Human-Animal Hybrids

[Det. Bart Lasiter]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_chimeras.html

 

Thoughts anyone?

[Darth Andrew]

Oh God.

 

But creating human-animal chimeras—named after a monster in Greek mythology that had a lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail—has raised troubling questions: What new subhuman combination should be produced and for what purpose? At what point would it be considered human? And what rights, if any, should it have?

The world is troubled as it is; we don't need another insane problem to worry about. I say don't even experiment with 'hybrids'.

[Samnmax221]

Well I thought I'd heard everthing

[Datheus]

I don't believe that this is even an issue. My understanding is that these things could not even survive past the cellular phase. These ridiculous news stories always misguide people. You'd be surprised how many people think harvesting stem-cells involves putting a pneumatic hammer to the back of a baby's head.

 

The fact of the matter is that these "chimeras" and stem-cells are little more than collections of a very small number of cells. It is beyond me how people think that these advancements in science are abominations yet completely ignore everything else (such as the treatment of both domestic and wild animals, pollution, oil, etc).

 

And believe me. If I found myself paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of my life, I would certainly consider tossing a few babies into the magic Spine-O-Matic machine. That thing could run on the ruined dreams of children and the blood of virgins for all I care.

 

We should consider ourselves EXTREMELY lucky that something as negligible as a petri dish of human cells can fuel the machine.

[TK-8252]

Mice with human brains? Wouldn't that make them as smart as US?

 

They'd enslave us and make us lab humans!

[Dagobahn Eagle]

At what point would it be considered human? And what rights, if any, should it have?

If it's intelligent, give it rights. Duh.

 

I hate morons who think that people have to be exactly like "us" to be granted rights. Case of point, clones. There are people out there who seriously do not know if clones should be granted rights or not, and if it will be illegal to harm/kill a clone.

 

How dumb can humans get?

[Master_Ginn]

Mmm, sounds vaguely familiar.......the Island of Doctor Merou anyone? I know it's not the same, but I'm guessing we're not too far away from getting into that type of experimentation.

 

To be honest, I have no idea how to feel about this. I need to know more about it before I make a judgment. I'm not sure I like animal testing, yet it's been great to the medical community in finding cures and treatments for certain types of illnesses. Basically, is it right to hurt, kill, and mutate animals(i'm not saying that they always do this, but it does happen), for the sake of curing an illness? Should my morality be overlooked for the greater good? They're tough questions that I don't know if I can answer at the moment.

[Samnmax221]

Anyone ever remember a little film called Jurrasic Park, little moral about not messing with nature

[TSR]

hey, they were stupid enough to lose control over them!

 

but what if the animals went all wierd in an anarchy type revolt?

(looks at dog chasing tail)

nah, not gonna happen.

[toms]

It makes sense to have regulation in early.. otherwise someone will do a controversial experiment and trigger some sort of press outcry.

 

Though I think that calling them chimera at this point is a bit sensationalist for a bunch of cells... but science will advance and at some oint people will do something more complex - it makes sense to have thought about the consequences and set up a celar sensible set of rules BEFORE that happens.

 

Rights should be determined as they are now.. not by some artificial "that mouse has 1 human gene in it therefore its human" mumbo jumbo.

[ShadowTemplar]

This is the kind of thing that should not be forced into a straightjacket regulation. You cannot forbid making human-animal hybrids unless you want to completely cut off several promising fields of research vis-a-vis insulin production and other transgenetic medicine production.

 

On the other hand, one cannot allow commercial application of this technique to run unchecked - not only do we run the risks associated with any genetic engineering, we face additional ethical complications, since - without regulation and oversight - at some point, someone is going to make a 'baby with rabbit ears' or somesuch nonsense. Personally, I doubt that such an embryo would survive to birth, but that in and of itself is an ethical complication, is it not?

 

The salomonic conclusion seems to be to establish some sort of oversight committee in the academic world for regulating experiments, and a similiar official committee to regulate the commercial and medical applications. How the latter two are to be composed, I shall leave to someone more knowledgeable than I, but I would expect that physicians would play a major role. As for the former, its membership should be drawn from the scientists who actually work with these kinds of things, plus maybe a physician or two.

 

That way experiments and applications can be handled on a case-by-case basis, and when we have a sufficiently advanced idea about just what we're really dealing with, the precedents set for commercial and medical applications could easily be codified into law.