Dr. Frankenstein's Students by Daniel Witt

Human Engineering in the 21st Century

In a fictional dystopian world, human beings are grown specifically for the purpose of harvesting their brains. Before they are fully grown, their brains are removed. Neurons from the brains are then inserted into the damaged brains of adult humans, where they take hold and grow, repairing the damaged brain. The patient then has a brain that contains elements of the dead victim’s brain.

You’ve probably guessed it – you live in that world. But the truly strange thing is, it’s normal, and few people seem to really care. A science fiction writer from the early 20th century would have thought this was a great idea for a dystopian horror story and would have been horrified to hear that this is where the society would end up in a mere century. But it’s hard for us enlightened 21st century humans to get too riled up about it. Perhaps that’s to be expected: dystopias only look grotesque and strange from the outside. From the inside, they are always quite mundane.

The MIT Technology Review reported on August 31 that a team of researchers, co-led by a University of California Neurology chair and funded by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer AG, have succeeded in implanting embryonic neurons in an adult patient’s brain. The neurons were developed from stem cells grown in a lab from parent cells originally extracted from a single human embryo created by in vitro fertilization (IVF, conceived in a test-tube). These dopamine-producing neurons were inserted into the brains of Parkinson’s disease patients in hopes that the neurons would take hold and grow and heal the brain, curing the disease. So far, the results have been somewhat disappointing. The implanted stem cells seem to have survived, and may have provided some mild benefits, but did not cure the patients.

“A Real Nightmare”

This is not the first time this has been tried. But past attempts were not pretty. The MIT report cites a New York Times piece from 2001 about another such experiment, this one using neurons taken directly from aborted fetuses. It turns out that putting part of a murdered person’s brain into your own brain is dangerous. “In about 15 percent of patients,” the report says, “the cells apparently grew too well, churning out so much of a chemical that controls movement that the patients writhed and jerked uncontrollably.” The article quotes a doctor involved in the study, Paul E. Greene:

''They chew constantly, their fingers go up and down, their wrists flex and distend,'' Dr. Greene said. And the patients writhe and twist, jerk their heads, fling their arms about.

''It was tragic, catastrophic,'' he said. ''It's a real nightmare. And we can't selectively turn it off.''

This was seen by the stem-cell research community in 2001 as an unfortunate delay. But slowly, quietly, progress resumed. Now that it can apparently be done without causing nightmarish consequences in the patient, we may see this treatment coming on the market.

A cure for Parkinson’s disease would be wonderful, of course. But putting cells from a dead unborn baby’s brain into the head of a sick person is a disturbing act, even if the fetus died a long time ago. The question is, is curing a disease worth it, if it means we live in a world where human beings are treated as spare parts?

Under a utilitarian or “net-happiness” worldview, there can only be one possible answer to that question: yes. When human happiness is the ultimate goal, all other considerations will bow to it. That includes the sacredness of human life.

To you readers who can’t understand why I’m so hot and bothered about stem cell research, stop and ask yourself: What if things like “sacredness” and “sacrilege” and “desecration” and “abomination” are not mere constructs or abstractions that society has created, but rather are part of the deeper fabric of reality itself? It’s not so absurd an idea; it’s what most humans have believed for the vast majority of our history. Believing in that changes everything, and hum-drum scientific progress, in this light, becomes a ghoulish horror show.

The Same Old Culprits

The inhumanity of the research being conducted today has a direct connection with the inhuman research of the past. Bayer AG has a history of this sort of twisted experimentation. During World War World II, the Bayer researchers experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz. A letter from a Bayer employee to an SS officer reads:

The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.

One would have liked to imagine that after the end of the war and the Nuremburg trials the pharmaceutical company would have made a clean break from what it had been during the Holocaust. But this does not seem to be the case. In fact, a man convicted of Nazi war crimes at Auschwitz, Fritz ter Meer, served on the Bayer supervisory board from 1956 until 1964.

Of course, it’s not just former Nazi pharma companies that are involved in this kind of thing today; after all, one of the leaders of the study is a neurologist at the University of California. However, the United States and Germany were never quite as different as some might think. The whole eugenics movement, a large contributor to the Holocaust, was widely popular in academic circles in the United States at the time. Forced sterilization of the supposedly unfit was the law in California from 1909 to 1979. In fact, according to law professor and eugenics expert Paul Lombardo, the Nazi practice in Germany had been inspired by California law.

Humane Germany, Dystopian America

In the 21st century, America actually seems to be the more dystopian nation of the two. Germany learned from its past that human engineering is dehumanizing and leads to atrocities and in 1990 enacted the Embryo Protection Act, which states: “Anyone who disposes of, or hands over or acquires or uses for a purpose not serving its preservation, a human embryo produced outside the body, or removed from a woman before the completion of implantation in the uterus, will be punished with imprisonment up to three years or a fine.”

That’s a shockingly sensible law for a Western educated democracy in the 21st century. How does Bayer get around it? Simple—by sourcing embryonic stems cells from the United States.

After World War II, the world saw the evil that came out of treating humans as mere machines to be tinkered with, improved, or discarded. As a result, there was a period of shame and regret in which such practices were generally rejected by Western society. It wasn’t just Germany that was forced to change course; California’s eugenics laws were eventually abandoned as well. It seemed that the side of good had won out, for once. Human engineering was on the wrong side of history.

But humans forget very quickly. Is it likely that embryo protection laws can remain on the books in any country if using embryonic cells becomes profitable and convenient? When the sheer convenience of committing an evil act outweighs the instinctive moral revulsion, society often caves. It almost always does. So as the last people who were alive to remember the atrocities of the 20th century die off, and as new technologies open up exciting new ways to engineer human beings, we are poised to enter a new era of desecration and atrocities.