StemCell Therapy

BiotechnologyBiotechnologyJames Watson and the late Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953; Watson has spoken in favour of genetic engineering

Biotechnology isn't something new - selective breeding to create more useful varieties of animals and plants is a form of biotechnology that human beings have used for thousands of years.

Biotechnology includes any use of science or technology to alter the characteristics of a particular breed or animal.

Biotechnology can be good or bad for animals - and it may also produce an answer to the ethical problems of experimenting on animals.

Transgenic animals raise a particularly difficult problem.

Newspaper articles about the ethical problems of genetically engineered animals are usually concerned about the danger these animals may pose to human beings (usually to human health), rather than any implications for the animals themselves.

Genetic engineering and selective breeding appear to violate animal rights, because they involve manipulating animals for human ends as if the animals were nothing more than human property, rather than treating the animals as being of value in themselves.

Recent action to allow animals to be patented reinforces the idea of animals as human property, rather than beings in their own right.

Biotechnology can be good for animals. Selective breeding and genetic engineering can benefit animals in many ways:

But biotechnology can also be bad for animals - the good effects for the breeder can offset by painful side-effects for the animals:

Profitability is one of the major drivers of both selective breeding and genetic engineering.

If animal welfare is not to be compromised, research must be restricted by a counter-balancing ethical principle that prevents altering animals in a way that was bad for the animal.

One writer, Bernard Rollin, suggests that a suitable rule to regulate genetic engineering would be this:

This principle can easily be adapted to cover selective breeding.

It's been suggested that genetic engineering may solve all the ethical problems of laboratory experiments on animals.The goal is to create a genetically engineered mammal that lacks sentience, but is otherwise identical to normal experimental animals.

Such an animal could not suffer whatever was done to it, so there should be no ethical difficulty in performing experiments on it.

Ethical problems:

Read more:
BBC - Ethics - Animal ethics: Biotechnology

This entry was posted on July 1, 2018 at 7:45 am and is filed under Biotechnology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |