Anticipatory Governance: Bioethical Expertise for Human/Animal Chimeras

The governance demands generated by the use of human/animal chimeras in scientific research offer both a challenge and an opportunity for the development of new forms of anticipatory governance through the novel application of bioethical expertise. Anticipatory governance can be seen to have three stages of development whereby bioethical experts move from a reactive to a proactive stance at the edge of what is scientifically possible. In the process, the ethicists move upstream in their engagement with the science of human-to-animal chimeras. To what extent is the anticipatory coestablishment of the principles and operational rules of governance at this early stage in the development of the human-to-animal research field likely to result in a framework for bioethical decision making that is in support of science? The process of anticipatory governance is characterised by the entwining of the scientific and the philosophical so that judgements against science are also found to be philosophically unfounded, and conversely, those activities that are permissible are deemed so on both scientific and ethical grounds. Through what is presented as an organic process, the emerging bioethical framework for human-to-animal chimera research becomes a legitimating framework within which ‘good’ science can safely progress. Science gives bioethical expertise access to new governance territory; bioethical expertise gives science access to political acceptability.