Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (22 page)

Dvorsky has been criticized for being an interspecies imperialist, for suggesting that animals would be better off if they were more like us. But that’s not quite what he’s saying; he wants to augment animals’ natural talents and capabilities, which may or may not actually make them more humanlike. In fact, Dvorsky says we could improve ourselves by adopting certain
animal
characteristics—the vision of a hawk, for instance, or the ability to swim underwater for extended periods of time, like a dolphin. What he imagines, he says, is a total “blurring of the species line,” the scientific elevation of “the entire biosphere”—humans, dolphins, and dogs all gaining new capabilities together.

It’s still unclear whether we’ll ever be able to enhance the bonobo’s language skills and, more pertinently, whether doing so would improve the ape’s quality of life. But I agree with Dvorsky that there are instances in which engineering (or reengineering) animals is a moral imperative.

The world is becoming ever more human, increasingly created by us, for us. We dam rivers, till land, and clear forests right under the feet and fins of the creatures that live there. We spray plants with toxic fertilizers and dump our industrial waste in lakes and rivers. We take far-flung vacations, allowing foreign species to make their way into new lands. (In fact, we are changing the environment so completely that geologists have given our epoch a new name: the Anthropocene, from the Greek root
anthropo
, which means “human.”) Then there’s climate change, which is altering the slim slices of habitat animals have left. Some species will adapt, of course; as the planet warms, birds have expanded their ranges northward. But for others, the rapid pace of change we’re causing will simply be too much. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that an increase of 3.5 degrees Celsius in global temperature could result in the extinctions of anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of the planet’s species.

Even when we’re not driving entire species toward extinction, we remain a powerful evolutionary force, capable of transforming the bodies of wild animals. Consider the impact that our hunting and harvesting has had on entire populations. Though a big ram with large antlers is the last animal a wild predator would target, human hunters covet these impressive specimens. We have harvested so many of these large deer, elk, and sheep over the centuries that many species have evolved smaller body and horn sizes. Similarly, fish have adapted to human harvesting by developing thinner bodies capable of sneaking out of nets.

Humans are a force of nature—we are, in some senses,
the
force of nature—and we influence animals whether we intend to or not. So the real question, going forward, is not
whether
we should shape animals’ bodies and lives, but
how
we should do so—with what tools, under what circumstances, and to what end. Are the needs of other species truly best served by leaving them to fend for themselves in a world that we have come to dominate? Unless we plan to move all humanity to Mars and leave Earth to rewild itself, we may need to help our furry and feathered friends survive in a world that has us in it. As Kraemer puts it: “I’m of the persuasion that we are changing the habitat for wildlife so rapidly that we may have to help those species evolve.”

*   *   *

We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. We’ve seen how scientists are already changing animal lives and considered how their work might play out in the near future. But what about the more distant one? If we went on a tour of the world’s pet stores, nature preserves, and family farms fifty or a hundred years from now, what would we see? There are enough journalists, politicians, and ethicists out there speculating about the worst-case scenarios—the glowing teenagers, the resurrected Hitlers, the killer cyborg armies. They’ve got the apocalyptic visions covered. After my time in the land of cloned creatures and bionic beasts, I’m ready to imagine an alternative future, one in which biotech brings hope and promise rather than anxiety and alarm.

In this world, I envision stocking our fields and farms with healthier animals. We’ll find cows, goats, and horses that are naturally resistant to disease and then clone them. When we can’t find such mutants, we’ll make them, engineering livestock that are free from diseases that threaten both humans and animals. We could modify all cows so that their milk contains higher levels of anti-bacterial compounds or heart-healthy fats. That way, we wouldn’t need a special prescription for supermilk—it’s what we’d all be drinking by default. And we could create critters whose milk is better for their
own
nursing offspring.

