A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)
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During the past century, a series of optimistic researchers set out to teach language to apes. This could have been no more than a queer expression of human naiveté… if it wasn’t for the fact that one of them succeeded.
Who succeeded? The one who avoided teaching the apes!
Why did the one who avoided teaching succeed?
I believe the answer lies dormant in an insightful objection to ape language research (ALR). The objection is that language is not like a strange property of human beings. It is not like a rare skill that we can loosen from our humanity and then empirically test if it can be transferred to nonhumans.
We must not confuse this insightful objection with its sophistic variant.
“Becoming someone” is more profound than “learning something.”
The secret behind success, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh discovered, was to initiate apes into a cultural environment with meaningful others who already were speakers (i.e., humans). And then wait and see. Wait and see if the apes would respond to this cultural environment as human children do… by spontaneously becoming speakers.
Every parent experiences that language isn’t taught to children but somehow grows within them, as if they were pregnant with language.
Sue had the same experience with Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota. They spontaneously developed comprehension of her spoken English, and they began to speak to her by (among other things) pointing to word symbols on a portable keyboard.
Culture transformed the apes’ way of being apes. Culture made them pregnant with language. Language began to “grow” in them.
Apes in the entertainment industry are specially trained to do apparently human things. These apes strike us as comical because they are not the kind of beings that can “carry” human skills.
In successful ALR the emphasis is not on training but on stimulating apes to become beings that genuinely “carry” human traits. Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota are not aping us. They have become sufficiently like us to be our co-inhabitants in language.
A short history of ape language research can be found on the Great Ape Trust website. Why training must be avoided in ALR is investigated in Kanzi’s Primal Language.
Privacy concerns and public health endeavours sometimes clash with each other.
A recent example comes from the state of Minnesota. After a ruling from the state’s supreme court, one has begun to destroy blood samples taken routinely from newborns in a screening program. The practice is seen as a violation of privacy, since consent was not obtained first.
Read more in Science, News of the Week.
Paradoxically, the victim can have the most powerful position, namely, as a “rhetorical figure.”
I sense this rhetorical power in Rebecca Skloot’s bestselling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I think less freely under the spell of this rhetoric. My thoughts are not allowed to discover new aspects of things. Questions are being silenced and the direction of my “reasoning” is predestined.
Who dares to be scrutinizing in the confrontation with the tear-jerking language that occurs on the author’s website for the book? This could be the lyrics of a whole genre of sad songs.
We read and write about Henrietta Lacks as if we were spellbound.
The most spellbound of all seem to be the reviewers of the book. Many excel in morbid presentations of a both dead and living body abducted by science; of a poor black woman who anonymously “paid the price” for a whole series of profitable medical discoveries and innovations.
Who wouldn’t yield to the temptation?
As a result, however, obvious questions are silenced. For example: Is it not wonderful that she was anonymous (until the publication of the bestseller)? Is it not splendid that scientists speak of “HeLa cells” and not about “Henrietta Lacks’ cells”? Wasn’t her integrity protected that way (until the publication of the bestseller)?
We don’t know how Henrietta Lacks would have described her destiny. Would she describe herself as a victim of science (rather than as a victim of cancer, for example)? Or has she become one of the most recent victims of the enchanting rhetoric of the victim?
(I wish to thank Joanna Forsberg for inspiration. A comment of hers on our Swedish Etikbloggen helped break the spell for me and gave birth to this post.)
Creating biobanks for future research is sometimes debated as if such investments seriously threatened sample donors’ integrity.
In Sweden, the Data Inspection Board even decided that it is against the law to collect biological samples and personal health data “for future research.” Participants cannot give their consent to anything that vague, they argued.
This distrustfulness may be out of touch with public perceptions, however, judging from a recent Australian study. The Australian researchers report “a high level of trust in university biobanks” and “a strong willingness to participate in biobank research.”
Don’t people know one cannot trust anything that vague?
Children pose a dizzyingly difficult problem for research ethics.
One of the most important tasks of research ethics is the protection of human research participants. This significant aim is realized above all through the requirement of proper information and consent procedures.
But children often cannot be protected though these means. They are too young to understand information about research and to give their own autonomous consent.
Children often are excluded from medical research. Since they cannot be protected by the standard ethical precautions, they can be protected only by being excluded from research, so to speak.
The result, however, is that “experimentation” on children in practice moves elsewhere. It moves to the prescription of medical substances to sick children in health care.
We often don’t know the side-effects of medical substances in children; at least not as well as we know them in adults. We often don’t know what dosages are required in children to gain the sought-after effect. We often don’t know when the dosages become toxic.
As a consequence of this, medical prescriptions to children lack the scientific evidence that we have for adult patients. Moreover, when children become sick, they may be “protected” as patients by being denied what could be the most effective medical treatment. Doctors cannot prescribe potent medical substances to children if they don’t know their effects in the body of a child.
