Shucking Oysters: Made to Order
By Alex Allen
While we celebrate the ever-growing world of technological innovation, we also seem to be pushed into even more uncharted territory – a mixed bag of progress and peril. Think Artificial Intelligence, a relatively new advancement that has raised significant ethical, security, and social challenges. The laws are not keeping up and the need for responsible innovation has never been more critical.
We are all familiar with news stories of people waiting for an organ transplant. Estimates are that over 123,000 people in the US are in need of a transplant and about 21 people die each day waiting for one.
The art and science of organ transplants is fairly routine. It’s getting the organs from the human donors that’s fraught with difficulties – moral, practical, and legal. And the tremendous demand for human body parts have moved from the trusted and regulated to the underground and criminal.
So given this environment, imagine a world where organ shortages are a thing of the past, where drug testing no longer relies on cruel practices against animals, and medical treatments are decided based on your DNA. This is the bold promise of “bodyoids” which make organ farms sound positively quaint.
The concept was introduced by three Stanford University scientists in a recent report in the MIT Technology Review. Bodyoids are envisioned as physiologically identical to normal human bodies but are engineered to lack consciousness or the ability to feel pain. The scientists claim these organ farmettes to be an ethical solution to our current practices. Just the concept of bodyoids raises profound moral questions.
While the supposed lack of consciousness answers the concerns about sentience and the exploitation of living organisms, the idea of creating human-like bodies purely for medical use is obviously a controversial one. “Many will find the concept grotesque or appalling. And for good reason,” the authors wrote. But they argue that the immense medical benefits will outweigh the ethical concerns.
They make it sound so practical and creepy at the same time. These scientists hope to grow the fetuses entirely outside a body in artificial uteruses, and use “genetic techniques” to stunt brain production and ensure that the body lacks sentience. Once the bodyoids are grown, they “could address many ethical problems in modern medicine, offering ways to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering.” Of course, with an idea that sounds like a sci-fi movie (or more like a sci-fi horror movie), many questions remain – particularly if the bodyoids can survive without a functioning brain, or if stem cells can even create such structures.
According to the scientists, the spare parts bodies offer “an ethical alternative to the way we currently use nonhuman animals for research and food, providing meat or other products with no animal suffering or awareness.” They point out how medical researchers have primarily relied on animals for testing, which isn’t always directly transferable to human treatments. Plus, the testing as most know, potentially tortures the creatures as they are sentient and feel pain. And further, endless drugs are constantly being tested, but very few of them get cleared for safe use on people.
With no surprise, the authors share the potential commodification benefits: “Governments, companies, and private foundations should start thinking about bodyoids as a possible path for investment. There is no need to start with humans – we can begin exploring the feasibility of this approach with rodents or other research animals.”
Nick Kampouris warns about the “risk of normalizing treating human biological material as a commodity, leading to a slippery slope where the lines between research, therapy and the free market become dangerously blurred.” I would go further and say that the sheer psychological aspect of living in a world where human-like entities are being grown for spare parts raises profound questions about our understanding (and appreciation) of life itself. Kampouris added that “the potential for misuse, even with strict regulations, will always be real too, complicating an already-difficult situation even more.”
The science is not new. In the past year, teams at NYU Langone Health and the University of Alabama have been transplanting single-gene-edited pig kidneys into “human recipients who had undergone brain death but had some bodily systems artificially maintained for a short while.” Last year in March, a man became the first living person to receive a modified pig kidney, one with 69 gene edits made by a company called eGenesis. The individual, who was already seriously ill before surgery, passed away a few months later. Two more genetically modified kidney xenotransplants have been performed: Langone Health transplanted a pig kidney into a woman, who is still doing well three months after. And in February, Tim Andrews, a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital, also received a pig kidney made by eGenesis. Now, a group of doctors and scientists in China report they have done the same with a pig liver.
But are we ready for bodyoids? Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. Even if it looks possible, the authors advise, that “determining whether we should make bodyoids, nonhuman or human, will require considerable thought, discussion, and debate.” Those decisions will, according to the scientists, “ultimately, be made by societies and governments.” What a scary thought, considering how our society and government have regulated advancements in AI. Which leads us to ask: Who should be responsible for the choice of research topics? Who is accountable for the misuse of scientific knowledge?
