From Winged Lions to Frozen Embryos, Neomorts and Human-Animal Cybrids: The Functions of Law in the Symbolic Mediation of Biomedical Hybrids

Abstract

This chapter argues that legal discourse offers a vital contribution to the social-cultural symbolisation of biomedical hybrids. Products of biomedical developments, such as human immortal cellines, three parent babies, frozen embryos and synthetic human tissues, appear to be questioning the founding frameworks, categories and distinctions of our moral experience. The main reason is that these hybrid entities go beyond the categorical distinctions between, for example, person and thing, alive and dead, male and female and natural and artificial. Under these circumstances, law’s intricate system of categories and constructions can become of vital importance in the collective effort to come to a cultural-symbolic understanding of these novel entities. In this chapter, law’s symbolic functions in this process are elucidated, analysed and compared to other possible approaches.

“The trouble concerns the fact that the ‘truths’ of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. The moment these truths are spoken of conceptually and coherently, the resulting statements will be ‘not perhaps as meaningless as a “triangular circle,” but much more so than a “winged lion”’ (Erwin Schrödinger). We do not yet know whether this situation is final. But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.”(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition)