Ethical issues in Neural Research: Transplantation of Human Brain Cells into Animals

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Ethical issues in Neural Research
Transplantation of Human Brain Cells into Animals

• Presented by
• Yio Wee Kheng
• Lim Tong Seng
• Dave Wee

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Outline

• 1. Introduction - Wee Kheng
• 2. Current Guidelines - Tong Seng
• Current Research
• Support
• 3. Objection - Dave
• Conclusion
• 4. Discussion

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Scope

• We are discussing ethical issues pertaining to
  the potential risk of developing human
  consciousness in animals, as a consequence of
  being transplanted human brain cells/tissue.
• We are NOT discussing ethical issues relating to
• Other types of organ transplantation
• The transferring of stem cells (other than brain
  stem cells)
• General Human/Nonhuman Chimeras
• Animal rights.

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Ethical Implications

• The human brain is the seat of the soul in human
  consciousness, something uniquely human, which
  makes humans human.
• Nancy Andreasen, The Revolution in
  Neuroscience
• The brain is the source of everything that we
  are
• It is the source of everything that makes us
  human, humane, and unique
• It is the source of our ability to speak, to
  write, to think, to create, to love, to laugh, to
  despair and to hate.

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Ethical Implications

• Brain death Human death.
• The pertinent question flowing from such
  experiments is whether or not in the process of
  transplanting brain tissue or the entire brain,
  we are, in essence, transplanting/creating the
  human mind.
• Thus, the ethical issues here are far more
  trickier than transplantation of other body parts.

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What is Human Consciousness?

• Robert Ornstein, in his book, The Evolution of
  Consciousness, noted Being conscious is being
  aware of being aware.
• The difference between merely being aware
  (i.e., just having experiences or simply
  feeling) and actually being self-aware (i.e.,
  knowing that you are having experiences, and
  knowing that you are feeling) is colossal!

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What is Human Consciousness?

• Humans not only possess such self-awareness and
  thought capability, but also the ability to let
  other humans know that they possess those two
  things!
• Enable the development of empathy, the capacity
  to identify emotionally with others Paul Ehrlich
  (2000)
• Nowhere is this more evident than in the human
  response to death.
• Death-awareness arose as a product of
  self-awareness.
• Ceremonial burial is evidence of self-awareness
  because it represents an awareness of death.
• There is no indication that individuals of any
  species other than man know that they will
  inevitably die. Dobzhansky et al (1997)

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Non-human Consciousness

• Are animals self-aware to the extent that they
  actually think about themselves.?
• Sir John Eccles concluded It has been well said
  that an animal knows, but only a man knows that
  he knows (1960).
• Nick Carter said that we might think of animals
  as beings that have extension and sensation, but
  not higher thought the ability to think, to
  think about thinking, and to let others know we
  are thinking (2002).

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Non-human Consciousness

• Self-awareness is different from information
  processing even when confused and unable to
  think clearly, one may be vividly aware of ones
  self and ones confusion. Robert Wesson (1997)
• The essence of mind is less data processing than
  will, intention, imagination, discovery, and
  feeling. Robert Wesson (1997)
• Thus, training animals to be self-aware does
  not prove that they are self-aware! E.g. the
  chimpanzee mirror experiment.

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http//news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/05/05
02_dolphinvanity.html
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Non-human Consciousness

• Are animals really not self-aware? Hard to tell.
  
• Can they describe to us what their notion of
  self awareness is? No. At least, not yet.
• The reason that we cannot be sure that animals
  have such self-consciousness is that they cannot
  tell us they do.
• Human language is capable of expressing
  self-consciousness the forms of animal
  communication which we have been studied so far
  cannot do so, or at least cannot do so
  unambiguously.

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Summary

• We dont do experiments on humans because of
  ethical issues.
• Only humans have consciousness.
• If an animal developed consciousness, is it human
  or animal? Is it right to do such experiments?

• Does consciousness belong to humans only?

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Next Speaker
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Current Ethical Guidelines
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Current Ethical Guidelines

• Canadian regulations allow transplantation of
  human stem cell into postnatal animals, but not
  prenatal nonhuman animals
• What if consciousness could be transplanted in
  postnatal animals? Would such an experiment still
  be allowed?

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Current Research

• Transplantation of some sections of brain from
  developing quails to developing brains of
  chickens.
• Result Chickens exhibited vocal trills and head
  bobs unique to quails, proving complex behaviors
  can be transferred!
• (Evan Balaban. Science 1988, 241, 1339-1342)

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Irving Weissman from Stanford University with
Stem Cells Inc. of Palo Alto. In 2004, injected
human neural stem cells into fetal mouse brain,
creating mice with 1 human brain. Planning to
create a 100 human brain in mice !
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Support

• Potentially large beneficial payoffs to the human
  race.
• - Investigate devastating diseases that cannot
  be easily studied and/or unethical to do so in
  living human, e.g. Parkinsons disease,
  Alzheimer, schizophrenia, brain cancer, etc.
• - To use as a model to test a new drugs
  efficacy and toxicity before applying to human.

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Support

• Mouse brain is too small and their development
  time too short to develop complex architecture
  similar to humans. It is highly unlikely that
  the mice will have human consciousness.
• - Consciousness is correlated to brain
  architecture.
• - Individual neurons do not have the capacity to
  think simple little thoughts it's a large
  number of those neurons taken together and
  arranged into a brain with a given architecture
  that can think. What counts is the the
  orchestrated organization and architecture of
  the neurons in the human brain to posses
  self-consciousness.

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Next Speaker
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Objection

• Nobody knows the minimum complexity the brain
  architecture must be to mimic a pinch of human
  consciousness.
• At what stage is human consciousness developed?
  Does it require full maturation of the
  organization system of the brain or is it a
  gradual development process?
• If it is indeed a gradual process, it might be
  able to develop some characteristics of human
  consciousness (maybe equivalent to a retarded
  human), even though it has space and development
  time constraints. How would it feel?

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Objection

• What if we transplant into an animal with a
  larger brain size, such as a chimpanzee, which is
  very similar to human?
• - A human trapped in a animal body! He or (it)
  will be banished by both the human and
  chimpanzee societies, thus becoming a social
  outcast!
• - He (or it) possesses human ambitions and
  desires, but the ability to achieve them is
  lost.
• - It is wrong to prevent living things from
  achieving their natural ends.

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Objection

• The risk of humanization increases with the
  number of human cells transferred. But it is
  experimentally challenging to control the level
  of mosaicism.
• - How shall we deal with these accidental
  humanified animals? Morally wrong to kill,
  imprison or free them. Damn if you do, damn if
  you dont dilemma.
• - We dont even know the safety limit!!!

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Conclusion

• Since the potential scientific benefits are
  strong and the therapeutic promise immense, it
  should be allowed as long as the animal models do
  not take on the characteristics of human
  consciousness.
• Karpowicz et al 2004 Nature Medicine proposed
  these limits
• Numbers of human cells transferred
• Choice of animals
• Transfer individual human cells rather than a
  mass of tissue.
• The guideline is to stop when the animal shows
  signs of human brain structures or behaviors. But
  how shall we deal with these animals?

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Conclusion

• These limits and guidelines are by no means
  robust because
• The quantification of human behaviors in animals
  is difficult and highly subjective
• We do not understand the relationship of human
  consciousness with brain architecture.
• Thus, we should progress with utmost caution.
• Robert W., The Mind-Brain Continuum a 5th
  Dimensional Concept
• To understand the relationship of human
  consciousness with brain architecture, we may
  require an entirely new, as yet not described
  methodology, which lies beyond quantum mechanics
  and molecular biology, a 5th dimensional
  concept, so radical, so advanced, so different
  that even its faintest outline has yet to appear.

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Discussion / QA
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Discussion

• What if, we have unfortunately created a chimera
  with human-consciousness?
• Is killing him equivalent to killing a
  human-being?
• Do we annihilate him? Or do we let him alive?

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Discussion

• Let them decide their own fate
• If their choice is to live, how shall we deal
  with them?

??
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Die
Live
??