Male Rats Giving Birth Shows Need to Regulate Biotechnology

Biotechnology is being harnessed to accelerate social-revolutionary policies and cross what once were immutable moral boundaries. The latest example occurred in China—where scientific ethics go to die. Here’s the story: Two Shanghai-based researchers surgically attached male and female rats. They then transplanted uteruses into male rats and ensured that the females’ blood nurtured the organs now in the male bodies.

Why do that? Part of the impetus may have been to advance a deeply yearned goal of the transgender movement, that is, to enable trans women—biological males who identify as female—to give birth.

Two germ-line engineered babies were already born—again, in China. Yes, there was an international uproar. But note, the controversy wasn’t so much because of what was done—but when.

You see, the cardinal sin wasn’t altering the children’s germ lines. That has always been a goal of gene-editing research on human embryos—blessed by, among others, the influential National Academy of Sciences.

Biotechnologists are also bent on creating “three-parent embryos.” The process, a quasi-cloning technique, removes the nucleus from the egg of one woman, puts it into an egg of another which had its own nucleus removed, and then fertilizing the genetically modified ovum with sperm. Voila, three biological parents.

The purported purpose of this extreme method of procreation is to enable women to bear biologically related children without passing on mitochondrial disease. Fine. But you know the technique, once perfected, wouldn’t stop there.

At some point, polyamorous threesomes desiring to have children biologically related to all partners will also demand access. Considering the way medicine is now applied to facilitate lifestyles as well as heal illnesses—and given the huge money to be made—who believes IVF clinics would say no? And if they did, they would probably be sued for discrimination.

The same could be said of the fortunes to be made in other areas of intensive biotechnological research. For example, scientists are working to create human eggs and sperm from skin cells.

Until now, biotechnologists who experiment on human embryos were supposed to follow the “14-day rule,” meaning that experiment embryos had to be destroyed at two weeks. The time limit was supposedly selected because that is when the neural system begins to form.

But the actual reason was that scientists hadn’t yet developed the techniques to maintain embryos outside a woman’s body for longer than that. Thus, by agreeing to nix experiments they couldn’t yet do, the ISCCR created an open field for research that could be accomplished.

The photos of the “humanized rat models” in the report are not for the squeamish. They depict the fetal scalps attached to rats still with human hair.

How do these experiments happen? Blame us. We permit “the scientists” to self-regulate, hoping they will give us miraculous breakthroughs in return. But to truly serve society beneficently, science requires humility and good ethics to accompany its quests.

Or put another way, every powerful enterprise—and nothing matches the life-altering potential of biotechnology—requires rigorous checks and balances to stay on a righteous path.

Here’s the bottom line: Unless society begins the crucial process of deciding through democratic processes and law what to allow or prevent legally—based both on the scientific benefit we hope to gain and the ethical horrors we are morally bound to prevent—the dystopian future prophesied in the novel “Brave New World” will become reality.