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Cautious Welcome for Transgenic Cloned Pigs but Xenotransplantation raises Ethical Doubts
Dr Donald Bruce, Society Religion & Technology Project, Church of Scotland
Tel. 0131-240 2250, Fax 0131-240 2239, Email: srtp@srtp.org.uk http://www.srtp.org.uk
or Church of Scotland Press Office 0131- 240 2243
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The cloning of 5 transgenic piglets by PPL Therapeutics focuses the controversial issue of xenotransplantation. At the forthcoming General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in May, a report on GM animals by the Society Religion & Technology Project will recommend a cautious approval of research into using transgenic animal organs in humans, but with important caveats. While the report does not object in principle to switching organs from animals to humans or the genetic modification of animals, it raises some deep ethical issues.
The "yuk factor" which many people feel cannot be dismissed as mere emotion or unfamiliarity. The fact that we already eat pigs already is not a sufficient moral argument. Eating a pig is at least doing no more than happens in nature. Switching organs across species represents a completely different way of using animals from anything humans have done before. To remove a live organ from an animal is a very serious intervention in an animal, especially for pigs, which are highly intelligent animals for whom many humans have a special fondness and with which we have some important physiological similarities. Not everything we can do to animals technically should be done ethically. Even in the cause of medical research, there are lines to be drawn. Xenotransplantation would be justified only if the efficacy in quality and length of life was so great that it justified what would otherwise be an unacceptable intervention in one of God's creatures with whom we share the planet. And here lies the rub.
Today, no one knows if all the rejection mechanisms can be overcome sufficiently to make the medical case strong enough. To do so requires the multiple genetic engineering of an large animal which is uncharted scientific territory - difficult to do even in plants, thus far. We therefore caution against jumping to the conclusion that the science will inevitably work well enough - it may, it may not. It is worthwhile attempting the research, as PPL are doing. Normal genetic engineering so far only adds genes. The pig cloning is a step towards attempting something not otherwise possible, which is to knock out a gene in the pig which would trigger a rejection mechanism if transplanted into the human body. This gene deletion can be done in cells but there is normally no way to "grow" a pig from the genetically altered cells. Nuclear transfer cloning, however, gives a method to do that. Today's announcement is another step, but a lot more research would be needed before any hope of a viable therapy. And if things do not go well, then there would eventually come the point when repeated pig research could not be justified.
So far PPL's cloned pigs have not shown the same animal welfare problems which have beset sheep and cattle cloning, but they will need to be monitored closely. While so much is not understood about animal cloning, it underlines the folly of attempting reproductive human cloning, quite a part from the overwhelming ethical objections.
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Dr Bruce is Director of the Society Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland, assessing ethical issues in technology for Scotland's national church. He chaired an expert working group on the ethics of genetic engineering in animals and plants, which produced the acclaimed book "Engineering Genesis", which examined the ethics of both xenotransplantation and animal cloning.
For more, see our extensive pages on Cloning, and also our Discussion Paper on Xenotransplantion.]
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