An Ethic-of-Care Critique of Induced Genetic Mutation in Animals

Abstract

Keywords

Animals, laboratory animal experiments, ethic of care, induced genetic mutation, standpoint critique

Suggested Citation Style

Donovan, Josephine (2025). An Ethic-of-Care Critique of Induced Genetic Mutation in Animals. Journal of Animal Law, Ethics and One Health (LEOH), Special issue on Accelerating Replacement of Animal Experimentation: Critical Theoretical Perspectives, 5-11. DOI: 10.58590/leoh.2025.002

* Josephine Donovan, Professor Emerita, Department of English, University of Maine, USA

Content

• I. The Feminist Ethic of Care
• II. Example #1: Gene-editing Mice to Induce Albinism
• III. Example #2: Gene-Editing Zebrafish to Rearrange Their Internal Organs (Heterotaxy)
• IV. Example #3: Gene-Editing to Induce Muscular Dystrophy in Rhesus Monkeys

I. The Feminist Ethic of Care

The feminist ethic of care is a dialogical ethic that requires paying attention to an animal’s own feelings about his or her treatment. It requires listening to his or her voiced or otherwise expressed point of view.[1]

As an ethic of loving protectiveness, the feminist ethic of care derives from women’s time-honored and nearly universal role in human society of caring for children and others for whom one is responsible.[2] Care involves attending to and respecting the needs of those within one’s sphere of influence and awareness, recognizing that they are independent entities with needs and interests apart from one’s own, respecting their dignity, and trying to enable them to live optimally in accordance with their needs and wishes, while acknowledging their vulnerability.

Such an approach requires a careful focus on the animal’s reaction or, when that is not possible, use of the empathetic moral imagination to appreciate what that animal’s reaction is likely to be. Knowledge of an animal’s generic identity and personal history is useful, but in general, as we share communicative faculties with all animate creatures, it is not difficult to ascertain their wishes: to wit, that they do not wish to be treated in painful, stressful, and otherwise demeaning and disruptive ways. Nor do they wish to be killed or to have their basic genetic identity disenhanced. Even the simplest of organisms – one-celled eukaryotes – know what is good or bad for them and express by movement their understanding of these realities – by moving toward what is beneficial and away from what is harmful.[3]

Humans have known about animals’ feelings for millennia but have chosen for the most part to ignore this knowledge on the theory that animals are inferior to humans and that humans can therefore use them for their own purposes, regardless of how such use may impact the animal’s own life experience.

Based on our knowledge of the animals’ wishes we can formulate our own ethical response – which is to respect their wishes (when such wishes do not endanger one’s own life or the lives and welfare of those for whom one is responsible). In the case of laboratory animals used in genetic experiments, an ethic-of-care perspective would therefore require “replacement” among the “3R” alternatives currently available.

A certain humility is required in the caring praxis, a recognition that life is a complex and interdependent matrix of relationships, a complete understanding of which is beyond human ken. Interfering with one aspect of the matrix may have unintended consequences elsewhere in the network. Caring, therefore, requires a respect for the complex design that has evolved in all natural creatures, who are born with an inherited potential, an entelechy, and who strive in their lives to realize what is good for them according to that design or telos. A caring ethic therefore requires respecting the needs and wishes of creatures to realize their own good.

Such an attitude contrasts to the historic masculine domination of the natural world, which is conceived – at least since the early modern period – instrumentally, as fodder for human purposes, with little or no care given to the ethical significance of other creatures’ own wishes and purposes. By contrast, an ethic of care maintains that humans’ relationships with animals should be dialogical. Humans should listen to what animals are communicating about how they wish to be treated, and their views or standpoints should be respected and incorporated into any human decisions about their treatment and reflected in that treatment.

An attitude of humility recognizes, therefore, that nature, and in particular natural genetic processing, is an infinitely complex phenomenon. Like all of nature, genes are not predictably mechanical entities; they are pleiotropic, that is, they have multiple and often unpredictable effects; they control “for multiple, often unrelated phenotypic traits.”[4] This means that in gene editing, even with the new relatively precise CRISPR technique, “we may produce an unintended phenotype change along with our intended one (…) Hence the phenomenon of pleiotropy suggests that there will always be a risk of unintended gene expression.”[5] Compounding the problem of accurate genetic engineering are the so-called epigenetic factors, “chemical compounds that are external to the genome but (…) can control when and how genes get expressed.”[6] These may interfere with and distort gene-editing so that “off-target edits” may occur.[7]

As living animals are the victims of these experiments, they are the ones who experience the mutilated bodies that result when genetic engineering goes awry. It is, in short, often a “phenomenological nightmare for the animals involved.”[8] Moreover, of course, the products of the failed experiments – “collateral damage” – are usually killed.

