Category Archives: My books

Genetically Engineering New Forms of Life

Want to know how to alter DNA to genetically engineer new forms of life?  Sounds like a new take on what we did in my thriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH, but it’s actually Newsweek’s cover story. http://www.newsweek.com/2017/07/07/natural-selection-new-forms-life-scientists-altering-dna-629771.html   

Author of the Newsweek article is Bryan Walsh. (Believe in giving credit where credit’s due, and writing this deserves credit!)

Right now I’ve got to run to an appointment; hopefully I’ll be back to make some points. But at least wanted to get this off to you to peruse over the weekend.

And if you time for even more perusing, please do check out my technothriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH.  https://michaelmcgaulley.net/books/sample-remedy/

Have a heart? Don’t let it break. Now they can recycle it!

I came on an intriguing article in MIT Technology Review, “Transplant surgeons revive hearts after death.”

These days, we’re familiar with heart transplants from brain-dead patients into others needing a new, healthy heart.

But in a new experimental breakthrough, successes have been achieved in transplanting the hearts of those not brain dead. Yes, there are procedural and ethical issues involved.

Mind you, this involves actual human hearts, not 3-D printed replacements, or bits of heart tissue grown in labs from human stem cells.

But the possibility raises some issues of medical ethics to be explored: if the donor is not brain dead, when and by what criteria can the heart be removed?

Rather than dig in deeply here, I’ll refer you to the article itself. You’ll see a “reanimated” donated heart actually beating outside the bodies of both donor and recipient.  Here’s the link.

Should a human-pig chimera be treated as a human?

“Should a human-pig chimera be treated as a human?”–that’s the title of an article I came upon in Aeon.  https://aeon.co/ideas/should-a-human-pig-chimera-be-treated-as-a-person

It’s a variation of a question that I raise early-on in my technothriller,  A REMEDY FOR DEATH. In REMEDY, a researcher tries to implant brain cells from a human fetus into a young chimp. (Not a plot-spoiler: that is only a small part of the story.)

In the Aeon article, the focus is on the pigs that may be used to grow replacement human organs.

“In this case, the scientists take a skin cell from a human and from this make stem cells capable of producing any cell or tissue in the body, known as ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’. They then inject these into a pig embryo to make a human-pig chimera. In order to create the desired organ, they use gene editing, or CRISPR, to knock out the embryo’s pig’s genes that produce, for example, the pancreas. The human stem cells for the pancreas then make an almost entirely human pancreas in the resulting human-pig chimera, with just the blood vessels remaining porcine. Using this controversial technology, a human skin cell, pre-treated and injected into a genetically edited pig embryo, could grow a new liver, heart, pancreas or lung as required.”

So now suppose the human patient has a fresh new pancreas grown in the pig. But, once that pancreas is taken out, what about the pig?  Off to the pork-chop shop?  No! It’s not so simple. “It is not a pig with a human pancreas inserted into it—it is a human-animal chimera . . . This could affect the chimera’s brain.”

In short, maybe, just maybe, that chimera—whether pig or chimp—may have something approaching human brain function or other “characteristics that we usually think of as having moral relevance.”

Seems far-fetched that a pig or a chimp might begin developing human-like brains, but a whole lot of far-fetched stuff  is fast becoming reality in today’s world.

 

FOR MORE on human-animal chimeras and related topics including organ harvesting, growing human body parts, human stem-cells, mice given human brain cells, what is a human?, and others I invite you to check out my blog for A REMEDY FOR DEATH.  http://www.a-remedy-for-death.com/

A REMEDY FOR DEATH, Human-Chimp Hybrids,  Chimeras, “Chimphumans”, and “Humanzeees”

Plot spoiler warning:  One plot-line in my scientific techno-thriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH, touches upon the sensitive possibility of creating hybrids combining human and chimp cells and characteristics. But my post here won’t spoil the story, I promise. (Even though, by the way, a “Chimp Donnie appears in some of the scenes.)

But now, in the “real world”, not the world of sci-fi–  Wait! Stop the presses! These days maybe there is scant to little difference between “real” science and “science fictionalizing” what is perhaps just round the corner—for good or bad.

