Three students; one drunk, one who was reluctantly sober and one unfortunately cursed by love, have all asked me variations of this question within the last two weeks.
We’ll get there, but first, a survey of the conditions … free free to try this experiment on your own. Visit a pet supply store and ask them “May I buy some baby rats or mice to feed to my pet snake?” With some exceptions, you will likely be shown some feeder rodents with prices. Next time, ask the opposite question; “May I buy some baby snakes to feed to my pet rat?” Different response? Why?
At least in the business of pets, we seem to have a respect for snakes as apex predators of rodents, that we don’t have for the rodents. Rodents tend to get into our food stocks and our homes, so we hate them, we kill them with little hesitation, unless we happen to have a gerbil, hamster, rat or rabbit as a pet, those get a pass. And yet, even a field mouse cornered in the garage, is a terrified little mammal. We’ve all connected to them at some point to their remarkable fragility. Mice are not hard to kill compared to say, certain microbes, or even structures as small as a prion. But humans have shown our expertise at killing animals on the large end of our scale magnitudes … once we developed the age of industry, we found that we could kill things like whales, elephants, rhinos, and flightless birds without much difficulty. It’s still the small stuff that really eludes us … stuff like viruses, and staph, or of course, prions, those horrid little fuckers.
But mice, they push into an odd territory, don’t they?
They reproduce fast enough that with a source of food, they can become too numerous to ever exterminate, much like bacteria. But unlike bacteria, they are mammals, like us, and they can be readily genetically engineered to have immune systems that have been “humanized.” Kill a hundred? Breed two hundred more. Their relative fragility is a feature! They die easily? Well, we don’t want them to die TOO easily, but y’know, just easy enough to move some product through the Walgreens, CVS or Rite Aid. The biological research industry is a tough game. The people who do that work have to harden their hearts, and recognize that all the humanized mice that they have to test, are being tested to save the lives of humans. And I can only assume that most of them can handle it without wanting to blow their brains out. That’s where they set their moral compass, and they do a good job of working within those confines. But they also operate under the idea that “Nature is the worst terrorist.” That’s an idea that I reject, but I understand why some researchers say it. I feel that if they could do some nonlinear fluid mechanics and see just how much of a razor’s edge our lives rest, they would view Mother Nature as our greatest possibly ally against the forces of entropy, rather than call that gorgeous woman a “terrorist.” Yes, the idea bothers me because I believe it is borne of ignorance to just how lucky we are to even exist in the first place, let alone get to exist with the luxury of only being taken out by a virus, rather than by some kind of razor-jawed space monster.
And then there are those who oppose any and all kinds of genetic engineering. They will eat hybridized fruits and vegetables, but they won’t eat genetically modified organisms of any kind. They won’t eat animals or animal products because they don’t support the industrialization of animals. They argue that we have the means to produce vaccines without genetic engineering, that we have the means to produce foods and lifesaving technologies without genetic engineering, so we should simply do that. Some of these activists understand the dangers of manipulating carbon thread-like structures down below the 17 nanometer regime without control of chirality and stacking dislocations. While some of these activists don’t have this knowledge, and just take a “holistic” approach, some activists have both the knowledge to why genetic engineering is potentially dangerous, and also why the natural approach may be best. John B. Fagan is perhaps one of these activists as described by David Barboza in an over twenty-year-old New York Times article. The other extreme might be a farmer in India who sets fire to a field of genetically-engineered rice, because he wants to avoid the risk of those GMOs to contaminate his own all-natural, Vedic rice crop. That’s where they set their moral compass. Fagan willingly gave up some enormous research grants to stick by his principals. The Vedic farmer in India risked prison for doing violence against the GMO field. In both cases, they likely didn’t see the kinds of profits from their work that they would have seen if they had little problem with using humanized mice or GMOs in their business.
So where do you fit? Where do you set your moral compass? Maybe you don’t set it at all, let the wind takes you where it may? Sometimes we get lucky, and the wind blows us right into port without having ever touched the tiller … but most of the time, it’s the rocks.
This little analysis is just for you three, the rest of the readers have already left. So … stake a claim. Pick a position that lets you sleep at night. That’s all you have to do.
I don’t particularly like to feed a wriggling meal worm to a pet reptile, I feel the little thing terrified at its inevitable demise in the mouth of the pet gecko, but I don’t toss and turn in my bed trying to make peace with it. On the other hand, a mouse is sufficiently close to my own mammal point of view, that I unfortunately can’t block out their misery. I’m okay with conventional medicines and vaccines that test on mice, because for better or worse, that mouse has a job, same as me. But the second that mouse is born with an engineered, humanized genetic body, even though it looks the same as any other mouse, it seems to cross a line that I don’t want to cross. And that’s where I stake my limit. I can eat a genetically-engineered soy burger, even though I would prefer a non-GMO soy burger. I can take a vaccine that has been tested on mice, or chimpanzees. But humanized mice? Humanized primates? That would bump against that spot where I set my moral compass. Why? It doesn’t really matter, I have my reasons … they’re scientific and ethical and I don’t feel the need to share at the moment. But they are my ideals. I choose not to ridicule the values of others in this area, and I choose to not be ridiculed by them in return.
If you set your moral compass to a place where you don’t feel the need to judge others’ ethics, then you just might have found the sweet spot, a place where you can stretch out and breathe easy. I’m okay with a minority of people who support the industrial-scale production of mRNA vaccines using genetically-engineered humanized mice for the same reason I’m okay with a minority of people who are vegan and intensely centered around their ideals of protection of animals. And this reason is that we need both extremes, so that we can set our own moral compass on these issues, or at least while we wait for a COVID-19 vaccine that was not tested on humanized-mice. Yes, we understand that this non-GMO COVID vaccine will be more expensive, we understand that it will take longer to get, because it will need to be tested on humans to ensure safety of pregnancies and long-term impacts. But we’re willing to wait, and we’ll stay masked up as long as the law requires it of us. We support the safety and health of our human neighbors, and of our animal neighbors. That rodent may not be entitled to live if we decide that it needs to die, but it at least has the right to die with the genetic heritage with which it evolved. That’s the Rick Yukon official moral compass setting … altering that animals’ natural genetics so that it can be used as a cost-effective research tool in order to lower the costs of medicines which we may or may not need, is not different than many other forms of animal cruelty, except that the end-victim in these shenanigans will likely be our children and grandchildren.