Chapter 1: 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?
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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. I am a lawyer, a law professor. The scientists think that there is a chance that they can do it.
And in fact, they've already produced some mice that both Nicalchi and there's at least one company in this space in the Bay Area have claimed to produce mice that have no heads. Now these mice die as soon as they're born, but they hope to get better at it.
We don't know first whether we'll be able to do this, and we don't know second, even if we do do this, does a mouse with no head tell us much about mice with heads, let alone about humans with heads? So there's both the problem of can we make it work at all, and how relevant is it for human health? And the answers to that are we don't know.
And of course, the idea that these animals aren't suffering, I'm always struck by the story of the executioner. I can't remember the details. I read an account of an executioner who was responsible for a lot of legal killings in America in prisons due to the death penalty.
And he was talking about how, you know, it seems quite peaceful and it seems like the person isn't in pain, but that's because they're paralyzed beforehand. And actually some of the drugs that had been used historically for death row were extremely painful, but it never looked like they were because of the nature of how they were put to death.
And so, assuming that these animals don't feel pain because they haven't got heads, is there any way of knowing that in a way that's ethical?
Is there any way of knowing it absolutely, positively, not any conceivable doubt? No, but that's true about just about everything in this world. We think, and we think we have good reasons to think, that without brains, there's no consciousness, there's no brain, there's no pain, there's no perception at all, that brains are crucial to perceiving the world. And we see some
We think with people who have had severe traumatic brain injuries or strokes or other things so that their brains aren't functioning, they don't seem to respond to anything. And further, we have this concept of brain death. If your brain is not firing, if nothing in your brain is working,
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Chapter 4: How does the concept of personhood apply to animals in research?
He's an expert in bioethics at Stanford. We're talking about, you know, the question that some scientists are trying to pursue is whether or not we could create animals, could be used for animal testing, potentially even donation of body parts like xenotransplantation. You know, the pig heart is very similar to the human heart. Whether or not we could create ethically sort of
organisms, animals, essentially, without heads, without brains, so that they don't feel. And how would we feel about that ethically? And there's been, like, you have a colleague, John Evans, in UC San Diego, who's actually kind of asked people about this, right? Because even if it was possible, is that something that we would want to, it just feels very, what has John found out about it?
So we have a technical term for it in bioethics. We call it the yuck factor.
Hmm.
Somebody hears something and they go, oh, yuck. So what John has found is that often what ordinary people are worried about isn't so much what the bioethicists and the scientists are worried about, and not necessarily so much about pain or consciousness as it is a connection to what that animal is supposed to be like. Whatever we think that means.
Now, I've grew up with dogs and had lots of friends with dogs, big dogs, little dogs, in-between dogs. All of those were wolves. We turned wolves into chihuahuas. I always find it crazy. We have a track record of manipulating living things to make them more convenient for us. That's what we do.
This is a more extreme case of it, but we've also made some breeds of dogs that have health problems because of the way we bred them. We are master manipulators, and that's not necessarily a good thing. This is another step toward it. And I would also remember, it's not just about medical research. It could also be about meat.
No, for sure. And it also could be about human body parts, right? I mean, we talked about xenotransplantation. If we could grow pigs that never felt pain but grew sterile hearts that humans could use as transplants, would that be a good thing? And if that's the case, why not just create humans with no feelings or brains that could be used to give you a good pitching arm, you know?
Like, where does your work go into figuring this out in terms of bioethics?
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of creating animals that cannot feel pain?
I don't know. I don't know how scientifically plausible it is, and I don't know how socially acceptable it would be, but I think we should be beginning to have a conversation about whether we think this would be a good thing or a bad thing. And that's a broad conversation. It's not just scientists or ethicists or the person in the street.
It's also people with diseases who hope that animal research will help lead to the cures for their disease. There are a lot of voices that will need to be heard. And it's better, I think, to try to get that all out on the table before before the headless mouse is out of the barn.
Yeah. And it is one of those things that you think, oh, no, that's terrible. It absolutely shouldn't have to do until it's your wife, your son, your daughter, and you realize that actually this person could be saved if we had a handless body sack. That then becomes a very real question. Really interesting to speak with you. Hank Greely is a professor of law and expert of bioethics at Stanford.
Thanks, Hank. Thank you. Future Proof Extra. With Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland. On Newstalk.