Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (21 page)

However, these figures pale in comparison with the $300 billion we spend every year eating animal flesh. When Harold Herzog, the psychologist who specializes in human-animal relations, surveyed his own students, he discovered that nearly half of them agreed with the statement “Animals are just like people in all important ways.” But of these students who put animals and people on the same plane, 90 percent of them ate meat and 50 percent supported xenotransplantation. National surveys have turned up similar findings. In a Gallup poll, 71 percent of Americans said that animals deserved “some protection from harm and exploitation,” and an additional 25 percent said that animals should have the same rights as people. Yet 64 percent of all respondents accepted the practice of using animals in medical research. More astoundingly, of those who said that animals deserved the exact same rights as humans, 44 percent supported at least the occasional use of animals in such research.

These conflicting attitudes position most of us in a terrain that Herzog calls the “troubled middle” (a term he credits to the philosopher and bioethicist Strachan Donnelly). The troubled middle is a land of contradictions. It’s a place where it’s possible to truly love animals and still accept their occasional role as resources, objects, and tools. Those of us in the troubled middle believe that animals deserve to be treated well, but we don’t want to ban their use in medical research. We care enough to want livestock to be raised humanely, but don’t want to abandon meat-eating altogether. “Some argue that we are fence-sitters, moral wimps,” Herzog, himself a resident of the troubled middle, writes. “I believe, however, that the troubled middle makes perfect sense because moral quagmires are inevitable in a species with a huge brain and a big heart. They come with the territory.”

Even Charles Darwin was a resident of the troubled middle. Darwin hated animal cruelty, but famously refused to condemn invasive animal research. “I know that physiology cannot possibly progress except by means of experiments on living animals,” he wrote, “and I feel the deepest conviction that he who retards the progress of physiology commits a crime against mankind.”

For the vast majority of us who reside in the troubled middle, there are no easy answers to the ethical dilemmas that biotechnology can pose. As biotechnology moves forward, we’ll have to carefully evaluate each application on its own terms, trying to balance what’s in the best interests of an individual animal with what’s good for its species as a whole, for humanity, and for the world that we all share. Even if we decide that there are instances in which animal discomfort is justified, we should take this discomfort seriously. We do that by making sure animals’ pain is controlled—by anesthetizing them, for instance, before performing surgical procedures—by meeting their physical and psychological needs while they’re living in laboratories, and by keeping the numbers of experimental animals as low as possible.

Perhaps the most valuable thing our expanding scientific capabilities will do is spark a real dialogue about our interactions with the other living beings that populate this planet. “We’ve always had strong moral responsibility, or we should have had, to other species,” says Richard Twine, the British sociologist. “We just haven’t exercised that very well.” Biotechnology provides an opening for reconsidering our obligations to animals. How can we seize this moment to rethink our relationships with other species and recommit to their well-being?

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For starters, the techniques of today and tomorrow could help us reverse the pain and suffering we’ve inflicted upon the animal kingdom. For an example, we need look no farther than the burgeoning field of canine genetics. Over the generations, we have bred and inbred our canine companions to the point of disease and deformity. One analysis of fifty popular dog breeds turned up a total of 396 inherited diseases affecting the canines; each breed included in the analysis had been linked to at least four, and as many as seventy-seven, different hereditary afflictions. Dalmatians are prone to deafness, Dobermans suffer from narcolepsy (the image of a fierce canine suddenly nodding off would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic), and Labrador retrievers are renowned for their terrible hips. In some cases, these disorders are nasty side effects of a small gene pool, of generations of breeding related dogs or relying on just a few popular sires. In others, they’re due to intentional selection for the exaggerated physical traits prized by kennel clubs and dog show judges.
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Thanks to modern genetics and genomics, we’re developing the tools to undo the damage we’ve done and conquer many canine ailments. As of 2012, commercial labs in North America, Europe, and Australia were offering tests for eighty genetic mutations linked to doggy diseases. For less than a hundred dollars, for example, VetGen can tell you whether your beagle has genetic variants that cause a bleeding disorder or your Boston terrier has a mutation linked to early onset cataracts, vital information that could help you secure the right medical care for your pooch. Breeders have also started using DNA testing results to create healthier dogs in the first place, carefully arranging matings that reduce the number of puppies prone to serious illnesses. Many canine diseases are inherited in a recessive pattern, meaning that a dog has to have two copies of a disease-causing mutation in order to develop the disorder. In these cases, dogs with a single copy of the mutation are known as carriers—they’re healthy, but they can pass the bad gene on to their puppies. When two carriers mate, there’s a chance that some of the puppies will inherit the unhealthy variant from both parents and will, in turn, get sick. Genetic testing can reveal which dogs are free of recessive, disease-causing mutations and can thus be bred without restriction. The carriers can breed too, as long as they mate with non-carriers. In this way, we can reduce the number of dogs that develop serious ailments while allowing the maximum number of pooches to contribute their genes to future generations. As it happens, genetic testing, followed by thoughtful breeding, has already reduced the number of English springer spaniels carrying a gene for a metabolic disease and the prevalence of progressive blindness among Irish setters and corgis.

Identifying the genes responsible for disease also opens up new possibilities for treatment, including gene therapy, in which vets give their canine patients a “healthy” version of whatever gene has gone haywire. Gene therapy experiments have been remarkably successful in dogs, with one project even giving blind dogs the gift of sight. These dogs had all been blind since birth, due to a mutation in a gene known as RPE65, which normally codes for a protein crucial to vision. In 2001, Gustavo Aguirre, a veterinary ophthalmologist and geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues engineered a virus that contained a healthy form of RPE65. They injected the virus into the eyes of their blind canine patients. The viruses delivered the new RPE65 gene into the dogs’ cells, which then started churning out a fully functional version of the critical protein—for the first time in these animals’ lives. Within two weeks, the dogs’ vision began to improve; within four months, they were able to successfully navigate a laboratory obstacle course. And the fix was permanent; the first canine patient lived for eleven years after the gene therapy, able to see until its dying day. (For blind animals—and humans—that aren’t good candidates for gene therapy, scientists are working on another option: bionic eyes, or retinal prostheses. The approach involves implanting electrodes in the eye that stimulate the retinal cells.)

