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MONKEYS controlling a robotic arm with their thoughts. Chicks born with a bit of quail brain spliced in. Rats with their brains synced to create a mind-meld computer. For two days in June, some of neuroscience’s most extraordinary feats were debated over coffee and vegetarian food at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science in Philadelphia.

The idea wasn’t to celebrate these accomplishments but to examine them. , a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleague ethicist Adam Shriver assembled a group of scientists, philosophers and policy-makers to discuss the moral implications for the animals involved.

“An animal would go from being a thing to a person, with all the moral and legal status that implies“

“Neuroscience is remodelling – in sometimes shocking ways – the conventional boundaries between creatures versus organs versus tissue, between machines versus animals, between one species versus blended species,” Farah told 91av. “We thought, let’s look at the ways in which advances in animal neuroscience might raise new ethical issues that haven’t been encountered before, or that might have changed enough that they need revisiting.”

It’s a timely question. Animal welfare has been hotly debated in some corners for years, but a handful of recent cases have brought the issue to the fore.

Last year, under pressure from activists and Congress, the US National Institutes of Health , and sent the animals to sanctuaries.

Meanwhile, the non-profit Nonhuman Rights Project has drawn attention for its attempts to take legal action to free captive chimps – so far Hercules and Leo from a Long Island research lab and Kiko and Tommy from private ownership. A new documentary, , chronicles the group’s so-far-unsuccessful quest for what its president Stephen Wise describes as “legal transubstantiation”. If the courts ever find in its favour, “the non-human animal would come out of that courtroom looking the exact same, but her legal status would be forever changed”, Wise said on the film.

That invisible change would hinge on a small but slippery word: “personhood”. In the eyes of the law, a person is something distinct from a human, and distinct from a thing. Personhood carries major implications for the legal, moral and psychological status of the being that is said to possess it. “I think of it as more of an honorific term than any sort of scientific term,” says Kristin Andrews, a philosopher at York University in Toronto, Canada. “It says, this is an animal that’s worthy of respect.”

It’s not unthinkable for an animal to make the leap to personhood. In New Zealand, a river of importance to an indigenous group has been ; so has a mosque in Pakistan. Courts outside the US have also struggled over animal personhood cases: dolphins in India and an orangutan in Argentina. With animals, the conversation often revolves around those with recognised cognitive capabilities, like dolphins, elephants, chimps and other great apes.

At the Philadelphia meeting, participants argued over what traits might qualify an animal for this vaunted status (see “A checklist for personhood“). Is tool use, or language, or planning for the future proof of personhood? A few definitions set the bar so high that they exclude some humans, such as young children or the cognitively impaired. One requires persons to be rational, self-conscious and a full-blown moral agent – a standard that would be hard to meet for children under 7.

Studying the brain could provide a clue, says Farah. Intelligent animals could have brains with characteristics reminiscent of human brains, such as the presence of sophisticated building blocks called spindle cells. But it’s still not well understood how particular psychological states or traits manifest in the brain.

The line between person and non-person becomes even more blurry when you consider the more radical side of neuroscience. Genetic engineering and chimera experiments can now endow an animal with brand-new traits. Just last month, for example, researchers in Japan revealed marmosets engineered to have a mutated human gene known to cause Parkinson’s disease. In 2014, extra brainy mice were created with half of their brains made of human cells. Some at the meeting posited that possessing a dash of human DNA might lift moral status – though it would be hard to say when that line was crossed.

In the end, the room seemed to agree that it may be difficult to ever pin down the definition of a “person”. The idea of personhood has ignited the debate – but rather than chase a perfect definition, society might need to settle for a practical middle ground. Instead of giving animals the full upgrade, we could start to understand them as near-persons, or at least as creatures of heightened moral value. We could then bestow rights in proportion to their abilities and intelligence.

“If sentience gets you moral status, but personhood is needed for full moral status, then the entire range of animals that are sentient but not persons have a status in between persons and things,” says David DeGrazia, a philosopher at George Washington University in Washington DC. “I think a lot of people would find a picture of moral status like that to be pretty plausible.”

Public opinion does seem to be shifting toward giving animals at least some rights. Last year, a Gallup poll found that 32 per cent of people in the US believe that – an eight-point rise since 2008.

But what rights might those be? The Nonhuman Rights Project focuses on habeas corpus, to protect against unlawful imprisonment. The group wants captive chimps to be sent to a sanctuary, where they can live in a wilder and more open environment. So far, no judge has ruled in favour of their cause. However, in May, it was announced that the chimp research facility where Hercules and Leo live will .

Upgrading animals’ moral status might not close the door entirely on research, but it is likely to make the rules much stricter. Like human children, animals might need a guardian to provide consent for research, and then only when it might be therapeutic or would present minimal risk; there would be no more infecting animals with serious diseases to test drugs.

In certain kinds of research, animals could have the chance to give their own assent. At the Smithsonian National Zoo’s Think Tank in Washington DC, computers built into part of the enclosure give great apes the choice to participate in a memory study for treats or wander away.

Alternatives to animal models might spawn their own ethical quandaries. One presentation, by Helena Hogberg at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, extolled the virtues of the “brain-on-a-chip” – a miniature, living model of the organ on a plastic lab dish. These models show functional characteristics like electrical activity and include a variety of cell types.

How brain-like would they have to be before we started to ascribe them interests and rights, asked one participant. Hogberg paused to consider, then said, “I don’t think we are worrying about that at this point.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Almost human?”