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Society, Religion and Technology Project Church of Scotland Looking at the ethics of technology for a New Millennium

Dr Bruce is Director of the Society Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland, the scientist responsible for assessing ethical issues in technology for the Scotland's national church. He chaired a 5 year expert working group study in Edinburgh on the ethics of genetic engineering in animals and plants, which produced the acclaimed book "Engineering Genesis", with case studies which examined in depth the ethics of both xenotransplantation and animal cloning. The working group included Ian Wilmut, the scientist who led the Roslin cloning team. Dr Bruce is an expert on the ethics of cloning and genetic engineering and a spokesman for a European church study group.

See also SRT's Cloning Pages, covering Cloning in Humans, Animals and for Therapeutic Purposes
See SRT's fuller article on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation

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The cloning of 5 piglets by PPL Therapeutics focuses the controversial issue of xenotransplantation.

In 1995 our Church of Scotland working group made submissions to Government and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics which expressed a cautious approval of using transgenic animal organs in humans, but with important caveats. While we did not object in principle to the notion of switching organs from animals to humans or the genetic modification of animals, the "yuk factor" which many people feel cannot be dismissed as mere emotion or unfamiliarity. It reveals deep ethical issues. The fact that we already eat pigs (some use this as a moral argument to justify xenotransplantation) is irrelevant. Eating a pig is at least doing no more than happens in nature; switching organs is not!

Xenotransplantation 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 the first step, but it needs a lot more research to make see if the hopes of the scientists turns into a viable therapy. If things do not go well, then there would eventually come the point when repeated pig research could not be justified.

There are also animal welfare considerations. Sheep and cattle cloning has led to sufficient welfare problems for a Ministry of Agriculture committee to call for a moratorium on commercial animal cloning. Fortunately PPL's cloned pigs have not shown the same problems, 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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This page was set up on 14 March 2000