Extra: Bodyoids
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof Extra with Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland on Newstalk. Yes, this is Future Brief, our news talk. I'm Jonathan McRae. Now, something that we really don't think about enormously, mostly because we don't want to think about, is that we use animals in medical research, and often these animals experience pain. We do our best to reduce that pain, of course, and we have to get ethical approval for every research program that we do that involves animal pain, but it happens. And if we want to get rid of it completely, there are a few things that we might try. And one of them is to create bodyoids. Here to talk to me about this is Hank Green. He's a professor of law and expert in bioethics at Stanford.
He joins me now. Hank, let's talk about, so the different, there are different approaches to this, right?
What ethical concerns arise from using animals in medical research?
But the philosophical problem of how we reduce animal pain in medical research is an interesting one in itself, right?
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.
And historically, there have been efforts to try and do away with this through the courts. There is a famous case that keeps popping up, I think it's in New York, trying to give personhood to chimpanzees who have been used in research so that the law views these animals as persons and therefore give them extra rights. But that, of course, that cannot work from a current system point of view, right? The way we undertake animal research, if animals were given the same rights as humans, it would be game over for medical research.
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 how did you get interested in this and how are we talking about bodyoids?
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.
And so this idea of creating sort of unthinking, unfeeling sort of organ and tissue sacs but that are living and have the same biological processes that normal animals might have, it throws up a lot of ethical questions, which I presume is why you're so interested in it. What do we need to think about if we were to go down this path of essentially breeding animals that don't feel and don't have brains?
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.
What are bodyoids and how could they change animal research?
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? So that's a great question. And I'm not a scientist.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:51
2
What ethical concerns arise from using animals in medical research?
0:51–3:46
3
What are bodyoids and how could they change animal research?
3:46–7:26
4
How does the concept of personhood apply to animals in research?
7:26–12:21
5
What are the implications of creating animals that cannot feel pain?
12:21–13:38