Genomics and Society: Reinventing Life? - Molecular Identity

In Greek mythology, a chimera was a creature made from parts of other animals. Chimerism today has many forms and can occur within the same species, ‘intra-chimerism’ and across different species, ‘inter-chimerism’.

Advances in molecular biology have altered the ways in which chimerism is understood. For tissue transplantation between members of the same species, chimerism became a problem to be solved with immuno-suppressants. Persistent intra-species chimerism can be found routinely in the bodies of women after pregnancy, raising questions about the role of chimerism in both normal and pathological processes.

Taking questions of molecular identity further, current research into regenerative tissue technologies makes inter- and intra-species chimerism appear as the common bodily state of the future. For example, how do we define the species status of entities created from parts of an animal egg and human nuclear DNA?

This panel will present thoughts from practitioners and sociological and philosophical analysis of the border drawing between and within species using molecular methods.

This paper analyses the relationship between the molecular approaches toward life in genetics and traditional ideas of species identity. In an exemplary fashion a recent debate in bioethics advisory institutions, the HFEA, the House of Lords, and the media focussed on DNA and the percentages in which its alien origin, nature, code or cellular environment would make a difference for the status of an embryo as human or other. This debate and its resolution illustrate aspects of the bio-scientific involvement in re-defining and re-modelling our cultural understanding of humanity and how emerging challenges or conflicts are treated. DNA-based definitions of what indicates humanity in laboratory objects neither translate into, nor resonate with common understandings of humanity – but are brought into the moral discourse as if genes defined what is or is not included in the space occupied by the morally outstanding unit, humanity. The status of these research objects as part-human, part-animal was terminologically disputed and a name advocated that included these genome chimeras firmly into the human race; to the effect that oversight over their production and the further development in this area were handed over to the HFEA. This paper will discuss the tensions between the bioethical desire to ritually realign the moral spheres as common with the technologies, and the novel approaches toward life in its molecular configuration developed in genomics.

In November 2006 the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority received two research applications to create human-animal embryos using enucleated animal oocytes (an egg with its nucleus removed) and the nucleus from a human cell. The resulting embryo has been coined first as ‘cybrid’ (short for cytoplasmic hybrids), then ‘interspecies’ embryos, before settling on ‘admixed’ embryos. Although the debate has tended to focus on animal-human embryos, this also raises questions about other kinds of animal-human mixings: so called ‘true hybrids’ (creating beings from the sperm and eggs of different species) and chimeras (inserting the cells of one species into that of another during embryo development or later). Taken together, these developments represent new possibilities in the creation of life and, therefore, challenge established conceptions of species and relations between them.

Focussing on the case of animal-human mixings, this paper explores the discursive processes through which these entities are (re)constructed and (re)classified. Drawing on data gathered during a public event on animal-human entities, organised as part of an ongoing project, "The Social Dynamics of Public Engagement in Stem Cell Research", I will tease out some of the key arguments mobilised and consider their public policy implications.

While the creation of animal/human hybrid cells in the laboratory has recently raised ethical discussion concerning what constitutes ‘human’, recent research on forms of naturally occurring human microchimerism raises questions concerning the ‘genetic’ and the ‘immune self’. Microchimerism refers to a small population or populations of cells in the body of one individual that derive from another genetically distinct individual, and arises both naturally (gestationally) and via transplantation (iatrogenically). In this talk I focus on the developing science of feto-maternal microchimerism, its positioning with regard to stem cell science and regenerative medicine, and questions it raises with regard to understandings of self and cells. I draw from, and examine, representations of feto-maternal microchimerism within scientific and popular literatures.