Cross-Post: The Moral Status of Human-Monkey Chimeras
Written by Julian Savulescu and Julian Koplin
This article was first published on Pursuit. Read the original article.
The 1968 classic Planet of the Apes tells the story of the Earth after a nuclear war destroys human civilisation. When three astronauts return to our planet after a long space voyage, they discover that humans have lost the power of verbal communication and live much like apes currently do.
Meanwhile, non-human primates have evolved speech and other human-like abilities, and are now running the earth with little regard for human life.
The astronaut George Taylor, played by Charlton Heston, is rendered temporarily mute when he is shot in the throat and captured. In one scene he is brought before the Apes, as he appears more intelligent than other humans.
He regains the power of speech, and his first words are: “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape.”
Planet of the Apes may be fiction, but this month the world’s first human-monkey lifeforms were created by Juan Carlos Belmonte at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the US, using private funding. Professor Belmonte and his group injected stem cells from the skin of a human foetus into a monkey embryo.
This part-human lifeform is called a chimera.
If implanted into a monkey uterus, the chimera could theoretically develop into a live-born animal that has cells from both a monkey and a human.
While it has been possible to make chimeras for more than 20 years using a different technique that involves fusing the embryos of two animals together, this technique has not been used in humans. It has been used to create novel animals like the geep – a fusion of a sheep and goat embryo.
Professor Belmonte used a different technique– called “blastocyst complementation” – which is more refined. It enables greater control over the number of human cells in the chimera.
But why is this research being done?
Crosspost: Learning to live with COVID – the tough choices ahead
By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu
This work was supported by the UKRI/ AHRC funded UK Ethics Accelerator project, grant number AH/V013947/1. The UK Ethics Accelerator project can be found at https://ukpandemicethics.org/
As mass vaccination continues to be rolled out, the UK is beginning to see encouraging signs that the number of COVID deaths is reducing, and that the vaccines may be reducing the transmission of coronavirus.
While this is very welcome news, a mass vaccination programme is unlikely to be enough to eliminate the virus, so we need to turn our thoughts towards the ethics of the long-term management of COVID-19.
One strategy would be to aim for the elimination of the virus within the UK. New Zealand successfully implemented an elimination strategy earlier in the pandemic and is now in a post-elimination stage.
An elimination strategy in the UK would require combining the mass vaccination programme with severe restrictions on international travel to stop new cases and variants of the virus being imported. However, the government has been reluctant to endorse an elimination strategy, given the importance of international trade to the UK economy.
One of the main alternatives to the elimination strategy is to treat coronavirus as endemic to the UK and to aim for long-term suppression of the virus to acceptable levels. But adopting a suppression strategy for the long term will require us to make a societal decision about the harms we are and are not willing to accept.
Daunte Wright: Policing and Accountability
Written by Jake Wojtowicz and Ben Davies
On April 11th, Daunte Wright was pulled over by police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. Shortly afterwards, he was shot and killed by police officer Kim Potter. Police Chief Tim Gannon described this as an ‘accidental discharge’. But framing events like this as accidents can be misleading and is just one way the police may insulate themselves from appropriate accountability.
The word ‘accident’ can bring to mind what we might call ‘sheer accidents’: bad fortune, acts of god, cars hitting the ice and veering off of the road. Even the language of an ‘accidental discharge’ can sound like Potter had the gun in her hand and it just somehow went off. But that isn’t what happened. Potter pointed the gun at Wright and pulled the trigger. She claims she meant to fire her taser.
Mandating COVID-19 Vaccination for Children
Written by Lisa Forsberg and Anthony Skelton
In many countries vaccine rollouts are now well underway. Vaccine programmes in Israel, the United Kingdom, Chile, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and the United States have been particularly successful. Mass vaccination is vital to ending the pandemic. However, at present, vaccines are typically not approved for children under the age of 16. Full protection from COVID-19 at a population level will not be achieved until most children and adolescents are inoculated against the deadly disease. A number of pharmaceutical companies have started or will soon start clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccinations in children and adolescents. Initial results of clinical trials seem promising (see also here and here).
There are strong reasons to inoculate children. COVID-19 may harm or kill them. It disproportionately affects already disadvantaged populations. For example, a CDC study published in August 2020 found the hospitalisation rate to be five times higher for Black children and eight times higher for Latino children than it is for white children. In addition, inoculating children is necessary for establishing herd immunity and (perhaps more importantly), as Jeremy Samuel Faust and Angela L. Rasmussen explained in the New York Times, preventing the virus from spreading and mutating ‘into more dangerous variants, including ones that could harm both children and adults’. Continue reading
It’s Only a Game
Written by Stephen Rainey
Footballers are increasingly prominent in speaking against social and political ills. They can draw attention to serious issues, given their public profile. If more of us followed their example, beyond supporting their causes, we could make a world less accommodating for moral complacency.
