You would think that the development of a discipline called “bioethics” would be a good thing, but you would be wrong.
The history of science and medicine is filled with appalling instances of scientists and doctors cruelly abusing people and animals–forced sterilizations, lobotomies, experiments on unwitting victims…the list goes on.
The problem, though, is that the people doing the bioethics are the same people, in many cases, who dream up these nightmares. Their goal is not to “do no harm,” but to justify it.
This is not a parody. Two bioethicists have argued in the prestigious professional journal Bioethics that we should breed ticks to cause more infections of a condition that causes an allergy to red meat.
Seriously. | @thewesleyjsmith https://t.co/LewpLzTcXR
— National Review (@NRO) July 30, 2025
A case in point–and there are many others, including those approving ghoulish experiments on children in “gender affirming care,” “death with dignity,” and experiments on aborted fetuses–is this pair of Western Michigan University “bioethicists” who want to infect human beings with a disease that makes people allergic to meat. Because ticks transmit the disease, they called their paper in the journal Bioethics “Beneficial Bloodsucking.”
How appropriate. Here is the abstract:
The bite of the lone star tick spreads alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a condition whose only effect is the creation of a severe but nonfatal red meat allergy. Public health departments warn against lone star ticks and AGS, and scientists are working to develop an inoculation to AGS. Herein, we argue that if eating meat is morally impermissible, then efforts to prevent the spread of tickborne AGS are also morally impermissible. After explaining the symptoms of AGS and how they are transmitted via ticks, we argue that tickborne AGS is a moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat. We then defend what we call the Convergence Argument: If x-ing prevents the world from becoming a significantly worse place, doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, and promotes virtuous action or character, then x-ing is strongly pro tanto obligatory; promoting tickborne AGS satisfies each of these conditions. Therefore, promoting tickborne AGS is strongly pro tanto obligatory. It is presently feasible to genetically edit the disease-carrying capacity of ticks. If this practice can be applied to ticks carrying AGS, then promoting the proliferation of tickborne AGS is morally obligatory.
Yes, they claim that infecting people with a disease is “morally obligatory,” therefore, ticks should be bioengineered to spread the disease to all of us.
I doubt that I need to explain to you that this idea is insane and that both of these professors should be excommunicated from polite society, and certainly should be nowhere near medical or biology students. Either you see this, or you don’t.
Rather, what this reminds us of is a basic fact that almost nobody seems to understand: the last people who should be empowered to contemplate and set ethical standards in any profession are the “experts” who are deeply enmeshed within a priesthood of expertise.
A discipline, by its very nature, creates myopia. We saw this clearly during the COVID pandemic, where public health officials, at best, were laser-focused on addressing COVID and completely ignored the secondary effects of their policies. Even if you buy the argument that they were well-intentioned–I, in many cases, don’t–the best you can say about the people who did so much harm in the name of reducing cases is that they didn’t consider that their mitigations cost people their lives, livelihoods, educations, and caused enormous social divisions that turned out to be worse than the disease.
In ethics, laser focus is a terrible thing. Being deeply committed to solving one problem can blind people to the whole picture.
This is quite scary.
“New technologies can help. But the best solution, we believe, is legal: We need to broaden the definition of death.” pic.twitter.com/TdgM90iQXH
— Dr. Kat Lindley (@KLVeritas) August 1, 2025
Experts may be necessary to explain the whats and hows of a problem, but should be kept as far away from the whys and shoulds. Ordinary people, who are also educated about many other variables, should be the standard-setters for what is acceptable or not.
Experts do things to us; we should decide what is acceptable or not, not the experts.
William F. Buckley famously said ““I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.”
His point is clear: expertise and intelligence do not make for good governance. We see all the time that experts miss the forest for the trees, while the rest of us are living in that forest.
That “bioethicists” can conjure up the idea that it is morally necessary to infect people with a disease and get their ideas published in a serious journal tells you everything you need to know about the discipline itself, and the dangers of listening to people within one.
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