Sorry for the interruption. As I was saying,  David Barash, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, explores some broader implications—and ethical dilemmas—in an article, “It’s Time to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids” in the magazine NAUTILUS.  http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/its-time-to-make-human_chimp-hybrids

Definitely worth reading, whether or not you come to agree with all of his in-favor arguments.

Usefully, early in the article, he clarifies the distinction hybrids and chimeras: “It is unclear whether my own imagined chimphuman will be a hybrid (produced by cross-fertilizing human and non-human gametes), or a chimera, created in a laboratory via techniques of genetic manipulation.”

He uses both “chimphuman” and “humanzee,” by the way.

(In fairness, I’d point out –possible plot-spoiler—that the method developed and being tested by Dr. Doug Daulby, lead character in A REMEDY FOR DEATH, suggests a third way of fusing humans and chimps. And hence brings its own unique ethical and legal issues.)

By the way, this concept of combining different sorts of animals—including even humans with animals—is not really so new, after all. It’s been done with race horses and various farm animals for years. But did you know that nearly a century ago the Russian biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was working on creating animal hybrids, including “zeedonks” (from combined zebras and donkeys)?

And there’s more! In the late 1920’s, with the support of Stalin, he experimented with injecting human sperm into female chimps, and then the reverse! Apparently nothing came of it.

Enough said here. The link to Dr. Barash’s article in NAUTILUS is above. And let me give a plug for NAUTILUS magazine as well, in which I first came on via this article.  Terms itself “a different kind of science magazine,” and does seem to be precisely that. Fascinating articles, and welcomes new subscribers, in print or e-edition.  The link is http://nautil.us/  (note the exact spelling.)

Just to give a sense of the savvy: this pic below is used to accompany the Barash article in NAUTILUS  Look closely! That one spooky pic conveys so much.

 

There’s another article, by John Ellis, commenting on the Barash piece in PJ MEDIA  https://pjmedia.com/faith/push-make-human-chimp-hybrids/  The title, “The Push to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids”, correctly suggests that he is less enthusiastic about the possibility.

Sample sentences from that article: “Ultimately, what Barash is after is the erasure of the uniqueness of human personhood. His argument for the making of a human-chimp hybrid is built on his rejection of any real distinctions between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.”

Professor Barash’s article was adapted from his upcoming book THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: USING SCIENCE TO SEE OUR SPECIES AS IT REALLY IS.  Coming, summer 2018, Oxford University Press.

And after passing on all these plugs, time for a plug of my own for A REMEDY FOR DEATH. (Available in both p-book and e-book editions at the usual book-sellers, including Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/REMEDY-DEATH-Playing-body-biotech-ebook/dp/B00946XVKW/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521574977&sr=1-3&keywords=mcgaulley

(Sorry for long link; can’t get the system to work right.)

My blog–in case you arrived here by other means– is www.MichaelMcGaulley.net )

 

Japan: “Scientists develop pigs for transplants”

Plot spoiler warning:  Not needed here, as the method in my science techno-thriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH, takes a very different approach to human-life extension (or “life-renewal”) than mentioned in what’s to come.

“Xenotransplantation” (an experimental technology which we do not  use in A Remedy for Death) involves transplanting animal cells or even whole organs into humans to replace what isn’t working. According to this article in more than 200 pig to human xenotransplantations been performed in Russia, New Zealand and other countries. Not in Japan yet, and not clear on the United States.

To clarify, in most of those experiments the organs (or stem cells, etc.) have earlier been implanted in the carrier animal, so what comes across is –for example–a liver grown in the animal, but a liver made from human cells.

We have in fact  covered multiple related issues in this blog, among them those you’ll see at the bottom of this page. (At the moment I’m having trouble inserting links here  today–so much for the limitations of technology!)

In any case, this new article  ( http://www.the-japan-news.com/news/article/0004283766 ) refers to work on growing special pigs for the specific purpose of serving as bearers for growing organs for transplantation to humans, using especially clean environments (even as the fetuses are removed from the uterus of a mother pig), and special checking for viruses that might be carried harmlessly in the small pig but be dangerous to humans.