Inoculate to Imbibe? On the Pub Landlord Who Requires You to be Vaccinated against Covid
Written by Isra Black and Lisa Forsberg
Elsewhere on the blog Tom Douglas has discussed vaccine requirements for commonplace activities, such as going to the pub, created by the state in the form of law or guidance. Let’s call these vaccine requirements ‘state-originating’. Also on the blog, Julian Savulescu has discussed whether ‘immunity passports’ are a human rights issue. In our view, vaccine requirements or similar raise important issues of human rights in a legal, as well as ethical and rhetorical sense. Legally, since the action of public authorities would be implicated in state-originating vaccine requirements, the measures would be evaluated for their compliance with, among other things, the Human Rights Act 1998 (and therefore the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights) and the Equality Act 2010. The legality of state-originating vaccine requirements would depend on issues of principle (eg how should we trade-off interference with personal life and the freedoms to pursue economic and social activities?), scope (what sectors or activities?), and implementation (eg how to handle any exemptions?)
In this post, we take a different angle. We consider the legal human rights and equality dimensions of private-originating vaccine requirements—for example, ‘inoculate to imbibe’: your local pub requiring you to have had a coronavirus vaccine to enjoy a pint.
Cross-Post: Self-experimentation with vaccines
By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu.
This is a crosspost from the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog.
This is an output of the UKRI Pandemic Ethics Accelerator project.
A group of citizen scientists has launched a non-profit, non-commercial organisation named ‘RaDVaC’, which aims to rapidly develop, produce, and self-administer an intranasally delivered COVID-19 vaccine. As an open source project, a white paper detailing RaDVaC’s vaccine rationale, design, materials, protocols, and testing is freely available online. This information can be used by others to manufacture and self-administer their own vaccines, using commercially available materials and equipment.
Self-experimentation in science is not new; indeed, the initial development of some vaccines depended on self-experimentation. Historically, self-experimentation has led to valuable discoveries. Barry Marshall famously shared the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his work on the role of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, and its role in gastritis –this research involved a self-experiment in 1984 that involved Marshall drinking a prepared mixture containing the bacteria, causing him to develop acute gastritis. This research, which shocked his colleagues at the time, eventually led to a fundamental change in the understanding of gastric ulcers, and they are now routinely treated with antibiotics. Today, self-experimentation is having something of a renaissance in the so-called bio-hacking community. But is self-experimentation to develop and test vaccinations ethical in the present pandemic? In this post we outline two arguments that might be invoked to defend such self-experimentation, and suggest that they are each subject to significant limitations. Continue reading
An Ethical Review of Hotel Quarantine Policies For International Arrivals
Written by:
Jonathan Pugh
Dominic Wilkinson
Julian Savulescu
This is an output of the UKRI Pandemic Ethics Accelerator project – it develops an earlier assessment of the English hotel quarantine policy, published by The Conversation)
The UK has announced that from 15th Feb, British and Irish nationals and others with residency rights travelling to England from ‘red list’ countries will have to quarantine in a government-sanctioned hotel for 10 days, at a personal cost of £1,750. Accommodation must be booked in advance, and individuals will be required to undergo two tests over the course of the quarantine period.
Failure to comply will carry strict penalties. Failing to quarantine in a designated hotel carries a fine of up to £10,000, and those who lie about visiting a red list country are liable to a 10-year prison sentence.
Priority Vaccination for Prison and Homeless Populations
Written by Ben Davies
Last week brought the news that an additional 1.7m people in the UK had been asked to take additional ‘shielding’ measures against COVID-19, following new modelling which considered previously ignored factors such as ethnicity, weight and deprivation. Since many of this group have not yet been vaccinated, they were bumped up the priority list for vaccine access, moving into group 4 of the government’s vaccine plan.
Two other groups, however, have not yet been incorporated into this plan despite appeals from some quarters that they should be. First, new figures reinforced the sense that the virus is disproportionately affecting prisoners, with one in eight of the prison population having had COVID-19, compared with roughly one in twenty in the wider population (in the United States, the prison figure has been estimated to be one in five).
Second, some GP groups and local councils have offered priority vaccination to homeless residents, despite their not officially qualifying for prioritisation on the government’s plan. There have also been calls for the government to incorporate this into national plans, rather than being left to more local decision-making.
Crosspost: Is It Ethical To Quarantine People In Hotel Rooms?
Written by
Dominic Wilkinson and Jonathan Pugh,
The UK government announced that from February 15, British and Irish residents travelling to England from “red list” countries will have to quarantine in a government-sanctioned hotel for ten days, at a personal cost of £1,750. Accommodation must be booked in advance, and people will need to have two COVID tests during the quarantine period.
Failing to quarantine in a designated hotel carries a fine of up to £10,000, and those who lie about visiting a red list country could face a ten-year prison sentence.
Other countries have already implemented mandatory hotel quarantines for travellers, including Australia, New Zealand, China and India. When are such quarantines ethical? And who should pay for them if they are?
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