morality and medicine

[mellowtigger]

For some people, technology seems to be a dizzying force that perpetually brings them new and previously unfathomable possibilities.  The thrashing of expectations forces them to constantly re-evaluate their understanding of the operation of the universe.  (Therefore it also threatens their understanding of God(s), therefore it is to be summarily distrusted as a destabilizing force.)

That's probably why some people are still stuck in the debate over stem cell research into conditions like Parkinson's disease.  They don't realize that they've already lost that debate and the next one too, because these processes are already producing useful knowledge about human ailments.

The "next one" debate that I mean is the creation of chimeras.  A chimera in folklore is a creature made up of several animals.  The traditional Greek example included a lion's head and body, a goat's head from the back, and a snake's tail with the head at the end (pictured here from Wikipedia).  A chimera in the medical sense is an animal whose dna incorporates sequences from other animals, particularly humans.  Human chimera also occur naturally (people have dna from two different people in them), but newly designed animal creations are the issue that I intend here.

I still think that the world very quickly needs to come up with a doctrine of species' rights.  We need to know immediately how to deal with current animals whose intelligence is frequently being revealed to be much like humans'.  We need specific thresholds of understanding (and therefore suffering) that trigger specific prohibitions against certain ill treatment.  Ill treatment is a certainty, as life is very messy, but we need to define when government will or will not become involved. Anyone can claim that their deity abhors a given practice, but I've noticed that it's generally up to humans to define when to enforce a standard.  (Deities seem to never intervene in time to prevent some impatient humans from taking matters into their own vigilante hands.)

So we need standards.  We need them yesterday.   "No" is an insufficient standard, as it's already too late and it's utterly impossible to enforce.  I think that a workable solution may involve making people responsible for the creatures they produce, just as parents are responsible for the creatures that they produce using the old-fashioned horizontal mambo.   I think the concept of chimeras is pretty cool.  I think it does provoke lots of moral questions that seriously need answers.  I'd be pleased if someday the process resulted in a creature that we could ask, "What do you think of the practice of animal experimentation?", and then we receive a thoughtful reply.

Anyway, the news that brought on this blog entry?

"Multiple sclerosis successfully reversed in animals"
http://www.physorg.com/news169211700.html

More specifically, those animals are re-introduced to their own modified chimeric blood cells.  Not true chimeras, but obviously pointing at the next step of the research, getting an animal's body to continuously produce its own cure.  They think this treatment "might also be effective against other autoimmune disorders like Crohn's disease, lupus and arthritis" and even for organ transplants.  Again, too late to have a debate about the process.  We have important medical knowledge already.  That genie isn't going back into the bottle.

For what it's worth, I would suspect (with weak conviction) that my own mother is a chimera.  She has said before that every time she's had her blood type tested, it's come back as a different type.  Chimera is one possible explanation, at least.

(p.s. Okay, it's an hour later.  I promise I'll stop repeatedly editing the original post now.  *laugh*)

Comments

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Chimerical mouse/human DNA is what makes it possible for my husband to live a relatively normal life. (Synthetic monoclonal antibodies.) Chimerism at the cellular level has been part of the pharmaceutical toolbox for at least twenty years now, but people who don't understand this are still itching to legislate it out of the toolbox.

If they succeed, I wonder how they will feel when they get old, develop terrible arthritis, and find out that they legislated the most effective treatment out of existence.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

I'm more vicious than you are. I'd hope for everyone they love to be stricken with an illness that could have been cured or treated with the methods they banned. And if they take ANY measures to get around such a ban - have people screaming at them about what horrible hypocrites they are.

My mother had rheumatoid arthritis, so I can empathize with you and your husband. I've lost friends to HIV, I've got a good friend whose father's intellect has been destroyed by vascular dementia... the list could go on. I have zero patience for people who try to obstruct ethical biomedical research.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I can't go quite that far simply because, as the partner of someone with Crohn's, I have some idea of just how awful it can be and can't quite bring myself to wish that on anyone. (Both the Crohn's and the secondary arthritis it's brought on are manageable thanks to Remicade. We joke that the only long-term side effect is that now he loves cheese even more.)

But I definitely share your lack of patience. What particularly infuriates me is the demon-haunted-world attitude that because some disease or harmful condition exists, we somehow deserve to suffer from it. The bullshit "God sent AIDS as a punishment for homosexuality" argument. I want to shake these people and scream at them, "Why do you wear contact lenses? Why do you take aspirin when you have a headache? Then why isn't that a good enough reason for you to fund HIV research and stem cell research, you hypocritical pieces of shit?"

In my theology, it is our highest moral duty to alleviate the suffering of other creatures by applying every tool we have at hand, first and foremost of which is our faculties of reason -- but to explain this in detail would be rather lengthy and I do not like to come off as proselytising in other people's spaces, so I will demur for the moment. I should probably blog about it in my own journal, though.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh, and thank you for your kind thoughts. I am sorry for your loss and the pain your friends and loved ones have been through, and I look forward to the day when no one has to suffer like that ever again. <3

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.

Unfortunately, I don't think I'm special in this regard - I suspect almost everyone has a family member or a friend who's dealing with some chronic ailment or another. (Especially if you include the "controllable" ones like high blood pressure. Wouldn't a cure - or even a once a year treatment - be better than daily pills?)

And to clarify one point about my "vicious" musing earlier... I can think in those terms... but if someone handed me a box with a red button and said "Press that, and it will be done" I couldn't do it. It just seems like it would take something of that magnitude - if anything can - to get through to some of these Know-Nothings.