Will Human Genes Be Spliced into Food for People?

• Author: Fitz, Don

...they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906

Exactly what constitutes cannibalism is less clear than it might seem. Everyone would agree that eating a human finger is cannibalism. But what about the tip of a finger? If you eat food cooked with lard which includes fragments of a slaughterhouse worker, is that cannibalism?

The problem of inserting human genes into food destined for human consumption is not so different. Is it cannibalism to eat food with one human gene? What about 50 human genes or an entire human chromosome? How much human material spliced into a living organism would make a product "essentially human?"

Just as people are unlikely to agree on how much genetic material constitutes "humanness," they are likely to differ on the conditions under which it is moral or immoral to consume food with human components. Given such a lack of consensus, we might expect that there would be a national discussion of using human genes in food.

Eating food with human genetic components would certainly run counter to the moral or religious beliefs of more than a few people. Even those who do not agree with their values are likely to defend their right to practice their beliefs. This would suggest that, even if there was no debate on whether or not to produce food with human genes, if it were done, such food should be labeled so that those who choose not to consume it could do so.

While these might seem to be reasonable expectations, food corporations and government agencies have acted as though there are no moral issues involved in the decisions they have made concerning what reaches consumers. Experimentation with introducing human genes into the food supply is already well advanced. There is good reason to suspect that the number of human genes in food will increase during the next few years. As this happens, industry is developing rationalizations of why human genes in food is not an issue deserving attention and governments are making it increasingly difficult for people to find out exactly what they are eating.

Human genes into animals

Genetic engineering (GE) researchers have been putting human genes into animals for years for medical purposes, such as trying to make pig hearts human-compatible...