Super-muscly Pigs Trading Ethics for Efficiency

摘要

Animal research is moving rapidly in two, divergent directions. Research on animal cognition, behavior, and welfare is teaching us that many animal species have complex cognitive and emotional lives and needs. Such insights reasonably increase our empathy for and insight into species other than our own. At the same time, new gene editing technologies are allowing scientists to design animals in ways that maximize their economic value as food sources. These technologies include programmable nuclease-based genome editing technologies, such as zinc-finger nucleases, transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and the CRISPR/cas9 system. They permit the direct manipulation of virtually any gene of a living organism more easily, cheaply, and accurately than has ever been possible before. In the last five years, these technologies have been used to edit the germline of more than 300 pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats. In June 2015, a team of scientists from South Korea announced the creation of super-muscly pigs using the single-gene editing technology TALENs. Whereas the debates on the ethical and social aspects of genome editing of human embryos and crops have triggered public, political, and media firestorms, genome editing in animals has received virtually no ethical scrutiny. Yet gene modification of farm animals like super-muscly pigs raises complex ethical questions about animal welfare, about who is benefiting from these technologies, and about the evolving, contradictory relationship between humans and animals. These questions have been ignored so far, but our growing awareness of the rich inner lives of many animal species makes such neglect increasingly troublesome.