Sonny Deriso, Doug Hertz, Paul Wolpe, AJ Robinson and Larry Klamon
PAUL ROOT WOLPE, PHD
DIRECTOR
ASA GRIGGS CANDLER PROFESSOR OF BIOETHICS
RAYMOND F. SCHINAZI DISTINGUISHED RESEARCH CHAIR IN JEWISH BIOETHICS
PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENTS OF MEDICINE, PEDIATRICS, AND SOCIOLOGY
"Re-Creation: The Biotechnological Restructuring of Life"
The world is changing, and most people do not recognize just how profoundly it is changing. We are fundamentally restructuring and rebuilding our natural, by manipulating, genetically engineering, and even creating from scratch the bodies of animals, insects, and microorganisms. Everyone knows that we have cloned many different animals now, including the pig, horse, dog, cat, cow, sheep, mice, rams, and so on.
Fewer realize that we have used biology to induce new types of crossbreeds:
The “zorse”, a zebra/horse Hybrid The ‘liger’ a lion/tiger hybrid (world’s biggest cat)
However, we are also creating new kinds of animals, not just combinations of existing ones. For example, we are genetically engineering animals that glow in the dark, engineering embryos with genes extracted from deep-sea jellyfish and coral. Glow in the dark animals now include mice, rabbits, even monkeys. Some real pictures:
Glowing pigs Glowing cats even Glowing monkeys
You can buy glowfish in your local pet store, genetically engineered zebra fish that naturally only come in silver and black but now, as you can see above, come in a variety of colors.
It does not stop at genetics alone. We are also combining animals with technology. We have created insects that have computer chips and wires engineered into their bodies. We have used remote control to turn insects into robots:
An Asian cockroach from Tokyo University that has electrodes wired into its ganglia and is controlled by a joystick that makes it go forward and backward.
Or, more ominously perhaps, creations like the beetlebot, with information technology incoporated into its physiology:
The beetlebot and other such insects are being created by DARPA, the defense department’s research agency, and the intelleigence and military uses are being explored.
In addition, we have begun to incoporate computer technology into mammalian brains. The ratbot has electrodes in its brain, so scientists can control it with a remote control and make it go through mazes as they wish:
The ratbot or roborat, also controlled by a joystick
There are others, such as monkeys with implants who have learned to control mechanical arms with brain waves.
What is interesting also is the way these technologies are being used in combination. Take the mouse created at Charles Vacanti’s lab at the University of Massachusettes. He genetically engineered the skin of the animal to be less immunoreactive to a human, then put a polymer scaffolding in the shape of an ear under the skin of the animal’s back, and then the skin grew over it. The idea is that we can sculpt an ear or nose (cosmetic surgeons are bad are reconstructing them) and use them for transplants in people who lost them in fires or accidents:
The point is that we are redesigning animals at our leisure, and creating not only new forms of life but also turning independent animals into robots – or, more accurately, cyborgs -- for our own uses.
Not only that, but we are for the first time taking brains and tissues out of animals and turning them into computers. The picture below is from the lab of Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi at Northwestern, who took the brain from a Lamprey eel, put it in refridgerated, oxygen rich saline and put it on a wheeled cart, attached light sensors to the brain’s vestibular system which were directed to the machines wheels. When lights were turned on the machine moved towards the light. It is the first example of two-way interaction between neural tissue and a robot:
The creation of human cyborgs
Finally, we are also beginning to integrate human beings and technology. We have been doing it for a while, with things like artificial hips and pacemakers. But it has reached an unpreedented pace.
Matthew Nagel is quadriplegic, and had a “braingate” technology implanted in his head, and would come into John Donoghue’s lab at Brown with a pedestal plug sticking out of his head and get plugged into a computer where he could control the cursor with thought. He even beat a Wired Magazine reporter at Pong using only his brain waves:
Matthew Nagel
JR had a brain stem stroke and was completely locked in, like Jean-Dominique Bauby in his book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Drs. Bakay and Kennedy at Emory implanted electrodes in JR’s brain and then to a computer, and for the first time he could use his brain to move a cursor and communicate with the outside world: 
In addition to these technologies, we are also creating psychopharmaceuticals to micromanage our cognitive and emotional states, have reprogrammed older women’s bodies to regress them to pre-menopausal states so they can carry children, and a number of corporations are with names like Rejuvenon, Longenity, and Immortality Inc. are tapping into a market of aging Boomers to create drugs and other technologies to arrest the aging process. The biotechnological industry is one of the most dynamic growth sectors of American business, comprising close to half of business R&D’s contribution to real GDP growth over the last fifteen years.
It is in this atmosphere of extraordinary progress by biotechnology that a place like the Center for Ethics at Emory steps in. As we negotiate these difficult moral waters, we need to ask what the limits are to human intervention in the natural world, what the proper goals and aspirations of our increasing technological power should be, and who should get to make these kinds of decisions. The Center for Ethics has developed a series of programs, scholarly projects, educational modules, and other tools to challenge students and the public to think about these issues and to be part of the important decisions we all must make as stakeholders in the new biotechnological world.
We clearly have the scientific knowledge to move forward. What is sorely needed is wisdom. The Center for Ethics at Emory is dedicated to providing ethical leadership in the emerging world of biotechnological marvels.
