Bodyoids: Frankenstein Slaves Meet Cartesian Technophilia 

The Catholic writer Walker Percy used the term “technophilia” to describe a Western—very American—faith in the power of “science.” It finds expression in slogans like “follow the science” and the conviction that “science” is the guiding light to lead humanity up from superstition and obscurantism to progress and happiness.

South African bishop Denis Hurley (considered in today’s terms a Vatican II “progressive”) had earlier used the term “technological imperative” to encapsulate a further temptation of the technophilic mindset: if we can, we may. If we can do something technologically, we may do it. 

Not everybody, of course, believes that. We can, after all, blow up Earth many times over, but there is likely a limited pool saying we may commit planet-wide genocide because we have the bombs. In some ways, though, numbers don’t matter. In an “ethically pluralistic” world—especially in bioethics—there’s always somebody ready to push the envelope and be “the first” to go where no human has (or should have) gone before.

Take “bodyoids.”

A March issue of MIT Technology Review promoted the idea of “bodyoids,” defined as “a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain.”

“Bodyoids” would come from pluripotent stem cells made into “structures” that “mimic the development of actual human embryos.” With the recent U.K. uterine transplant and promising advances in “artificial uterine technology,” the authors hope that we might be able one day to produce “ethically sourced” “human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.”

Why make “bodyoids” (other than to prove you can)? Well, ethical constraints have hitherto limited what one can do with real human beings; so, much medical experimentation and drug testing occurs on animals. But animals are imperfect analogues to human beings, meaning using them for testing or experiments is inefficient and can provide erroneous data when transferred to human beings. “Bodyoids” might solve that problem.

The authors concede there have already been efforts to cross moral lines (e.g., “animated cadaver”). Behind such efforts lies equivocation in definitions of death. The traditional criterion for declaring death was heart-lung cessation: if you ceased breathing and your heart stopped, you were dead.

But, under pressure of the “technological imperative” and the growth in organ transplantation, the traditional criterion was attacked: cessation of oxygenation and circulation damages tissues, making them suboptimal or even useless for transplant. So, “brain death” definitions of death came into vogue: death was the permanent cessation of all brain activity, including the brain stem.  

But “brain death” always proved to be a somewhat more ambiguous criterion, in part because we know less about brain function than we do about cardiac function and, in part, because some people tried to chip away at the definition. I italicized “including the brain stem” above because the brain typically dies in phases. The brain stem—the part that controls respiration and circulation—is often the last part to die. Waiting till then, however, could pose the same problem as the traditional criterion of heart-lung cessation: the onset of transplant organ damage. 

To avoid this, some people propose “brain death” to mean the permanent cessation of higher brain functions (e.g., consciousness, communication, etc.). Such brain cleavage would then allow for a minimally functional brain stem keeping transplant organs “fresh” till needed.  

That seems to be the same mentality behind “bodyoids”—artificially produce a mentally impaired but physiologically functional human who can then be employed in medical research or, maybe someday if the technology allows it, supply “spare parts” like kidneys, a liver, or a uterus.

“Technological imperative” folks will justify the “progress” by insisting “bodyoids” really aren’t human: They are not the product of sexual intercourse but laboratory manipulation. They lack some/all brain function. They’re just “clumps of cells,” not perhaps too different from the embryos we trade in for in vitro fertilization or the dehumanization we attribute to anencephalic children.  

So why let a perfectly good blob of tissue go to waste?

The Catholic vision of the person is irreconcilably opposed to the Cartesian which, unfortunately, stands at the forefront of much modern philosophy. Catholic philosophical anthropology recognizes the human person as a composite whole, a being of soul and body, spiritual and material, whose division is an injury. It’s why we speak of the “resurrection of the body” not the “eternal life of the soul”—because the whole man, body and soul, shares a man’s fate. The Catholic vision of the person is irreconcilably opposed to the Cartesian which, unfortunately, stands at the forefront of much modern philosophy.Tweet This

When Descartes declared, “I think; therefore, I am” (cogito, ergo sum) he destroyed this integrated vision of the person. He turned man into a mind with a body attached. The “thinker” was what mattered; the body was but an instrument, a tool, of that “thinking” mind.  

For 17th-century Descartes, separation of mind from body was all in his head. For 21st-century builders of “bodyoids,” it is a vision they’d like to make a reality. They see utilitarian value in its realization and, on Cartesian principles, no ethical obstacles. If we subtract the “think,” there’s no “am” so—go ahead!

The bioethical world has been careening toward full-blown Cartesianism for years. It does so when it turns mental capacity into a sliding scale of humanity: Down syndrome babies are less human, anencephalic infants even non-human. A cheap alchemy occurs at the other end of life: fall into irreversible coma and men become turnips, “vegetables” whose killing is not “killing” because we’ve already defined them out of the human race.

With “bodyoids” made in labs, will coming into life the normal way—human sexual contact + pregnancy = birth—now become a “privileged” status while artificial reproduction can be anything from an “alternative means of family formation” to a Frankensteinian factory for human experimentation and medical needs, in the name of what “science” makes possible?  

Richard Weaver warned “ideas have consequences.” Especially bad ones. And especially bad philosophical ones.