Genetic technology isn’t just for diseases that have an obvious heritable component. In 2011, Helen Sang, a developmental biologist at the Roslin Institute, and Laurence Tiley, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, engineered transgenic chickens that are incapable of spreading avian influenza to the other members of their feathered flocks. (Alas, the modified chickens can still contract the flu themselves—they simply don’t transmit the normally contagious illness to other birds.) The modification could save the lives of countless chickens and reduce the threat to human health, representing the ultimate win-win. In fact, Duane Kraemer, the scientist who helped clone several species, thinks that biotechnology has so much potential to improve the health of farmed animals—and to safeguard the health of humans along the way—that “cloned” and “genetically engineered” may one day acquire the same cachet as “organic” or “free range.” “What I would like to see happen,” he says, “is for the products and the strains of animals that are developed—for people to become so proud of those that they’ll advertise: ‘These are cloned and genetically engineered products! And they’re special!’ I think someday that will happen, and that’s when the public will of course be much more accepting.”

Of course, even endeavors that seem as straightforward as making disease-resistant animals can be fraught with ethical complexity. In some situations—such as when we’re dealing with farm animals—our motivations may not be entirely altruistic. “You have to bear in mind the economic context of their lives,” Twine says. “Clearly, the main motivation for making animals disease-resistant is to maximize profitability of their existence as commodities. There could be some benefit in terms of an animal perhaps having less degrees of suffering, but of course they don’t escape that category of commodified farmed animal. They still have to face an early death in the slaughterhouse.” Furthermore, operators of factory farms may view the creation of healthier and hardier animals as an excuse to cram livestock into crowded pens, let them live in unhygienic conditions, and otherwise treat them poorly.

Or consider a more extreme prospect, laid out in a 2010
New York Times
editorial headlined
NOT GRASS-FED, BUT AT LEAST PAIN-FREE
. In it, Adam Shriver, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in philosophy and neuroscience, outlined a remarkable bit of research. Scientists had discovered, he wrote, how to genetically engineer mice that were missing enzymes critical to the brain’s pain-processing system. That made the rodents unable to feel pain, as though they were hooked up to a permanent morphine drip. Shriver set forth a radical proposal: Given the animal suffering inherent in the meat industry, and the fact that humans aren’t likely to abandon their carnivorous ways anytime soon, we should start genetically engineering livestock that feel less pain. “If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether,” he wrote, “the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them.” Every logical bone in my body agrees with Shriver, yet the emotional part of me resists. Though the ostensible goal of engineering pain-free animals is to minimize other species’ discomfort, what it’s really doing is alleviating our own. If we think these creatures aren’t capable of feeling much pain, will that give us license to alter and exploit them in even more profound ways?

These are the discussions we’ll need to have if we have any hope of using our new technologies responsibly. Do we want to make genetically engineered, disease-resistant livestock so that we can get away with substandard living conditions and inadequate medical care, while maximizing profits on factory farms? Or do we want to use these creatures as an opportunity to launch a broader campaign to improve the lives of farm animals? In some ways, our own unease with these technologies is productive—it means we will have to keep evaluating and reevaluating their consequences for animals.

The important thing is that we do not throw the genetically modified baby out with the bathwater. We spend so much time discussing the ethics of using our emerging scientific capabilities that we sometimes forget that
not
using them has ethical implications of its own. How many animals (and humans) will suffer if we turn our backs on breakthroughs like a genetically engineered chicken incapable of spreading the flu? Biotechnology is not the only solution to what ails animals, but it’s a weapon we now have in our arsenal, one set of strategies for boosting animal health and welfare. If we reject it out of hand, we lose the good along with the bad.

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If we really want to boost animal welfare, perhaps we should be embracing technology, not running from it. That’s what George Dvorsky, a Canadian bioethicist and futurist, believes. Dvorsky, who heads up the Rights of Non-human Persons program at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, says we owe animals far more than merely leaving them alone. Instead, he thinks we have a responsibility to use all the scientific techniques at our disposal to improve their lives. As a society, he says, we are increasingly toying with the prospect of
human
enhancement, with our growing ability to use some combination of pharmacology, genetics, and electronics to upgrade our bodies and brains. In Dvorsky’s mind, if we’re going to build a better version of our own species, animals should get the benefit of the same technologies.

One option: enhancing animals’ sensory skills. For instance, while dogs have a great sense of smell, their vision isn’t quite so spectacular. “Their horizon line is extremely low,” Dvorsky says. “They don’t see in the broad spectrum of colors that we do.” The right genetic manipulation or brain chip might change that. Dvorsky also imagines making dramatic upgrades to animal cognition, altering the genome of a bonobo in ways that supercharge its memory, for instance, or boost its capacity for using complex forms of language. “I realize how absolutely extreme that sounds,” he admits. “It’s really, really out there. But I’m doing my duty as a thinking person. Just because we lucked out in the genetic lottery doesn’t mean that we don’t have a moral responsibility and obligation to the other animals of the planet.”

Dvorsky’s dream of memory enhancement is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Scientists have already engineered dozens of strains of “smart mice,” which learn faster and retain more than their non-modified counterparts. Another team of researchers managed to improve rats’ performance on a memory test by using implanted electrodes to stimulate neurons in the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in memory formation and storage.