This book provides a sober and systematic treatment of the philosophical and political issues surrounding so-called interspecies research, or ISR, which ranges from, say, the implantation of human stem cells in a mouse embryo to the transplantation of organs from a genetically modified pig into a human body. In the former case, the mouse is used as a breeding ground for human organs; in the latter, the pig is actually bred to provide those organs. Andrea L. Bonnicksen observes at the outset that the former—so-called early ISR—appears to raise more ethical worries than the latter because it involves converting the mouse into a “chimera,” that is, a creature bearing the cells of two species. In any case, ISR poses a variety of problems because of its straightforwardly instrumental treatment of living matter, all of which is cultivated to promote human welfare. The “means” produced in service of this end, sometimes intentionally but often as by-products, are the chimeras and hybrids of the book's title. (Unlike chimeras, “hybrids” literally constitute “interspecies,” as produced by the successful joining of egg and sperm from different species.)
Once we treat these transgenic entities as ends in their own right—and not mere means—the troubles begin. Moreover, these troubles are difficult to resolve because chimeras and hybrids are unstable both conceptually and materially: Their identities not only violate conventional species boundaries; even granting a liberal sense of species identity, these creatures are unlikely ever to become self-sustaining organisms. In short, ISR forces us to countenance the deliberate production of living matter stripped of what the molecular biologist Jacques Monod called “teleonomy,” the capacity for purposefulness. Here, the Italian postmodern theorist Giorgio Agamben makes a relevant distinction between bios and zoe—the organism as, so to speak, subject and as subjected; in specifically human terms, “People” as a self-conscious political unit and “people” as a miscellany of individuals studied by population geneticists. For Agamben, the fundamental problem of politics is how to enforce the distinction, with the meaning of human dignity hanging in the balance. However, he understands the problem in classical terms as concerned with how otherwise normal people pass from the status of bios to zoe in extreme political situations, ranging from slavery to ethnic cleansing. He overlooks the prospect presented by ISR—namely, that life forms might be bred so as never to be capable of enjoying the status of bios.
In this respect, ISR belongs in the center of political deliberation, though for now it remains a relatively understudied, and certainly undertheorized, area of policymaking. Bonnicksen's book should substantially alter this impression—but more by its careful analysis of the entanglement of extant ISR in more mainstream policy concerns than by its case for the profundity of the normative issues that ISR raises. Bonnicksen, while knowledgeable of philosophy, discusses it only on a need-to-know basis vis-à-vis specific policy matters, which are drawn mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom, with occasional glances at the rest of the European Union, Canada, and Australia. Nevertheless, her philosophical instincts are quite sharp, as she presumes that all is not right in anti-ISR arguments that appeal to “human dignity” in the context of complaining that human cells implanted in another organism would be unable to develop fully their human capacities. Given our general inability to distinguish species on strictly genetic terms, such an objection seems a bit presumptuous. Moreover, taken too literally, the objection would cast doubt on the probity of cell and organ transplants between humans, which arguably enhances one individual's dignity at the expense of another's.
The main lesson that Bonnicksen seems to draw from a literature that still largely consists of preemptive moral censure of prospective forms of ISR is that ethics needs more instruction from science than vice versa. She never puts the point quite so boldly, but she repeatedly highlights the relatively primitive, if not outright prejudicial, bases offered for halting ISR. A reliable source of examples here is George W. Bush's bioethics tsar, Leon Kass, a physician by trade but a natural law theorist in the Aristotelian mould by vocation. He has consistently opposed ISR on the grounds of the “deep wisdom” reflected in our instinctive repugnance of chimeras and hybrids—what is often called the “yuck factor.” In response, Bonnicksen sides with transhumanist ethicists, such as Oxford's Julian Savulescu, who cast suspicion on the very instinctiveness of our repugnance, as that suggests a response harking back to an earlier evolutionary era—and hence in need of being unlearned. Even seemingly more sophisticated moral critiques of ISR, which accept its possible health benefits but reject an open-ended exploratory approach to transgenic organisms, increasingly need to contend with the movement toward “systems” or “living” architecture, in which organisms are embedded—and in some cases engineered—to complement the life cycle of ordinary construction materials, so as to provide for more ecologically integrated buildings capable of literally repairing themselves with minimal human intervention.
To put the arguments concerning ISR in broader perspective, it is worth recalling that animals (and plants) have always been used for experimental purposes in science, typically in ways that require a radical transformation of their default state of being. However, as the philosopher of science Rom Harré has recently stressed (in Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat, 2009), such transformation may occur in one of two spirits: The animals may be treated either as instruments, in which case their bodies are simply means to detect, measure, or produce something else, or as models, in which case their bodies are studied in abstract conditions that enable the isolation of their own natural-occurring but normally hidden processes. The difference is epistemologically substantial. For example, much of Charles Darwin's empirical basis for evolution came in a shift of perspective on, say, pigeon breeding from an instrument used for specific purposes to a model of the more general process of natural selection.
Harré interestingly opines that the history of science has been marked by so much apparent mistreatment of animals because, until quite recently, it was acceptable (though not unanimously approved) for scientists to regard animals as little more than sentient machines for human use and study. This was a theological legacy of the scientific revolution, which, by tending toward a literal understanding of our having been created “in the image and likeness of God,” effectively licensed the appropriation of nature as a laboratory for humans to acquire a better understanding of God's plan. ISR may be seen as Darwin's revenge on this entire line of thought, as we now come to treat our own bodies as the scientific revolution taught us to treat those of animals. To be sure, from ancient times, there have been thinkers who defended the integrity of animal bodies against human wants and needs. But once Darwin's fully naturalized conception of species removed the ontological divide between humans and other animals, the human body—especially in its embryonic and antenatal stages (Bonnicksen's “early ISR”)—became the main battleground.
Thus, in their defense of human dignity, the so-called pro-life lobby led by Leon Kass nowadays adopts arguments used by animal lovers in the past, just as scientists have come to treat human embryos and fetuses as factories, the other recognizable way of treating animals in the past. In the end, our “humanity” may simply not lie in the possession of a determinate physical form or genetic makeup, in the improvement of the godlike capacity to manufacture life itself, the Pandora's box that ISR is slowly but steadily opening.
If this book fails to have the popular and even academic impact that it deserves, it will be due to its mechanical chapter structure and boring style. However, these features are reminiscent of the manner in which policy white papers are written, and so—no doubt helped by the location of the publisher—the message is likely to be heard in Washington as a calm voice amid the hyperbole surrounding interspecies research.
