mellowtigger | morality and medicine (Reply)

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*)