The dizzying difficulty can perhaps be simplified thus:
There is growing concern among ethicists about this situation. More knowledge is needed about children’s responses to various medical treatments. Otherwise they cannot be given the best possible treatments when they are patients. That, however, requires more clinical research with children. – But how can we ethically justify such research?
The problem is discussed in the current issue of The American Journal of Bioethics. A target article by David Wendler is followed by seven open peer commentaries.
If you are interested in the problematic, I strongly recommend reading this discussion and considering whether the attempted justifications get to the root of the dizzying problem. One thing is clear, though:
Protecting children ethically by excluding them from research participation is not the unambiguously good deed it may appear to be.
Being human, can I think nonhuman thoughts? Can the world I perceive be anything but a human world?
These philosophical questions arise when I read Cora Diamond’s and Bernard Williams’ humanistic portrayals of our relations to animals.
A certain form of “human self-centeredness” is often deemed unavoidable in philosophy. If I talk about a dog as being nervous, for example, I use language. But since this language is my language, and I am human, the dog’s “nervousness” would seem to have its ultimate reference point in my humanity.
When I try these thoughts, they make it look as if we, in some almost occult sense, were trapped in our humanity. The more we reach out toward other bodily beings, the more entrenched we become in our own spirituality. Language may open up an entire world for us. But since language is human, it makes us a solipsistic being that cannot but experience a fundamentally human world.
Believing in an “ineliminable white or male understanding of the world” would be prejudiced, Williams writes. But our humanity cannot, of course, be eliminated as if it were an old prejudice. Therefore: “A concern for nonhuman animals is indeed a proper part of human life, but we can acquire it, cultivate it, and teach it only in terms of our understanding of ourselves.”
Similar thoughts appear in Diamond’s notion that the kind of moral response to animals that can motivate vegetarianism (such as her own) is an “extension to animals of modes of thinking characteristic of our responses to human beings.”
Perhaps I misunderstand them. But the idea seems to be that we become human primarily with other humans, and only thereafter relate to a “nonhuman” world on the basis of the more primordial human one. Humanism, in such philosophical form, could be called: the idea of “humanistic immanence.”
What is valuable in the idea of humanistic immanence is what it has in common with all good philosophy: the self-critical occupation with our own thinking. What I find more questionable is what appears to be an unfounded assumption: that we become human primarily with other humans (a purification of what is human).
One does not have to be a “post-humanist” to make the following observation:
Consider, in the light of this observation, Diamond’s important idea that, “we learn what a human being is in – among other ways – sitting at a table where WE eat THEM.” Take this notion of human becoming to ape language research, where apes and humans meet daily over food and have conversations that may concern such matters as what to eat, who eats what, and who eats with whom.
What happens when humans share food with apes, sitting down on the ground rather than around a dinner table? What happens to our “humanity” and to their “animality”? What happens to us as men and women when apes communicate attitudes to how humans of different sex and age should behave? What happens to our moral understanding when apes view some visitors as bad and urge their human friends to bite them?
My (human) notion of nervousness may in part have developed through interaction with our sensitive Great Dane when I was a child. What I learned through these interactions may only thereafter have been extended to human nervousness.
I am human and so is my language. But the manner in which I became human (and acquired language) transcends, I want to say, the purified human sphere of “humanistic immanence.”
My ineliminable humanity already is more than human. What are the consequences for philosophy?
In a comment to what I posted earlier about the decision of the Swedish Data Inspection Board to stop LifeGene, Åke Thörn asks what I mean by saying that
Since the question has deep interest, I want to answer it here, in a new post. I will use a simile to explain my intended meaning.
Suppose that rather than discussing biobank ethics, we were playing a form of chess with the strange feature that the chessboard sometimes changes. Squares turn into circles. Or the entire chessboard turns into a rhomb.
These changes of the chessboard make the old rules obsolete. What is “straight” and what is “diagonal” on a chessboard with the shape of a rhomb? The rules need to be reconsidered!
Research ethics and ethical review can be compared to games played on chessboards that sometimes change and require that rules and basic notions are reconsidered. What I meant in my previous post was that LifeGene represents such a basic change of the research ethical chessboard.
How should the “aim” of biobank infrastructure be described, given that infrastructure is not a research project with the aims of individual biobank projects? Do people turn into “research participants” when their ten-year old blood samples are used in new studies?
We cannot always cherish old ethical notions – as if there were no such things as TIME and CHANGE. We sometimes need to rethink rules and basic notions.
I hope these considerations explain my understanding of ethics as sensitive to changing times, and my notion of LifeGene as a “new reality.”
Pär Segerdahl is the editor of the Ethics Blog and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)
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