We could also equip all farm animals with tiny electronic devices, such as the temperature-sensing microchips that are beginning to make their way onto the market. When injected just underneath the skin, these “Bio-Thermo” chips continuously monitor a critter’s internal body temperature. Imagine deploying these devices on a massive scale, putting one in every farm animal as soon as it’s born. If the world’s farms all contained microchipped cows, goats, pigs, and chickens, we could monitor the animals for sudden signs of fever and use the temperature spikes as an early warning sign of a possible disease outbreak.

Maybe we could engineer these chips to measure other health indicators as well—blood pressure, hormone levels, and more—and combine them with wildlife tags. The tracking devices of the future could tell us not just
where
animals are, but also
how
they are. Are elephant seals thriving? Or are they just getting by? We could tag a large and representative sample of the seal population, keeping our eyes peeled for an unexpected rise in the rates of illness or death. The data might be able to help us identify an impending population catastrophe and give us the opportunity to intervene before it’s too late.

Closer to home, we could put these kinds of chips in our pets as well. My dream? Networking these devices with our smartphones. Envision the kinds of apps we could create: An alert pops up on your phone. It tells you that Fido’s got a fever, but that none of his other vital signs seem out of whack. Given that the fever’s not high, the program recommends watchful waiting, but notes that if the dog develops serious vomiting or diarrhea, you may want to take him to the vet. The software provides a list of links for you to explore if you’d like to read more about the possible causes of canine fever and reassures you that it will ping you with updates every hour until Fido’s condition improves. I’d pay a lot for a system like that (and can think of more than one panicked call to the emergency animal hotline that it might have prevented).

When it comes to dog diseases, future pet owners may be better equipped to manage the occasional defects and abnormalities that do pop up. What if every new puppy came with a readout of its complete genetic profile? Armed with this information, we’d be able to provide our dogs with better medical care, monitoring them for early signs of illness and formulating treatment plans that keep them healthy as long as possible. We may be able to nip all sorts of problems in the bud with an early dose of gene therapy. Better yet, we might be able to fix defective genes in dog eggs, sperm, and embryos. That would not only keep individual dogs from suffering, but also make more dogs eligible for breeding, thereby keeping the canine gene pool as diverse as possible. (Not a dog lover? Never fear. DNA tests and screening programs for cats and horses are beginning to proliferate, too.)

We may be able to harness other laboratory breakthroughs to nudge all the world’s animals one step closer to immortality. One potential tweak involves a gene that codes for a metabolic enzyme that goes by the nickname “PEPCK-C.” (It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s much better than the enzyme’s full name: phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase.) PEPCK-C helps our bodies produce the glucose that our cells use as fuel. In 2006, scientists at Case Western Reserve University engineered mice that made elevated levels of PEPCK-C in their muscles. This single alteration had far-reaching effects. For one, the modified rodents were natural marathoners, capable of running for hours at a time without stopping. Normal mice tired and quit after just 0.2 kilometers on a mouse treadmill; the modified mice went twenty-five times as far, cranking out 5 kilometers at a stretch. Even more remarkably, the engineered mice lived two years longer than normal mice, and the females were fertile for twice as long. What if we made this same genetic modification in endangered species? It would give us animals that not only lived longer, but also had more opportunities to reproduce in the wild. This one small genetic change could be enough to help threatened populations rebound.

My crystal ball of biotechnology reveals other ways we could help animals transcend their biological limits. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if instead of euthanizing every broken-down racehorse, we simply gave them all bionic legs? (Of course, it would be even better if we stopped racing horses altogether, but barring that, prosthetics may at least provide a way to keep more of these equines alive after catastrophic injuries.) Or we could push the field of animal prosthetics even further: What if we replaced the legs of aging dogs with springy prostheses that let them run faster and farther than they ever did as puppies? Or gave the future Winters of the world motorized tails, boosting the cetaceans’ speed and enabling them to flip and spin and perform exciting new tricks? We could make injured or elderly animals not just functional again, but better than nature ever intended. Bionic limbs might help our beloved creature companions stay spry as they age and squeeze as much life as they could out of each of their days.

