We Still Don't Know How to Talk About the Ethics of Human-Animal Hybrids

In ancient Greece, the word "Chimera" referred to a monstrous beast with the body of a lion, a tail that was a snake, and a goat head growing out of its spine. In genetics, chimeras are any animals that have working genes from two distinct zygotes – in other words, 4 parents. In the future, chimeras will be Frankensteinian monsters that resemble monkeys and pigs but think and emote like humans, living lives of confused despair and hapless identity trouble. Ha!

But in all seriousness: a new report examining the use of "Animals Containing Human Material" for biological research published by The Academy of Medical Sciences, was written to set preliminary terms for regulating ethically delicate research on animal-human chimeras. The use and synthesis of animal-human chimeras could be the political equivalent of the next stem-cell debate (after all, stem cells are usually necessary for the creation of chimeras), but with more outlandish examples, fear-mongering, and allusions to ancient mythical monsters.

As a matter of fact, human-animal chimeras have been in used in medical research for years. Chimeric mice, for instance, have been bred with human DNA to test cancer drugs, and goats have been engineered with human proteins in their milk. This field of research holds considerable promise for medicine – while investigators are often limited by the fact that they can't test many drugs and cures on humans (and rightly so), human-animal chimeras would allow them to directly test human tissues of interest. But this poses an important question: What "tissues"are acceptable?

The report is hoping to get a head start on the discussion of the ethical dilemmas posed by Animals Containing Human Material (or "ACHMs". It would certainly hurt ACHM research if the first discourse on it was in reaction to a specific study or, say, a gross picture of a goat with human hands. Scientists from The Academy of Medical Sciences show support for the study of ACHMs and highlight its advantages, but the public response detailed in the report is a bit unnerving.

According to a public poll from the study, people are most accepting of chimeras with human blood (55%) and skin (51%) cells, and least comfortable with the use of human brain (45%) and reproductive (42%) cells. According to the report, the use of neural stem cells elicited the most goosebumps. One respondent was quoted saying, “I don’t have a problem with it until it gets to the brain…Bits to do with memories, that would be too far – it’s a human thing to have a memory.”

Uh. What they probably meant to say was it’s a "brain" thing to have a memory. Maybe they forgot.

As the authors state, "The key question, which cannot at present be answered with certainty, is whether populating an animal's brain with human cells could result in that animal developing some elements of human consciousness, or 'human-like' behavior and awareness. The likelihood is that the kind of work currently being done could not cause this to happen."

While the ethics of animal research should always be scrutinized and discussed, I hope the future of ACHM research is not held hostage by the fear that scientists will somehow be able to breathe humanness into animals. I would have preferred stronger words from the report — populating an animal's brain with a number of human cells is not only extremely unlikely to instill it with human consciousness, it's near impossible.

Sure, neuroscience is a young field – we barely know what is happening in our own brains, let alone what's happening in a mouse's brain, let even further alone what would happen in a mouse brain with some neurons from human stem cell DNA – but "human-like behavior,"especially a behavior as complex as consciousness, is an extremely intricate web of neural dynamics that requires billions of bits of the human brain and human body working in tight harmony.

If shooting a little bit of human DNA into an animal turned it into some kind of hybrid beast with humanish thoughts, I'd guess someone would have made one by now. And to the best of my knowledge, Victor Frankenstein is not behind the quest to cure Parkinson’s.