Ethical Issues of Transplanting Organs from Transgenic Animals into Human Beings

One of the most important applications of transgenic animals for medical purposes is totransplant their organs into human’s body, an issue which has caused a lot of ethical andscientific discussions. we can divide the ethical arguments to two comprehensive groups;the first group which is known as deontological critiques (related to the action itself regardlessof any results pointing the human or animal) and the second group, called theconsequentialist critiques (which are directly pointing the consequences of the action).the latter arguments also can be divided to two subgroups. in the first one which namedanthropocentrism, just humankind has inherent value in the moral society, and it studiesthe problem just from a human-based point of view while in second named, biocentrismall the living organism have this value and it deals specially with the problem from theanimal-based viewpoint. in this descriptive-analytic study, ethical issues were retrievedfrom books, papers, international guidelines, thesis, declarations and instructions, andeven some weekly journals using keywords related to transgenic animals, organ, andtransplantation. according to the precautionary principle with the strong legal and ethicalbackground, due to lack of accepted scientific certainties about the safety of the procedure,in this phase, transplanting animal’s organs into human beings have the potentialharm and danger for both human and animals, and application of this procedure is unethicaluntil the safety to human will be proven.