Why producing pigs with human organs demeans both our species — and theirs

The spare parts surgery industry — and it is quite literally an industry today — has taken a great step forward. ever since heart transplant surgery was developed in South Africa by Christiaan Barnard in 1967, the difficulty has always been: how do the doctors get their hands on enough ‘spare parts’?

In the cruel world of South Africa during the Apartheid regime, the answer was easy. Black lives were easily expendable and there were plenty of dead black people whose organs could be taken out by hospital surgeons with few questions asked.

White patients paid hefty fees to benefit from such procedures.

Today, China, which executes petty criminals in huge numbers, does a roaring trade selling their body parts to foreigners who need transplant operations.

Now, in response to what is seen as a body parts shortage, scientists in California have found a way of growing human organs inside pigs. No one can doubt their ingenuity or their technical skills. It is the morality of the exercise which we must question.

Indeed, this is surely one of the most nauseating developments of our time.

The procedure is possible thanks to the truly prodigious advance made by science in the field of genetics and in our ability to read the code of our own and the natural world’s genetic make-up.

Scientists at the University of California are making use of a gene- editing technique known as Crispr, which allows them to alter DNA with remarkable precision.

They cut out the specific section of a pig’s DNA responsible for making a pancreas from a tiny porcine embryo — and left a vacuum, a sort of hole, in its place.

They then injected the embryo with human stem cells — special cells that can develop into any tissue type. The plan is that these human cells will fill the gap in the embryo left by the removal of the pig’s pancreas gene — and develop into a human pancreas, which can be ‘harvested’ when the animal is fully grown.

So far, these hybrid or chimera embryos have been allowed to grow only to 28 days before being tested and destroyed, and it is too early to say whether the technique will work. But the exercise is fraught with danger.

experts worry that human stem cells — which, remember, can develop into any form of tissue — could migrate to the pig’s brain and start developing there, imparting the animal with human characteristics.

Indeed, so concerned is the National Institutes of health — the main agency for medical research in the U.S. — that last year it imposed a moratorium on providing funds for research using chimeric embryos.

Professor Pablo Ross, the scientist leading the California research programme, has found other funding, however, and insists that the injection of the stem cells has ‘a very low potential for a human brain to form’.

BUT any possibility of this happening is surely too awful to contemplate.

By failing categorically to dismiss it, Professor Ross is effectively admitting that injecting the very stuff of a human being into a pig could cause not merely a human pancreas to develop inside the animal, but a human brain, and with it a consciousness as well!

In a BBC Panorama programme on the subject this week, stem cell expert Robin Lovel- Badge, of London’s Francis Crick Institute, said: ‘ What we don’t know, and what they need to look at, is whether the human cells can also contribute substantially to other tissue, and particularly they are worried about the brain.’

This is not a horror film scenario, though it is certainly horrific. This is not science fiction. It is reality. These are actual scientists having a realistic conversation about the possibility of implanting cells in a pig and producing a cognisant human brain inside that animal.

Soviet scientists attempted, in an infinitely cruder fashion, to transplant the heads of dogs in the Fifties for the purposes of medical research. Dr Vladimir Demikhov created a grotesque two-headed dog that lived for a short while — an experiment which was well on the way to producing the threeheaded Cerberus of Greek legend.

Our ancestors fashioned legends and stories about hybrid creatures. We have borrowed their word Chimera to describe the Californian pig- human foetuses and, indeed, genetics uses the term for any of its artificial hybrids. When the Greeks dreamed up the Chimera, it was a monster — perhaps a lion, mingled with a snake and a goat.

Other hybrids of their mythology included the harpies, dreadful shrieking birds of prey with the heads and voices of women.

The centaurs were men with horses’ bodies, the satyrs were men with the legs of goats.

Almost all human mythologies, as far as we can tell, have invented hybrid monsters. Think of our own Cornish mermaids — fish-tailed beauties who lure sailors to their deaths in the briny.

Societies throughout history have fantasised about hybrids because they have regarded their creation as the ultimate horror. Our distinctness from the rest of the animal kingdom is one of the most basic of human concepts — which is why Charles Darwin caused such a brouhaha in 1859 by his implication, in the theory of evolution, that we were cousins of the apes.

Whatever you make of the sacred beliefs of Victorian science, the distinctness of human beings from their animal cousins is not really in doubt. I do not advance this as some kind of esoteric religious doctrine, but as a simple matter of fact.

Animals do not laugh or blush. They have no music, no art, no uselessly decorative crafts, as all humans (and even the dear old Neanderthals) have had.

They do not possess language in all its complexity. Attempts to show that animals have very basic versions of these human characteristics only serve to show how vastly different we are, even from animals that seem to have some little bit of a ‘human’ characteristic.

A dog may seem to smile, but it does not have anything like what we would call humour. The solemn elephants — very movingly — mourn their dead and arrange their bones in a ceremonial fashion, but this is miles away from the variety of human practices concerning the dead.

If we fail to keep a distinction between humankind and the animals, we demean ourselves and those animals.

In producing hybrids, we have entered The Island Of Dr Moreau. This was the dystopian fantasy of the young h. G. Wells in 1896 — subsequently made into at least two gripping science-fiction films.

AShIP- WReCkeD traveller, edward Prendick, finds himself ashore on an island where a mad scientist, Dr Moreau, has created human- animal hybrids. There, among other monsters, he comes across the swine-folk — people who seem human, but resemble pigs.

Wells was an anti-Christian and he wrote his novel partly in order to shock religious minds. But in so doing he could not hide his certain knowledge that creating these hybrids was a blasphemy, not so much against the God in whom he did not believe, but against humanity and against the animals.

The scientists admit they do not know where these latest experiments could lead.

It is a terrifying prospect that by injecting human stem cells into an animal, some appalling Moreaustyle hybrid could be created. A human consciousness trapped inside a pig’s body.

All kinds of horrible questions then arise. Cannibalism is the ultimate taboo. But just think of

eating the bacon of a pig with a human brain! Of course, thousands of patients owe their lives and good health to tissue taken from pigs — in the form of heart valves, for example. But these Californian experiments are of a completely different order.

We face some very stark ethical questions. Science is advancing so rapidly that we are capable of doing things which in previous generations were regarded as science fiction. The scientists and medics have, indeed, become like gods, toying with the stuff of life.

Do we really want this? If we place a value on human life, and the precious distinctiveness of being human, do we equate this with the fundamentally base idea that we want to continue for ever at whatever cost?

Would we happily prolong our own life by buying the heart, liver or pancreas of some executed criminal in China? Most of us would say ‘No’.

Would we be prepared to enter the amoral science-fiction world of California, where pigs and humans have begun to be indistinguishable? Again, we should surely say ‘NO!’

There are activities in the laboratory from which decent people recoil. Think of the horrors perpetrated by Nazi and Soviet medics in the past.

In California, they have strayed into this kind of murky territory. We should not follow them. We should urge our legislators to make sure that such gruesome experiments are never allowed in Britain.

They might reply they are attempting to save human lives. We should reply that a life is not always saved by being preserved.

There is such a thing as decency. The creation of pig- human chimeras is a horror from which all decent people should recoil.