Beware the ‘Bodyoids’

H ere come the “bodyoids” — maybe. Earlier this year, a group of academics speculated enthusiastically about the possibility that we may soon be able to develop entire human bodies, complete with everything — except brains. In MIT Technology Review, they gushed about the utility of “a potentially unlimited source of human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.” They could be used to test therapies for non-bodyoids, and as a source of . . . spare parts.

“Many will find the concept grotesque or appalling,” they admit, adding that “just because something can be done does not mean it should be done.” That such a bizarre idea is even being discussed is a sign that it is probably closer to being feasible than we’re ready for.

This new scientific terrain will come with far more issues to wrestle with than “consent,” one of the few these scientists could summon up. That they seem more excited about the experimental potential of a nonsentient mass of living human flesh than they seem interested in pondering the ethical issues attendant to the creation of such a thing is a strong indicator that we’ll need a way to think about advances in biotechnology that scientists, and science itself, cannot provide.

For that, we can start by looking not forward, as scientists always seem so keen to do, but backward, to an initiative launched by President George W. Bush. The Bush era may be over, but the Presidential Council on Bioethics, which Bush created, should not be forgotten.

President Bush initiated the council in a 2001 executive order. It was not the first such group. Prior councils had been assembled since 1974. But Bush’s version was unique. Led initially by the polymathic Leon Kass, it formed against the backdrop of a series of high-profile developments in biotechnology: Dolly the sheep had been cloned in 1996, and debate was raging in unusually public fashion about the use of stem cells. The role of the council was seemingly simple. As the order spelled it out, “The Council shall advise the President on bioethical issues that may emerge as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology.”

But there was a subtlety to the council as it ultimately functioned. It did not simply assemble a group of scientists to police their own fields. According to theological ethics professor Gilbert Meilaender, who served on the council, Kass stressed that “it was a council ‘on’ bioethics, not a council ‘of’ bioethicists.”

The presence of Kass, Meilaender, and others, such as Princeton University professor Robby George, further indicates that it was up to something more sophisticated: to construct a framework for the public to think through these complicated issues. In George’s view, it succeeded in creating “reports that improved the quality of public debate by equipping citizens and policy makers with solid factual information vetted by experts representing different points of view on key ethical questions, and informing them of the best arguments available on competing sides of hot-button issues.”

These reports are more than time capsules of early 2000s hot-button scientific issues. They furnish principles relevant today. One report, on cloning, judged using the practice on humans “not just another in a series of powerful tools for overcoming unwanted infertility or treating disease” but rather a worrying “crossing of an important line separating sexual from asexual procreation and the first step toward genetic control over the next generation,” establishing that scientific advance cannot be pursued heedless of moral considerations. Another, on reproductive technologies, lamented that “our regulatory institutions have not kept pace with our rapid technological advance,” which remains the case.

The council did not agree on everything. That was not its purpose. Nor was its driving motivation to produce public policy recommendations, though it did supply some. Its primary aspiration, as Meilaender wrote, was “to help the public and its elected representatives think about the implications of biotechnological advance for human life.” At a time when such questions were “bizarrely prominent,” as Yuval Levin, who served as the council’s executive director, put it, that was an important role.

The council was replaced by a superficially similar yet less impressive body in Barack Obama’s presidency. Neither Donald Trump in his first term nor Joe Biden in his only term had anything comparable. But these issues have not gone away. Speculation about bodyoids is only the tip of today’s biotechnology iceberg. Some tech titans currently have the president’s ear. Yet the tech world is currently besotted with a form of private eugenics involving extensive prescreening of embryos generated through in vitro fertilization, and unironically throwing around terms like “Gattaca stack” (another reason conservatives should be wary of Big Tech’s sudden favor). Still others dream of “queering the genome.”

The Bush council’s work, though now old by the standards of constantly advancing science, can still provide some guidance today. Better yet would be to revive it. The goal of all thinking on these matters, whether informed indirectly or directly by the council’s work or not, should be to articulate a positive moral vision that enables clear judgment on what advances are consistent with it, and what falls short. “The challenge is always to articulate the yes for which you have to say no to some things,” Levin told me. Maybe there are some more defensible innovations. But we won’t know without the right guidance.

Our very humanity should remain paramount in such guidance. Should we lose track of that, even the greatest wonders of progress could not compensate for the loss of moral judgment. We’d lose something fundamental if we abandoned the sort of discernment that should make it pretty obvious that there’d be something wrong with harvesting brainless copies of human bodies. Meilaender warned that “we can become inhuman in either of two ways — by acting in a manner that is less than human, or by striving to be more than human.” If we’re not careful, aiming for the latter could lead to the former. And the real “bodyoids” might end up being us.