Reconfiguring the Animal/Human Boundary: The Impact of Xeno Technologies

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on the symbolic and cultural as well as practical implications of what I term xeno technologies. I argue that these biomedical technologies, which aim to prolong individual human lives through the sacrifice of animal bodies, generate considerable anxiety and pose many intriguing issues for health care lawyers. In part, the concerns engendered by xeno technologies are attributable to the incalculable risks they may pose. This, coupled with public distrust of scientific evaluations of risk, undermines scientific attempts to present them as benign technologies. In this paper, however, I suggest that xeno technologies provoke a deeper cultural unease by raising, in acute new forms, historical and religious concerns about bodily mixing and rejection which challenge traditional notions of (human) self identity. The various ways in which xeno technologies render human and non-human bodies vulnerable and penetrable, pose multiple challenges to the animal/human boundary. In my view, they should force a radical re-thinking of notions of kinship, which should extend beyond the ȁ8easy caseȁ9 of human kinship with other great apes. Rather than addressing this issue, however, healthcare law makes valiant attempts to shore up the animal/human boundary. Such efforts at boundary maintenance may be traced at various sites, including the regulatory regime under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. I argue that lawȁ9s efforts to grapple with the ethical challenges posed by biotechnologies are doomed to incoherence unless it confronts the unreflective speciesism underpinning law, which designates animals as property and serves to obscure our kinship with them. My suggestion is that health care ethicists and lawyers should instead seek to expose the myriad ways in which biotechnologies may prove oppressive rather than liberatory for those who are made their human and animal subjects.