Philosopher Mary Midgley condemned as an “exuberant power fantasy”[9] such projects, deploring the hubris of biotechnology for its instrumentalist mechanistic view of nature, wherein “a colossally complex system with its own laws” is turned into “a consignment of inert raw material laid out for our use.”[10] Jennifer A. Doudna, the biochemist who invented the CRISPR technique, acknowledged that it now gives humans “the power to radically and irreversibly alter the biosphere,”[11] enabling us “to bend nature to our will.”[12] Not surprisingly perhaps, Doudna herself worried that like Frankenstein she may in the CRISPR technique have “created a monster.”[13]

In their recent book Biotech Animals in Research: Ethical and Regulatory Aspects (2024) Mickey Gjerris, Anna Korman, Helena Röcklinsberg, and Dorte Bratbo Sørensen selected for critical analysis three representative examples of laboratory experiments involving genetically mutated animals, ranged according to the severity of their disruption of the animals’ normal well-being.[14] Unlike most reports of lab experiments, which give only the results, their descriptions explain what is actually happening to the animals in the process.

The first example is an experiment where the Tyr gene was “knocked out” in mice using CRISPR technology in order to induce albinism in the animals.[15] The second example involved the deletion of the mmp21 gene in zebrafishes in order to induce heterotaxy (abnormal arrangement of the internal organs) in the fishes.[16] The third example used the CRISPR technique to delete the dystrophin gene in rhesus monkeys in order to induce Duchennes muscular dystrophy in the animals.[17] The purpose of all of these experiments was to provide “animal models” for the treatment of human diseases.[18]

Gjerris et al. asked contributors to provide critiques of these experiments. I provided an ethic-of-care critique, reproduced here,[19] which is based on the animals’ considered standpoints in the experiments. These critical standpoints may be determined by communicating with the animals – paying attention to their reactions – and by appreciating homologically what the animal must be feeling. As humans and animals share basic sensorial and cognitive capacities, such inference is ontologically based.[20]

One way to estimate what an animal’s reaction to any of the three sample experiments described herein would be to imagine asking for her or his consent – which would be required of a human subject in any lab experiment.[21] Were any of the creatures involved in these experiments – mice, zebrafish, monkeys – asked their consent – after its procedures and purposes were carefully explained to them – it is quite clear that their response would be a resounding “No”. They would be running or swimming away from the experimenter as fast as they could.

II. Example #1: Gene-editing Mice to Induce Albinism[22]

Were one to ask the original mother mice in this experiment whether they wished to have needles injected into their stomachs repeatedly, to be pumped full of fertility-promoting hormones, which increase anxiety and emotional distress, and then to be killed, so that their embryos may be harvested for the gene-editing procedure, the answer, we know, would be “No”. This, according to an ethic of care, is important ethical knowledge that we humans should not ignore or override.

In this experiment the CRISPR technique was then applied in vitro to 440 harvested embryos with the Tyr gene (which affects the production of melanin for pigmentation) disabled or “knocked out”. The embryos were then implanted in surrogate mothers. 174 thus genetically mutated mice were born as complete or partial albinos, that is, colorless or without pigmentation. It is not clear what happened to the other 266 embryos or baby mice. If these were miscarriages, there was likely accompanying pain and distress for the surrogate mothers. If they were born as defective baby mice, they were undoubtedly killed.

As for the remaining partial or complete albinos, it should be noted that albinism is not just an aesthetic matter of color or lack thereof; it often involves vision impairment. How many of these mice were born blind or visually impaired as a result of the experiment is unclear, but presumably many may have been, an ethically deplorable result which no creature would choose for her- or himself.

To what extent the color change affected the social interactions among the mice is also unclear. An ethic of care holds that individual creatures cannot be understood apart from their cultural and physical environment – their Umwelt. Brown mice evolved with that coloration because it enabled them to survive in a particular environment. A white mouse would be robbed of that protection and thus more vulnerable in a natural setting. Granted, the laboratory cage is not a natural setting, but destroying a mouse’s natural capability divorces her or him even further from their natural ecological niche.

III. Example #2: Gene-Editing Zebrafish to Rearrange Their Internal Organs (Heterotaxy)[23]

Fish have feelings, as Jonathan Balcombe has revealed in an important book on the subject.[24] Indeed, “Zebrafish can get depressed and respond to the same antidepressant drugs humans do”.[25] The zebrafish in this experiment, designed with their internal organs abnormally arranged, are thus not objects; they are individual subjects with feelings, wishes, and needs, which, according to an ethic of care, we humans are obliged to honor.

