Drawing the Line at Not-Fully-Human: What We Already Know

Jason Scott Robert and Françoise Baylis (2003) correctly identify the widely publicized image of a mouse with a human ear growing on its back as one of the most symbolically-charged recent depictions of biomedical experimentation and its challenge to the category "human."

Such images are both disturbing and fascinating. They vividly capture the mixed emotions surrounding the new genetics, including hope for improved human health, pride in technological achievement, and fear for future human integrity. Alongside the mediagenic ear-mouse, the glowing rabbits, and the transgenic primates are nonvisibly "unnatural" animals such as Dolly the celebrity clone, who was seen to be miraculous, ironically because she was a "perfectly ordinary" sheep.

Increasingly, the mix-and-match ethos of postgenomic science is producing novel organisms with hybridities only recently presumed to be "biologically impossible"—including new human-animal mixtures such as sheep with human genes. For Robert and Baylis,

the engineering of creatures that are part human and part nonhuman animal is objectionable because the existence of such beings would introduce inexorable moral confusion in our existing relationships with nonhuman animals and in our future relationships with part-human hybrids and chimeras.

Writing from a background of anthropology rather than philosophy or bioethics, what strikes me as helpful about this formulation is the connection between the threat of moral confusion and its effect on existing and future relationships.

This connection is central to anthropological work on the new genetics, which is now beginning to comprise something of a subfield in its own right (Franklin 2003). The first major ethnographic study of new reproductive and genetic technologies, conducted in Britain in the early-1990s, provided considerable data demonstrating a widely-shared desire for clear limits to their use (Edwards et al. 1993, 1999). This point has been further elaborated both by Strathern (1992a; 1992b) and by Edwards (2000), who emphasize relationality, and, in particular, understandings of kinship, as key to definitions of both obligations and limits in relation to innovative new technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), genetic testing, or cloning (Edwards and Strathern 2000).

My own ethnographic research on IVF (Franklin 1997) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) (Franklin 2003) similarly confirms that definitions of genealogy, incest, kin ties, consanguinity, affinity, inheritance, and conjugality provide the primary frame of reference for the strong sense of the need for clear limits to the use of new technologies such as the "designer baby" technique. Both clinicians and patients will reason through a particular possibility, such as donor gametes, in terms of its potential effects on other people, based largely on experiences of existing relationships.

Paradoxically, this research has consistently also found that the reverse is true, that a strong sense of relationality is one of the strongest sources of the desire not to limit biomedical experimentation, in particular, for example, when parents seek treatment for a child suffering from a life-threatening disease. Under such circumstances many otherwise "abominable" or "repugnant" experimental options might not only come to appear acceptable or necessary but are desperately sought after. Here, the moral imperative might be precisely to resist or deny a sense of fear or repugnance, in order to do everything possible and leave no stone unturned.

A second anthropological truism confirmed by these, and other, ethnographic studies (see esp. Rapp 1999; Finkler 2000), is that everyone knows there are a range of points of view on the legitimacy, morality, and desirability of new technologies such as genetic testing. A particularly pertinent example for the purpose of this commentary is human embryonic stem cell manufacture (Franklin 2001). At present, some countries, such as Singapore and Britain, have enthusiastically endorsed human embryonic stem cell experimentation, publicly funding its development and linking it to future national health strategies for widespread diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's, and cancer. In other countries, such as the United States and Germany, the strength of public opinion...