Bioethics and Big Sheep

Don’t let anyone pull the wool over your eyes, sheep are big business. So big, in fact, they landed one 81-year-old Montana man in jail.  

The Washington Post reported recently that Arthur Schubarth was sentenced to six months in federal prison for illegally cloning a giant species of sheep and using it to produce even bigger hybrids for lucrative canned hunts. In 2013, Schubarth acquired tissue from a Marco Polo argali, a rare and protected species of bighorn sheep from Kyrgyzstan. He then contracted with a cloning facility to create embryos of what he called “Montana Mountain King,” a 300-pound hybrid breed with the curling horns sought after by high-dollar hunters.  

Schubarth then bred the Mountain King to North American bighorn sheep, resulting in an even larger hybrid species, which he began selling to captive hunting preserves for up to $10,000 a head. He also sold dozens of DNA samples to breeders around the country. So, it’s difficult to know just how many of these Jurassic Park hybrids there are. 

Schubarth’s business venture violated numerous conservation and commerce laws. As one assistant director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put it, he risked “introducing diseases and compromising the genetic integrity of our wild [bighorn] sheep populations.”  

The bizarre story raises an important question: Why are we so good at recognizing and enforcing ethical limits when it comes to medical or genetic experimentation on animals, but not humans? 

These two discussions were, at one point, connected. Remember Dolly the Sheep? It was 30 years ago that the cloned sheep made headlines. Hailed as the first “successful” experiment in cloning, Dolly sparked debate about the promises and limits of this technology, especially about if and how it should be used with humans. Buried in the press coverage was just how unsuccessful this success story was. Dolly only lived about half as long as a normal sheep and was the sole survivor among hundreds of attempts, many of which were deformed.  

The implications for humans were among the main reasons that, several years later, then-President George W. Bush banned the cloning of human embryos. At the time, he was widely criticized for standing in the way of science and dashing the hopes of the disabled.  

However, the years have vindicated Bush’s policy. The promised cures of human embryonic stem cells never materialized, even after the Obama Administration lifted the ban in 2009. By contrast, non-embryo-destructive methods of stem cell research have yielded hundreds of treatments. 

Bush, in fact, approached the issue in a fundamentally different way than his critics and successor. His policy emerged after he convened a remarkable panel of experts. The President’s Council on Bioethics included not only scientists with the knowledge of how to clone and experiment on embryos, but philosophers, ethicists, legal scholars, and even theologians who asked whether we should do this; and if so, when and how. Their work, collected in a volume called Human Dignity and Bioethics, demonstrates the breadth of source material about human personhood and value that was consulted. In addition to loosening restrictions, President Obama replaced the theologians, philosophers, and ethicists from the President’s Council on Bioethics with more scientists and researchers. 

The problem with that approach is even more obvious today, when technology has come so far. If an old guy in Montana can pull off a do-it-yourself sheepzilla, imagine what’s happening with human cloning in China. For that matter, compare the concern with Schubarth’s scientific meddling to the widespread indifference of human manufacturing in the United States. IVF, surrogacy, and gamete “donation” have made it possible to create children to-order, often for same-sex couples or those who’d simply rather outsource the work of pregnancy and birth. We buy, produce, and distribute children to couples, throuples, and other relational mix-and-match arrangements without an ethical care in the world. And who knows what technology will make possible tomorrow?  

Whatever it will be, we’re not ready. The consistent trend in science is to plow ahead and save concerns about right and wrong for later. By the time someone turns up doing with humans what Arthur Schubarth did with sheep, it will be too late to hit the brakes. 

In the presidential debate awhile back, Kamala Harris said we should “trust the experts.” What she didn’t clarify is “which experts?” It’s one thing to master a technique like cloning or IVF. It’s another to know whether to ever use that mastery, evaluate if and how it helps people flourish, and to know who is qualified to decide.  

For those questions, we need those who make a habit of asking not only what’s possible or profitable, but what’s right, and what honors the value of every human made in God’s image. Dolly, the sheep nature never intended, got us asking these questions decades ago. Maybe that can happen again.