Yuk Factor

(c) William Bains and OUP 2004. Extracted from Biotechnology from A to Z, 3rd edition, ISBN 0-19-852498-6.
see http://www.biotech-atoz.org

A flippant term for the very real observation that the public, and indeed many scientists, judge the ethical acceptability of experimental procedures and biological manipulations in accordance to a scale of personal distaste. Thus the creation of the first cloned carrot in the 1960s was greeted with amusement in the press, while the creation of the first cloned frog in the early 1970s was treated with interest and some caution and the creation of Dolly the Cloned Sheep in 1997 resulted in widespread alarm. Similarly, tests that rely on newts have less negative impact on public relations than those on rats, and rats are considered more acceptable than rabbits or dogs.

In general this reflects a concern for animals that look or behave more like human beings. The ultimate public condemnation is therefore reserved for the potential scientific interference with human foetuses or children. In public debate the yuk factor is sometimes a deciding one: much of the opposition to Monsanto's promotion of BST as a biopharmaceutical to boost the milk production of dairy cattle was based not on arguments about farm economics but on the feeling that it must be horrible for the cow to be turned into a milk-producing machine.

This is a very real scale of values, and one that many scientists do not take seriously enough (hence their calling it a 'yuk factor' rather than a 'value scale'): it cannot be acceptable for society to support a scale of values that treats chimpanzees the same way as bacteria, if only because the jump from how we treat chimps and how we treat each other is so much smaller than that between chimps and bugs. However going to the extreme of beating up the CEO of animal-based research companies with baseball bats (as happened to the CEO of UK-based Huntingdon Life Sciences) is taking the ethical argument to extremes that few would support.