One of today's great issues is how an advanced medical technology like xenotransplantation should be applied. It is well known that medicine brings not only potential but also risk. On the cultural level, xenotransplantations are equally complicated; they arouse thoughts about whether our outlook on humanity will be influenced now that modern techniques can “correct” our defective bodies. The article asks whether xenotransplantation creates new cultural meanings. That is, how do newly emerging ideas of a technologically created normality raise a set of moral questions about nature and culture, mind and body? The discussion is based on interview studies with patients suffering from diabetes and Parkinson's disease. The former have been given porcine islets, while the others have had human fetal cells transplanted into the brain; the latter are also potential recipients of xenotransplants. This empirical material becomes the basis for discussing how diseases can lead to a crisis in which it is essential—on a concrete, everyday level—to find strategies for dealing with the consequences. In this process of identity and normalization, advanced biomedicine is an important factor.
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In the United States in 1995, five patients with Parkinson's disease were operated on with nerve cells from pigs. Panorama, Animal Transplants, BBC1, June 1996. See also Nuffield Council of Bioethics, Animal-to-Human Transplants. The Ethics of Xenotransplantation (London: Nuffield Council of Bioethics, 1996).
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The interdisciplinary project Genetics, Gene Technology and Everyday Ethics was conducted from the Department of Ethnology by Susanne Lundin and Lynn Åkesson (1997-2001). The medical project Treatment of Diabetes by Transplantation of Porcine Islets (1998-2003) was conducted from the Department of Transplantation Surgery, Huddinge Hospital, by C.G. Groth, and includes the ethnological subproject Cultural Perspectives on Xenotransplantation, in which Susanne Lundin and Markus Idvall are involved.
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Parkinson's disease is a serious neurodegenerative disease in which the body cannot produce dopamine. Without this hormone, important nerve cells in the brain cannot be regenerated, which results in the body being unable to function. Since 1987, nineteen patients have been transplanted with human fetal cells at Lund University. My informants belong to this group. Globally, about 350 people have been operated.
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In 2001, the research project “Cultural Perspectives on Xenotransplantation” (Susanne Lundin, Markus Idvall and Lynn Åkesson) initiated a study focusing on members of the general public in Sweden. Through a Swedish Institute for Public Opinion survey (SIFO Research & Consulting AB), 1,000 randomly selected individuals aged 15 and upwards were interviewed by telephone. Seven questions were put within the framework of a nationwide so-called telephone omnibus, a telephone survey that SIFO Research & Consulting runs Monday to Thursday every week—and through which the interviewees are confronted with a collection of question relating to a large number of subjects and to the different clients of the institute. The main aim was to capture the attitudes of ordinary people to transplants of organs, cells, and genes from human to human and from animal to human. In contrast to earlier studies by the research group, “Attitudes of the General Public to Transplants” has been done primarily using quantitative methods. This attitude survey stems from a need to gain further insight into the in-depth interviews that had been conducted earlier with a broad empirical material. See also S. Lundin and M. Idvall, “Attitudes of Swedes to transplants and transplantation research” (forthcoming).
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The mission of Health Care is to make people healthy or at least reduce their symptoms. That most drugs don't just give relief—but also have side effects—is well known by both experts and laymen. With biomedical treatments, however, and particularly those that are relatively unproven, this knowledge is especially important. In the wake of biotechnology, it is not only new medical problems that crop up, but also a new definition of medical science: an image in which medicine is seen not just as a healer, but also as a direct threat.
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In the multidisciplinary research project “Genetics, Gene Technology and Everyday Ethics” led by myself and the ethnologist Lynn Åkesson (1998), amongst other things, we are studying why certain innovations are judged as being unproblematic while others are provocative. It has become apparent that in the medical field, a pragmatic outlook usually prevails in which the advantages have preference over possible misgivings. Gene technology applied in plant breeding is criticized in a totally different way and can result in the closest militant opposition groups. Here, hopes of medical breakthroughs are confronted by the idea that the technique is a risky encroachment into natural processes that can easily go out of people's control—or that can be exploited in the wrong way.
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