Pumping the Brakes on the Latest Biomedical Research

Attempts to find cures for neurological diseases include research proposals to create better neural organoids and neural chimeras. The primary ethical issues involved here are not so much about neural organoids, but chimeric research. Embryonic chimeras are created with human neural information such that a nonhuman animal would grow human neural components. The older frameworks surrounding animal ethics in medical research are ethically impoverished and thus are not suited to evaluating this emerging research. Consequently, we need more discussion of newer, more comprehensive frameworks that accept and provide for what is necessary for an animal to be the kind of thing that it is. Our success in finding a cure for neurological diseases will dramatically affect the lives of dozens of millions of human beings. But it is precisely when the stakes are highest that we need to be most careful about not discarding important ethical boundaries.