Are We God Yet?
I am actually in the middle of my exams and am not really supposed to blog right now, but yesterday I watched this very interesting story on made-to-order organs on TV and can’t help but talk about it here.
I tried to find the story transcript online, but I think it’s still inaccessible, but here’s the video link.
Gone are the days when patients need to wait years for organ donors to donate suitable organs to save their lives. Our scientists have found a way to engineer a completely functional organ using the cells of the patient. Not only will this shorten the waiting time for organs, physicians will face less risk of organ rejection as the cells of the organs itself are made from the patients’ cells. This breakthrough will revolutionize the way we can save lives.
Basically, the video highlighted two methods of growing these organs to supply the ever-increasing demand of organ transplant. The first method is to build the organs by growing cells on an organ scaffold. Hence, the basic components of this method are an organ scaffold from either a dead human or a pig and some cells from the patient needing the transplant. You may think that the idea is crazy, growing your cells on organ scaffold obtained from a corpse or an animal and transplanting them back into your body. But wait until you hear the second method developed by Esmail Zanjani of University of Nevada. What this scientist is doing is manipulating the genetic codes of a sheep that it matches that of the patient and then growing the organs in sheep. He basically, did a surgery on a pregnant sheep and injects the bone marrow of the patients into the sheep fetus so that the gene code of the sheep matches that of the patient. Then we wait. Let the sheep grows up to a certain age and then we can harvest its organs and transplant them into the patient in need. It is amazing I must admit. But what is the implications of that experiment on our moral and ethics? We are fundamentally creating a new human-animal hybrid through this process. Zanjani may only clone the sheep so that it has 15% of human cells and that it is still, theoretically, a sheep. The question is when does that sheep becomes human? And does killing a 15%-human creature considered murder?
For the past decade, science has countlessly challenged human ethics in the effort to improve human lives. We have been faced with questions of the ethics of cloning, abortion, manipulation of genes, playing with life and death, playing god. Indeed, we may seem, in a way, like we are trying to outsmart our creator(s) (if you believe in this(these) higher beings). For years, human has tried to play the god card and most of the times, we have stopped ourselves from going over the line (wherever it is). But despite how forbidden that line looks, human’s curiosity will never be backed down by mere conscience or ethics, moreover by a mere idea of faith or god or religion. It seems that curiosity trumps everything else. It is like a need that requires sating, a constant hunger for knowledge, breakthrough, endeavor. Toying with lives, feelings, emotions seems rather unimportant in the grand scheme of things. You may inhibit something from happening right here right now, but it doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future or in some other secluded laboratory deep in the forest or in a secret island somewhere – and it’s all for the sake of knowledge.
The problem is that we all know that whatever experiments it is, however unethical things may be, there’s nothing we can do to stop them from happening. You think that frankenstein science of reviving the dead is impossible? You think humanity has done enough to stop such experiment from being carried out? You think we have failed so far? Watch this secret documentary of an experiment in the 1940s.
Human will never stop! Just tell me what you feel after you watched that video! I admit that I was appalled at what they have done to the dog, but at the same time I am amazed at what human is able to do and how far they are willing to go to do things they are not supposed to for the sake of knowledge and probably for the sake of saving lives. The same problem applies to the made-to-order organs. Just imagine, if you can now build your own organ separately, can’t you build a complete human being? Looking at how far we have gone and what we have achieved, I believe that it won’t be long before we can do that! For now, we may be arguing about creating a monster of having a human being inside an animal and the ethics on how to treat these beings, whether or not killing them is considered murder, etc. But in the future, we will be faced with even greater question on the ethics of creation of a complete human being – from scratch. I can already see the headline: Are We God Yet?
Personally, I think that the idea of creating a human-sheep hybrid is sickening and morally unacceptable to the whatever ‘human’ fraction that is embedded within the sheep. But then again, if we could save a perfect and natural human being from death by sacrificing the lives of these ‘lesser human’, is it acceptable? If your loved ones are at the brink of death and you are faced with the option to choose to let the 1:10 human:sheep creature ratio to die instead of your loved ones, which option will you choose? Will you choose to be perfectly conscientious or selfishly and unethically practical? What if you are faced with a 1:2 human:sheep ratio, 1:1 human:sheep ratio? Where is the border between killing a sheep and killing a human being? How do we even know if the sheep is feeling and thinking like human, but confined within the physicality of an animal? What if at 1:10 ratio, the sheep has a human nous, with an animal limitation in speech or expression? Is it human? We really don’t have the answers for these.
And ironically, the only way to answer this question is to tread through the path of the unethical, carrying out unethical experiments on these beings and find out whether or not they are innately human, fractionally human, completely human or a mere animal. The risk treading through this journey is unbelievable. You are risking your morale to exchange for answers. And even more ironically, the catch is that no matter what the answer proves to be, you would have still lost your humanity because the mere idea of experimenting with a creature without knowing whether or not it is right or wrong, is by itself an unethical conduct. It’s the Adam and Eve story. No matter whether the forbidden fruit gives you the knowledge of a god or not, the mere action of picking it off the tree has violated your conscience in obeying the rule imposed.
We have succumbed to temptation once, why not again?
