Hank Greely

Yes.

Suffering is suffering.

And if you worry about human suffering, the non-human animals that we cause to suffer through medical research or through things like agriculture also impose an ethical burden on us.

It would be very hard to do a lot of really important medical research.

Medical research that not only prevents human suffering, sometimes the medical research helps for veterinary drugs and other things to help animal suffering as well.

So...

I learned about the idea and the, I think, ugly but eye-catching word, bodyoids, when I got an email from one of my Stanford colleagues, a stem cell scientist named Hiro Nakauchi.

who has done lots of interesting things with stem cells and with genetic manipulation.

His idea is make animals that cannot feel pain, cannot have consciousness, but still are useful for purposes of medical research.

And one of his most extreme version of this, and I don't know whether I think it's going to work or not, is to make animals that don't even have heads at all,

But short of that, you could make animals that don't have brains at all or animals that don't have the parts of brains that would be responsible for consciousness or pain.

You know, first, though, it's important to remember that for the last 300 years or so in the West, until recently,

Our general philosophical position is that animals were automatons that didn't have any feelings.

So from Rene Descartes on, the idea was animals don't feel or think, they just look like they feel or think.

Well, we don't believe that anymore.

So if all you're interested in is relieving suffering,

The idea of doing this has some great attraction.

On the other hand, should we really be changing the nature of our fellow creatures, changing the nature of animals in this way, and not just changing it, but changing it in a way that lowers their normal function, that sort of degrades their normal function?

Is that an appropriate thing for humans to do?

I mean, is it even medically possible to do this?