Biopunk: Can we make a Person without Human Rights

Biopunk #1: Meet some of the Archetypes

Biopunk #2: Dire Wolves versus Humanized Flies

 

One of the reasons I started a blog was that in my gaming, I stumbled upon an idea that is horrific enough that I wanted other people’s thoughts.

The question is, can humanity make a person that people would accept as not having human rights?

Now, six months ago, one could clearly argue that the answer was, “No”. But given that an alarming number of people in the United States who are comfortable denying due proses to people accused of violating immigration law—the victims obviously can’t be “known illegal immigrants” because that would require due process to show that they were in the US illegally—I have to think that there will be individuals who would accept that my artificial people have no human rights.

Human Rights. Now the folks at Oxford say that human rights are rights believed to belong justifiably to every person. I live in Canada, and we have a government website that talks about human rights, and it makes an interesting point:

“You do not have to earn your human rights. You are born with them. They are the same for every person.”

The United Nations has an established “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and Article 4 on this site says, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms”.

I argue the problem is that the same people who are comfortable denying others due process would be perfectly happy if they could find a loophole around human rights—and one of the unstated fundamental premise of my game, Rubble and Ruin, is that a massive war was fought partially over this issue.

What I want to do is to articulate this loophole, and get people thinking about this, currently theoretical issue, long before it becomes real.

TAGs. In Rubble & Ruin I call these people transgenic anthropomorphic genomes. And before I can explain how this works, we have to know a little bit of biology.

The Tree of Life. First, let’s look at the tree of life. I like this visualization. Everything listed at the edge of the tree is a group of species alive today. The branching pattern shows how the different groups are related. The root of the tree is known as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).

LUCA was a single celled organism that existed several billion years ago and everything that is alive today is a direct, linear decedent of that organism. All the plants, all the trees, all the bugs, all the bees. You. Me. Everything. If you found something that was alive today that was not a descendant of LUCA, it would simply push back the age of LUCA to the new common ancestor.

The 60% Limit. To understand where I am going, you first must understand how much genetic similarity all living things share. But to understand that you have to have a slightly nuanced understanding of genetic similarity. Genes are regions of DNA molecules that do something. There are all sorts of different “somethings” that they do, but a gene is a part of a DNA molecule that encodes another molecule that has some action.

A mutation is a permanent change to one or more of these genes. Most mutations are harmless. The mutation changes some little bit of the DNA but does not change the thing the gene makes.

Living things reproduce and small changes accumulate and over time species diverge. Ecologically, two groups of organisms might find different niches and stop sharing their genes and one way or another the two groups separate enough genetically that they can never re-merge into one. Eventually you get bananas and people.

And when we say that a banana shares 60% of the genes of a human. We mean that between those genes that can be recognized as similar due to common decent, their encoded protein sequences are 60% similar. And this is true for chickens and yeast cells and just about anything. And that is because of LUCA.

We all share the same underlying metabolism, because we all descend from the same ancestor, LUCA. If we break that metabolism, we die. And if we’re dead, we don’t pass on any mutations we might have. There is a limit to how far apart we living species can get from one another.

Until now.

Conscious Control of Biology. We are entering a period where we can build organisms according to intentional design. We’ve actually been doing this for a long time. Bananas as we know them were created by people. The yellow thing we buy at the store would, without human intervention, be full of big seeds. But now, with each passing year, we are getting greater control over what we can create. And I don’t think we are crazy far away from being able to make TAGs.

You have to eat. Humans are heterotrophs. In order to live we must consume the remains of other, formerly alive, creatures. And each of us has our own “line” about how far those creatures have to be away from us before we consider consuming them is okay. Likewise, we each have a line for how far away from us something will need to be before it gets human rights. And I suspect there is not a court in the world that would say that a mouse is due Human Rights.

So, let’s start with a mouse.

Chromosome Puzzle. Sinha and Meller give us a nice visualization of the relationship between human and mouse chromosomes. The majority of mouse chromosomes are, from common descent, the same as humans. They are just shuffled around.

Soon we will be able to unshuffled them. We just need a genetic technology that allows us to force specific crossover events.

We will be able to create a mouse that has chromosomes that look like humans. Of course if we want these things to live and breed, we will need to make a male and a female and take out anything that will lead to lethal inbreeding—but that is just work.

The 60% Puzzle. Once you have mice with human-shaped chromosomes, you need to go through and meticulously change all the genes. It is easy to knock out, or remove, those genes that are unique to mice. We could do that today. There are a handful of genes that are unique to human, those will need to be knocked-in. We will create those synthetically. We won’t take anything but information from existing humans.

And then we will take those genes and gene regulatory elements that are different between humans and mice and build DNA sequences that are functionally equivalent to wild-type human sequences—but that do not occur anywhere in the natural world. Again, we could do this today.

And there are a few steps that I glossed over—but in the end you will have a TAG.

Grow your first TAG. If you take this TAG genome and grow it in something not human, say a surrogate animal or some kind of exofetus growing machine, you will get something biologically indistinguishable from a human. You would create a single cell that mimics a just fertilized egg and the thing would develop over nine months into a neonate indistinguishable from a wild-type human. At least physically. It would be easy to sequence the DNA and see that it had all these synthetic sequences.

Since we’ve carefully, and purposefully, made the creature such that it can breed with wild-types (we wouldn’t have to unscramble the chromosomes, but we did). When this TAG matured it could produce children with wild-type humans.

But nothing about it is human by descent from human’s common ancestors.

Do They Deserve Human Rights? For me, the answer is a clear yes. They are functionally indistinguishable from wild-type humans. For the Tech Bro’s of the world, I’m not so sure. I can easily imagine oligarchs wanting a group of humans that they can legally enslave. That they can force to do whatever they want. That they can further genetically modify to follow whatever fantasy they have in mind.

I think these people would argue that human rights flow from being born from a wild-type human, and therefore these individuals do not get human rights—they are just genetically modified mice and gain the same rights as a mouse.

If you made it this far, I would love to hear from you. Would you extend human rights to TAGs? Or, was I clear enough in my description that you can understand why I think some people wouldn’t give these creatures human rights? Please feel free to comment below.