From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sun May 12 2002 - 12:08:58 MDT
Jeremy Rifkin has a new anti-biotech effort going, described in today's
Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-051202patent.story.
He and Dr. Stuart Newman of New York Medical College are attempting
to patent a "humouse", a human-mouse hybrid embryo. Their point is to
raise public alarm over some of the more disturbing potentials of biotech.
Patent experts say the humouse case could be important for three
reasons.
First, no court has ruled on whether human embryos can be patented,
or whether a mix of human and animal material remains, in a legal
sense, human. This lack of legal clarity is becoming more important
as scientists push to understand embryos and the medically promising
stem cells that grow inside them.
A Massachusetts company, Advanced Cell Technology Inc., is trying to
produce and patent human stem cells made by merging human DNA with
cow eggs, creating a human-cow embryo. A Chinese scientist is working
with human-rabbit combinations. Cow and rabbit eggs are far cheaper
than human eggs, and producing stem cells with them could prove more
inexpensive and efficient.
Second, the patent office has allowed thousands of claims on genes,
cells and animals over the last two decades. By raising the question
of what can be patented, Newman and Rifkin hope to undermine some of
those patents.
Finally, the patent dispute is part of a political struggle to define
the legal and moral status of the human embryo. President Bush has
barred federal funding for experiments that destroy embryos for their
stem cells, and he has devoted two speeches to arguing that embryo
destruction is unethical in research. Within weeks, the Senate is
expected to vote on whether it should be legal to create human embryos
through cloning.
Apparently the idea of the humouse would be to create an embryo which
had a mixture of human and mouse cells scattered throughout, which would
then theoretically work cooperatively to create a living organism with
some properties of each. A sheep-goat hybrid was created in this way
in the 1980s, although obviously sheep and goats are much more similar
than humans and mice.
Most of the article is about the legal issues regarding patenting embryos
and genes. For now the humouse patent is being denied on the basis of
the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned slavery! Many
legal experts question this, since even an individual who was born with
a patented genome would not be a slave.
Strangely, the article does not discuss the more fundamental issues
much. Would a human-mouse hybrid be viable? What would it look like?
The idea of an organism halfway between a human and a mouse is shocking
and appalling to me. Would it be conscious? Intelligent? Capable of
speech or some other form of communication? Should it have human rights?
It seems to me that from our Extropian perspective, such organisms
are the opposite of the direction that we want to go. Even if viable,
they would be unlikely to be successful. Human intelligence is barely
adequate as it is. Diluting it with animal genes is likely to create
beings who lack the human capacity for self-improvement which is so
crucial to Extropian philosophy.
So on this issue, I think we need to join Rifkin and oppose the creation
of this type of organism. It would be, literally, a monster that was
likely to suffer a terrible sort of half-life. Of course, this view
will be shared by practically everyone, which is perhaps why the article
didn't dwell on such an obvious ethical question.
Hal
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