To cause these living creatures to be born with severe birth defects that will affect their ability to function normally, in accordance with their telos, is thus morally objectionable. Between twenty to forty percent of the fish thus genetically distorted in this experiment were born with cardiac looping defects, a malformation of the heart that causes deficient oxygenation. These fish thus would have been impaired in their daily activities due to a lack of energy.

Since the deletion of the mmp21 gene is thought to induce heterotaxy, that is, abnormal rearrangement of internal visceral organs, the fish so treated would likely have had other serious malformations, such as to the lungs, spleen, liver, and intestines. Needless to say, the malformations of any of these organs would cause severe pain and distress to the creature and likely premature death. Thus impaired, the animal would struggle to carry on her normal behavior but would be preventing in doing so by the genetically induced defects. An animal thus “disenhanced,” that is, deprived of normally occurring faculties or coerced to endure artificially imposed impediments, is robbed of the capacity to strive for and realize her or his natural good. Such coerced deprivation is ethically objectionable because it elides and vitiates the animal’s own needs and wishes.

Moreover, it robs the animal of dignity. It may seem anthropomorphic to consider that a fish could have dignity. But dignity at its simplest means being able to carry on independently in effecting the realization of one’s own individual and species-specific life-purposes, or, at a minimum, being entitled to respect for that capability.

A poignant article by Suzanne Laba Cataldi describes how she came to realize how the concept of dignity applies to animals when she observed some bears performing in a circus, riding bicycles or dressed in silly costumes, etc. Such coerced behavior, she felt, seemed to violate the animals’ dignity: “what is so painful about looking at these bears (…) is their lack of a (…) certain bear dignity.”[26] It was a matter, she realized, of not letting the bears be who they naturally are – that is, bears, not ornaments or toys for human amusement. Dignity, she decided, means being “self-possessed” and in control of one’s own life[27] – in the case of animals, pursuing one’s own species-specific telos.

In the case of the zebrafish: having one’s internal organs impaired so as to be unable to function as a fish – to swim freely, to pursue food, to engage in one’s natural behavior, and to control one’s movement – means being deprived of the possibility of living one’s life as a fish-being, instead of as an experimental object designed for human purposes. Such distortion of a fish’s natural being robs it of dignity.[28]

IV. Example #3: Gene-Editing to Induce Muscular Dystrophy in Rhesus Monkeys[29]

The monkeys in this experiment designed to have muscular dystrophy are no longer seen as living subjects with their own needs and wishes; rather, they are “models”, that is, scientifically designed simulacra stripped of feelings and thoughts – in other words, phenomenologically disensouled, of interest only as physiochemical mechanisms. Were these animals considered living subjects and their feelings and wishes considered of ethical significance, these experiments would (and should) never have occurred. For, without question, were these animals asked if they would willingly undergo the pains, stresses, and agonies of disablement, their answer would be “No”.

As with the mice, the mothers and fathers of the monkey offspring genetically mutated were subjected to painful injections and, in the case of the males, the invasive probe of electroejaculation (apparently at times without anesthesia). The surrogates into whom the genetically modified embryos were implanted often experienced “difficult births”,[30] and both mothers and baby monkeys experienced maternal and infant deprivation, which is intensely stressful and known to permanently damage the offspring psychologically.

The fate of the nine monkeys born with the induced muscle cell mutation (which is thought to be the cause of Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy in humans) will likely be more dire than psychological distress. For, if the mutation proves to have the same effect in monkeys as in humans, their lack of a dystophin gene – “knocked out” by the CRISPR technique of gene editing – means that their muscles will gradually atrophy, and they will die young. The dystrophin gene codes for the protein that maintains muscle cell membranes. In humans Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy occurs only in males: however, in the case with monkeys the induced condition appeared in six females as well.[31] As the experiment started with 179 gene-edited embryos and only nine usable “models” resulted, there seems to have been considerable “collateral damage” (i.e., dead monkeys or embryos) along the way.

The article describing the experiment includes a disturbing photo of two of the resulting mutated baby monkeys at the age of about ten weeks. One look at the photo[32] gives one a clear idea of how the monkeys feel about their situation. They are frightened, anxious, and sad, clinging to one another for support. Few people could look at this photo without feeling a surge of sympathy for these pitiful creatures. An ethic of care holds that such feelings of compassion should not be ignored, dismissed, or overridden by claims of a higher legitimizing human purpose. Rather, they should serve as ethical guides, alerting us to the inherent immorality and wrongness of this experiment and others of its kind.

From an ethic-of-care perspective, therefore, replacement of such experiments is the only acceptable alternative of the current “3R” options (replacement, refinement, reduction).

Copyright (c) 2025 Josephine Donovan

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