February
1996
Editorial:
You Are What You Put into You
By Martin Rowe
|
|
|
Sometimes events come together in a synchronicity that shouts out for
some sort of public debate — and now is no exception.
One of these events involves a topic familiar to readers of Satya [see
1:9]: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or "mad cow disease."
For a number of years, until the late 1980s, British farmers fed their
cattle a concoction of animal remains including dead sheep’s brains
infected, it so happened, with a degenerative disease called "scrapie."
Soon, tens of thousands of cows were exhibiting behavior such as disorientation,
muscle spasm and collapse, and finally death. Autopsies revealed their
brains to be full of holes, like sponges.
Something of a minor panic ensued. Government ministers assured British
consumers that BSE could not cross species — although, it was
revealed, cats had diet of it as had some animals in zoos. The UK emphasized
to the European Union and other trading partners that exported British
beef was uninfected, and the issue seemed to fade away.
Until now. Recently in the UK there has been a minor outbreak of Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease (CJD), the human equivalent of BSE, which is usually extremely
rare and confined to older people. But some teenagers and farmers —
all associated with cattle farming — have died and an extremely
sober (and decidedly carnivorous) British neuropathologist has told
the public he will not risk eating British beef, and nor should they.
Given the long incubation time of CJD — perhaps ten or fifteen
years — it is quite possible that these cases are merely the beginning
of an epidemic. Beef sales have plummeted; schools across Britain are
not serving beef; and the British people (once more) don’t know
whom to believe.
Let’s switch to the other event: the transplanting of baboon bone
marrow into Jeff Getty’s body. Mr. Getty, who is dying of AIDS,
hopes the baboon’s T-cells will fight the infections caused by
HIV and thereby bring about a breakthrough in the fight against AIDS.
Mr. Getty’s brave gesture will not save his life, but he hopes
it will ultimately save others.
The risks of this operation are considerable. Virologists and epidemiologists
have expressed grave reservations about the possibility of transferring
diseases currently unknown to human beings from non-human "donors"
— diseases which could mutate horrifically within the human body.
Mr. Getty’s body, significantly, will fight the invasion of foreign
bodies with all its diminished might; and Mr. Getty will — as
with all recipients of alien organs — be obliged to exist for
the rest of his life on a toxic cocktail of anti-infection drugs.
Now you know as well as I that the issues which need to be addressed
here in both cases are not those of safeguarding meat production procedures
or screening animals so that no organs are infected with potentially
lethal diseases. Nor are these simply more examples of the fact that
humankind’s war against bacteria and viruses is by no means won,
and may in fact be slipping away from us.
Yet I have yet to see the real issues debated anywhere — except
perhaps for the odd letter or brief comment in a newspaper here and
there. So, let’s raise them. If we are going to feed dead animals
to natural vegetarians such as cows, why should we not expect disease
to spread? If cows can become ill by eating other animals, why do we
not extrapolate this to other animals, such as ourselves, who are physiologically
(if not culturally) not attuned to eating meat?
In the second place, when no human being has yet survived more than
a few years with a non-human organ inside him or her, why should we
expect any future human being to be any different? If there is a chronic
shortage of human organs available for donation, would it not make much
more sense as well as be much more medically effective to educate many
more people to make organs available to people after their own death?
And then there is the biggest issue of them all, which these two events
call out for us to discuss. That is the proposition that non-human animals
do not belong inside human animals — whether as skin, or heart,
or tongue, or shank, or liver, or milk, or egg. They weren’t born
to feed us or store our organs, and we weren’t born to eat them
or store theirs either.
Perhaps this all seems obvious to you. Perhaps it seems radical. But
I’m not so lost to reason as to believe that we shouldn’t
at least talk about it. My basic question is why this debate is being
conducted solely within the realms of science — with only scientists
being the voices both extolling and critiquing British agricultural
practices and baboon-organ transplants. Where are the media, the ethicists,
the politicians, the theologians, the social scientists? Where are we?
Have we so handed control of our own ability to judge what is right
or wrong to technocrats that we cannot simply say, "No, this is
wrong," or "No, this flies in the face of decency, and respect,
and what we feel to be good?" Is it so moronic to ask whether we
should not in all this consider the interests of the cow, the baboon,
the onco-mouse ("engineered" to form cancer cells), the human
hemoglobin-producing pig, and the human milk-producing cow — all
either currently patented and available or coming soon to a biotechnology
agribusiness near you?
There is, of course, one final irony. When we have imported the baboon’s
liver, the pig’s heart, the cow’s spleen, and whatever else
into our body — maybe we’ll start recognizing that there’s
not such a moral difference between human and non-human animals, now
that the physiological difference is diminished to almost zero. I doubt
it somehow.
 |
|
|
 |
