Monkey Can, Monkey Do?

It's got the head of a monkey and the body of a monkey. But not the same monkey.

You probably don't want to hear any more details of this Mondo Bizarro medical news item. According to pioneering scientist Robert White, the mix-and-match creature he fabricated in a 1970s experiment survived for "many days." This experiment raised hopes, he told the BBC in an interview last month, because "People are dying today who, if they had body transplants...would remain alive."

This comment raises the bar in the competition for stating the obvious. Nevertheless, for most of us, the idea of swapping monkey heads prompts an immediate, instinctive revulsion, a reaction that may also feature incredulous laughter. Between those two reactions--this is too hideous to consider, this is too absurd to consider--there remains a stubborn reality: Somebody somewhere did consider it, and then went ahead and did it. In a lab somewhere, monkeys were beheaded, reassembled, and then kept temporarily alive.

The advancing front of the "life sciences"--cloning, gene manipulation, tinkering with body parts--keeps sending similar unbelievable and appalling items our way. Medical ethicists are regularly convened to fret about them, and on a recent TV show an audience member asked the panel the old familiar question: "Has our ability to produce these new technologies outdistanced our ability to cope with them ethically?"

The question has a weary quality, because we suspect that ethical concerns are going to have very little influence over what eventually takes place. It's efficiency, or the illusion of it, that governs these things. Look for comparison to the field of weapons development, where new killing devices have historically been implemented as soon as they are invented: the guillotine replacing the axe, for example. Hand-wringing about ethics seems irrelevant. Weapons technology hurtled forward until the proliferation of nuclear missiles brought the promise of Mutually Assured Destruction, and people realized no one would be around to enjoy this absolute efficiency. That glimpse into the abyss, rather than newfound scruples, prompted a pullback from the brink.

So the short answer to the woman in the audience is, Lady, that happened a long time ago. The human tendency to let technology overrun ethics appeared the first time somebody picked up a rock and hit somebody else over the head with it.

There's an extra creep factor with these new experiments, though. We've long been familiar with technologies that increase the efficiency of death. This latest round, however, confronts us with technologies that bring to life things we instinctively sense should not be. They feel disturbing and ominous, as if they violate the harmony of nature. Even when they engineer life, they participate in death.

Yet it's a disservice to dismiss these innovators as merely lacking in ethics. Dr. Joseph Guillotin was troubled by the clumsy and gruesome axe beheadings that he witnessed during the French Revolution, and the machine he proposed was welcomed as more compassionate. To a culture awash in blood the guillotine seemed an obvious improvement. Today, however, we would question whether factory-style decapitation ever advances social reform.

Continued on page 2: »