problems in human beings. Medicine might, in our modern age of information and education, exist now separaretly as a purely scientific field, like physics, and it's this side of it that you'll find being written about in your JAMA articles. But the majority of that research is funded with the hope that it will be developed into practical applications used to correct maladies. If medicine were primarily curative and focused on healing tissues rather than preserving human life, medical researchers wouldn't be expected to spend much more time researching and developing cures applicable to humans than any other species of plant or animal, right? But they do - we clone dogs to learn how to clone organs to heal people, and while we might be genuinely interested in how cloning works, we're more interested in developing that technology to improve huamnity's physical quality of life and ability to survive.
redhurt or anyone else, please tell me if this discussion is a)fruitless, b) boring, c) over, or d) irrelevant, but I think this is one of the most interesting things I have ever discussed on a blog. For that reason, I am going to respond to a few things you (redhurt) posted last and see if the discussion continues:
“I still don't see how this allows society to say, ‘letting you restore your body to it's natural stable functioning would impede us from having the necessary degree of suffering in our community. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to stick out these next few years with prostate cancer, and then die.’”
I don’t want anybody saying that, because that is not what I am arguing. I am arguing, at least in part, that, because we don’t have a cogent paradigm in medicine by which to account for purposes and ends, and thereby justifying the reduction of suffering and the extension of life, the entire project of trying to do so is severely undercut. I am also arguing that part of the reason no such paradigm exists is because what we are doing now is not really medicine in any historic sense, but is biotechnological redefinition.
“I don't believe our desire to define ‘human exisitence’ supercedes the right of an individual to survive in a functioning body if possible.”
Again, my argument rests on the belief that the goal of modern medical technology is not about survival, but about defining the human persons as an identity that is not dependent on or limited by the biological structures that give rise to that identity.
Reproductive technologies are a clear, if contentious, illustrator of this. Birth control exists as a way for a human person to exercise sexual agency apart from the normal biological processes that accompany sexual intercourse without such an intervention.
Organ transplants function much the same way: It is a way of perpetuating a human identity such that it is not dependent on the biological structures that gave rise to him/her in the first place. In the case of a failing heart - one that the person would otherwise be dependent on for existence - a medical intervention allows a radical separation of biology and consciousness in the form of a different heart and the technical facility to make it operate.
I cannot think of a more radical form of redefinition: casting the human person as someone who is not contingent upon the function of the biology that gave rise to him/her, but an absolute identity separated from their biology through an act of will in the form of biotechnical empowerment. Simply because that radical redefinition also facilitates survival, albeit in a strange and somewhat counterfeit sense, does not mean that it is an intervention for the purpose of survival.
”I think you're dangerously universalizing your perception of how cloning technology will change the human condition. From my perspective, 200 years of booming technology hasn't changed humanity too much. It's changed the way we live but not the root of the things we struggle with, and those are the issues that bring meaning to life. I simply don't agree that cloning requires a ‘redefintion’ of the self or society on the grand scale you're imagining.”
This might be at the root of our disagreement. I think that what it means to be human right now (August 11, 2005) is so radically different than what it meant to be human 200 years ago that existence as our predecessors knew it is virtually unrecognizable to us. That is not to say that humans or human consciousness is different at all, but it is to say that those things that make up the content of our fears, hopes, worries, dreams, struggles, fascinations, and anything else you could imagine is unbelievably different. It is our chronic presentism that often blinds us to that, which is exactly why I am a historian and attempt to think about everything historically. I am sure we could all write a lot about that, but I want to keep it short so that we can (hopefully) continue on-topic.
I don't think the discussion is over, largely because the blog emails me whenever you post a comment so it's easy for me to know when to check back. :)
I think you highlight the core of our discrepency here:
"Again, my argument rests on the belief that the goal of modern medical technology is not about survival, but about defining the human persons as an identity that is not dependent on or limited by the biological structures that give rise to that identity."
This might well be true for the field in general. The amazing load of work being done in such things as erectile dysfunction medicine, reproductive inhibitors (which you pointed out), plastic surgery, etc. are all definitely geared towards this end. Cloning has many applications in this arena as well.
Abstracted to deal only with the role of medicine as it pertains to making our "selves" unihibited by our bodies, I think I'd agree with much of what you've said here. My disagreement only comes in discussion of specific technologies, specfically organ transplants, and how technology from cloning can be used to enhance our ability to survive with a higher quality of life.
I think there's a difference between the morning after pill and organ transplants in that the pill is intended first and foremost to unlink the self from the body while in transplants I'd say this is a secondary result. The purpose of any surgerical repair on the body is to restore it's functionality. That this also changes the way our physical frailty impacts our lives is part and parcel with it, yet certainly not the direct and tangible reason why the surgery is being done.
I believe being human today is vastly different only in context. When I say "being human" here, I mean the way we "live life" or how our "selves" operate - the thing you're saying is impeded by advancements in technology. I think technology provides context but can't do anything to alter who we really are. "Living life" involves how we respond to joy and pain, greed and charity, love and hate. Being human in this metaphysical sense isn't seriously effected by whether your average life-span is 30 or 130, but simply how you respond to the circumstances you're given. Such basic and character-driving forces as greed and selfishness can't be changed by a million years of technology. We're humans with vastly different powers and societies, cultures and environments, than our anscestors, but still struggle with the same fundamental character shaping forces, and I believe we always will.
Feel free to respond here - I'm not opposed to keeping this thread going, but I'll start a new post on what it means to be human in a technologically advancing world to bring others in.
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