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Since 1993, a working group of the Society, Religion and
Technology Project (SRT) of the Church of Scotland has been
examining ethical issues of genetic engineering. This
inter-disciplinary group of experts includes Roslin scientist Dr
Ian Wilmut, head of the team who cloned Dolly. The following
article by the Director of the SRT Project reflects on some of
the ethical issues, straight from the sheep's mouth.
Cloning had already been done to a limited degree by splitting embryos, mostly in cattle, and raised ethical and welfare concerns in the process. But the Roslin work opens up the prospect of a far wider range of applications from adult animal cells. At the moment, there are only a few early results in sheep, and rather little is understood of how it has happened. Different farm animal species differ somewhat in their embryology. Now the technique has been extended to cattle and also mice, suggesting that it could be general in mammals. It remains to be seen to what extent the method would work in different animals without adverse effects. But assuming it could be applied more widely, what are the potential applications in animals?
Since 1986, Roslin have been genetically modifying sheep to produce proteins of therapeutic value in their milk. Successful as this has been so far, the present methods are very hit and miss, using perhaps 100 live animals to get just one right one. The original aim of Dr Wilmut's nuclear transfer work was to find more precise methods by genetically modification, via a cell culture, if a way could be found to grow live animals from the modified cells. Their announcement in July 1997 of the transgenic cloned sheep Polly marked the first evidence of this principle. The fact it was a clone was, in a way, a side-effect. PPL Therapeutics, the Edinburgh firm behind the research, say they might clone 5-10 animals like this from a single genetically modified cell line, but then breed them naturally, as "founders" of a set of lines of genetically modified animals. There would be no advantage in cloning beyond the first point.
But these medical applications on farm animals tend to be small scale affairs. The amount of animals and the amount of milk is very small compared with conventional meat or bulk milk production. Imagine you are a commercial breeder of cows or pigs, and over many generations you have bred some fine and valuable beasts with highly desirable characteristics. One possible application of Roslin's work could be to clone such animals from the cells of one of them, and sell the cloned animals to "finishers" - those farmers who simply feed up the animals for slaughter, rather than breed them to produce more stock. Again, the breeder might want to clone a series of promising animals in a breeding programme, in order to test how the same "genotype" responded to different environmental changes.
The extension of cloning to mice opens up potentially larege area of research, because mice are so much easier to use, to breed and their genetics and metabolism are better understood. The implications are discussed briefly in our article Cloned Mice - Is the sky now the limit for cloning?
The extension of cloning to mice means that many more anials are likely to be used in research at a time when the trend is to reduce animal use. There is a difficult tension here.
One assumption is that the animal kingdom is there for us to use in almost any way scientists dream up or commercial companies see a market, short of inflicting gratuitous pain. The fact that we kill animals to eat them is taken to justify more or less any other use, especially if we can cite human medicine or job creation as goals. On this view, only if they are warm and furry, or primates, do we start to have some qualms, and even then, very selectively.
Many people would disagree. Nature is not ours to do exactly what we like with. On a Christian understanding, all creation owes its existence ultimately to God. This does not mean that we cannot use animals, but it does mean that humans have a duty of care and respect towards them, as creatures which exist firstly for God, and only secondarily may be used by us. Such use must be responsible and with a dignity due to another of God's creatures, and we should hold back from some uses. Is cloning then the point to say "no"?
The suggestion that cloning is justified because we already intervene so much in animals can be an excuse for looking properly at the case in point. It also begs the question about what we are already doing. There are a number of techniques in regular use on farm animals which are ethically borderline, which illustrates a general problem. Both biotechnology and industrial production methods in agriculture carry over certain assumptions from the sphere of chemistry or engineering which, though scientifically applicable to animals, may not always be morally applicable to them. We see this in the animal welfare problems which conventional selective breeding has caused in some cases, such as poultry, from applying production logic too far.
Against that context, if anything, what is called for is greater restraint. Why would we want to clone meat producing animals, anyway? Most of the suggested applications relate to production improvements rather than clear human or animal benefits. To create genetic replica animals routinely, for the sake of production convenience for the supermarket would be to apply a model derived from factory mass production too far into the realm of living creatures. In the limit, to manipulate animals to be born, grow and reach maturity for sale and slaughter at exactly the time we want them, to suit production schedules suggests one step too far in turning animals into mere commodities.
SRT Comment on Farm Animal Welfare Council Report "The Implications of Cloning for the Welfare of Farmed Livestock" is at Cloning, Ethics and Animal Welfare
Back to start of the Ethics of Cloning Animals
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This page has been produced by the Society Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland. For more about our work on other issues, see our Other SRT Project pages, our SRT Publications List, or our On-line SRT Newsletter.
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