These ideas might seem like pie-in-the-sky fantasies, but imagining a future in which we elevate animals and enhance their lives is the first step in bringing that world into being. And it’s not just animals that stand to gain. Indeed, we’ve already seen how technology can jump across species barriers. The prosthetic liner designed for a cheeky dolphin ended up solving major problems for human amputees. Some of the vision disorders that affect dogs have close analogues in humans, and the gene therapy that cured dogs of their blindness is being tested in visually impaired people. Optogenetics also promises revolutionary new treatments for human neurological disorders. As science advances, I suspect we’ll see more and more of this kind of crossover, with innovations in the animal world inspiring breakthroughs in the human one (and vice versa). In 2012, for instance, a team of Swiss researchers used chemical infusions and implanted electrodes to stimulate the spinal cords of paralyzed rats. The treatment helped the rodents get back up and running again—literally—and it may one day do the same for paralyzed humans. By enhancing animals, we may discover ways to make
ourselves
smarter and stronger, faster and fitter, healthier and happier.

Biotechnology is not inherently good or bad; it is simply a set of techniques, and we have choices about how we employ them. If we use our scientific superpowers wisely, we can make life better for all living beings—for species that walk and those that fly, slither, scurry, and swim; for the creatures that live in scientific labs and those who run them. So it’s time to embrace our role as the dominant force in shaping the planet’s future, time to discover what it truly means to be stewards. Then we can all evolve together.

Notes

Introduction

a new industry is taking shape
: The researcher leading this effort, Tian Xu, has a dual appointment at Fudan University and Yale University, but the mouse manufacturing itself is happening at Fudan. Unfortunately, Xu did not respond to repeated requests for interviews, so information about his work and the technique he developed comes from several sources, including S. Ding et al., “Efficient Transposition of the PiggyBac (PB) Transposon in Mammalian Cells and Mice,”
Cell
122 (2005): 473–83. Ling V. Sun et al., “PBmice: An Integrated Database System of PiggyBac (PB) Insertional Mutations and Their Characterizations in Mice,”
Nucleic Acids Research
36 (2008): D729–34. Sean F. Landrette and Tian Xu, “Somatic Genetics Empowers the Mouse for Modeling and Interrogating Developmental and Disease Processes,”
PLoS Genetics
7, no. 7 (2011). Sean F. Landrette et al., “PiggyBac Transposon Somatic Mutagenesis with an Activated Reporter and Tracker (PB-SMART) for Genetic Screens in Mice,”
PLoS One
6, no. 10 (2011). Muyun Chen and Rener Xu, “Motor Coordination Deficits in
Alpk1
Mutant Mice with the Inserted
PiggyBac
Transposon,”
BMC Neuroscience
12, no. 1 (2011). “Pioneering New Genetic Tools & Approaches,” Tian Xu Laboratory, accessed March 5, 2012,
http://info.med.yale.edu/genetics/xu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37
. “Deciphering Mammalian Biology and Disease,” Tian Xu Laboratory, accessed June 1, 2012,
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. “PBmice: Piggybac Mutagenesis Information Center,” Fudan University,” accessed June 1, 2012,
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. “Tian Xu, Ph.D.” Howard Hughes Medical Institute, accessed March 23, 2012,
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. Dennis Normile, “China Takes Aim at Comprehensive Mouse Knockout Program,”
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312 (June 30, 2006): 1864. Pat McCaffrey, “Little Mouse, Big Medicine,”
Yale Medicine,
Winter 2007,
http://yalemedicine.yale.edu/winter2007/features/feature/51773
. Margot Sanger-Katz, “Building a Better Mouse,”
Yale Alumni Magazine
, May/June 2010,
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. Michael Wines, “China Lures Back Xu Tian to Decode Mouse Genome,”
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, accessed June 1, 2012,
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.