This morning I  am thinking: what the fuck, China?

Scientists added human brain genes to monkeys. Yes, it’s as scary as it sounds.

Okay. Let’s be clear. I am in favor of science. Scientific advancements save lives and improve the quality of our lives. I am also of the opinion that our highest calling as human beings is to create beauty, and to discover truth.

But this? This is not beautiful.

Of the 11 transgenic macaque monkeys they generated, six died. The five survivors went through a series of tests, including MRI brain scans and memory tests. It turned out they didn’t have bigger brains than a control group of macaques, but they did perform better on short-term memory tasks. Their brains also developed over a longer period of time, which is typical of human brains.

I am, of course, generally not in favor of animal experimentation, nor human experimentation —  I say “Of course” not because I presume my audience knows that I am a humanist, a pacifist, a vegetarian and an animal lover, but because I am a thinking, feeling human, and thinking feeling humans should all generally oppose experimentation on sentient creatures. I understand that sometimes animal experimentation is necessary. Medical advancements, for instance: when those experiments move forward, lives are saved and lives are improved, and that is probably worth the cost. It is sometimes impossible to move a project forward without live subjects, and animals are probably better subjects than humans, ethically speaking.

But this is not a medical advancement. This does not help humans live longer, nor better. This was done entirely, completely, because they could.

Although the sample size was very small, the scientists excitedly described the study as “the first attempt to experimentally interrogate the genetic basis of human brain origin using a transgenic monkey model.” In other words, part of the point of the study was to help tackle a question about evolution: How did we humans develop our unique brand of intelligence, which has allowed us to innovate in ways other primates can’t?

They excitedly described the study as the first attempt to do BIG FANCY SCIENCE WORDS. The attempt to answer that question is nonsense: how a macaque is affected by people injecting weird DNA into its genome has nothing whatsoever to do with human evolution, and anyone with a high school education knows it. There’s no possible way to isolate the variables and find specific information. I’m sure this would give hints that could lead to new knowledge — but six dead animals and five fucked-up ones seems a very high price for hints.

And of course, though I do not like slippery slope arguments, there’s no need to speculate about this experiment leading to more like it, coming faster and going farther: that’s already happening.

The Chinese researchers suspect the MCPH1 gene is part of the answer. But they’re not stopping there. One of them, Bing Su, a geneticist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, told MIT Technology Review that he’s already testing other genes involved in brain evolution:

One that he has his eye on is SRGAP2C, a DNA variant that arose about two million years ago, just when Australopithecus was ceding the African savannah to early humans. That gene has been dubbed the “humanity switch” and the “missing genetic link” for its likely role in the emergence of human intelligence. Su says he’s been adding it to monkeys, but that it’s too soon to say what the results are.

Su has also had his eye on another human gene, FOXP2, which is believed to have graced us with our language abilities. Pondering the possibility of adding that gene to monkeys, Su toldNature in 2016, “I don’t think the monkey will all of a sudden start speaking, but will have some behavioral change.” He would not be breaking any laws.

Ohhh, he would NOT be breaking any laws! Well, shit, I guess that’s fine, then.

The article goes on to make a fairly obscure point, which is that monkeys made to be more like humans will suffer even more in a constricted lab environment; it also points out that “normal” monkeys suffer enough as it is, that macaques have intricate and important social lives that they can’t experience in a lab. This is all true, and makes this experiment unethical — or it would, if there was any ethical argument to be made for this experiment.

Look, I understand that science does not always have clear connections to a practical use. My father, a nuclear physicist, spent his career working on multi-billion dollar projects that had no direct application in the world. But of course practical application was not the point: expanding knowledge leads to better understanding, which leads to both greater expansion of knowledge and, at some point, practical applications, which is where longer and better human lives come in. But we can’t just focus on the eventual positive outcome: we have to consider the cost right now, and the benefit right now, with the potential benefit considered only after that. And the cost of this experiment is much too high, while the benefit from it is — little more than bragging rights. This doesn’t change our understanding of human evolution, it confirms, slightly, something we already thought was true. It can’t confirm it too conclusively, because again, macaques infected with human DNA are not the same thing as  Australopithecines evolving under natural selection. Not even close.

Last two things I want to point out about this: one, Chinese geneticists have already altered human DNA, entirely against any standard of scientific ethics. (They may have arrested the scientist who did it, but really, what does that even mean in China?)

And two, China is not the only nation involved. Of course not.

When it comes to studying monkeys, a researcher gets much more bang for their buck in China, as the Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang reported last year:

A standard monkey in China costs about $1,500, compared to roughly $6,000 in the United States. The daily costs of food and care are an order of magnitude lower as well.

In the past few years, China has seen a miniature explosion of genetic engineering in monkeys. In Kunming, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, scientists have created monkeys engineered to show signs of Parkinson’s, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, autism, and more.

Because of the relative ease of conducting primate research there, some researchers regularly travel from the US to China for scientific work on monkeys. As Zhang pointed out, researchers at Emory University recently collaborated with scientists in China who work on genetically modified monkeys. And Su’s study involved University of North Carolina computer scientist Martin Styner. Styner, who told MIT Tech Review that his participation was minimal, said he considered pulling his name from the study and has come to believe such research is not “a good direction.”

Although the US is not green-lighting studies like Su’s, American universities that collaborate with Chinese scientists on such studies may still be complicit in any ethical harm they cause.

I hope we’re all ready for what comes next.