Chimeric Experiment Produce Animal-Human Hybrid: Has Science Gone Too Far?

[chlamor]

Humanism is a stubborn and arrogant philosophy. Not only is it Prometheus unbound but also heavily subsidized. An article by Jeremy Rifkin about this at link below. A few snippets:


What happens when you cross a human and a mouse? Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke but, in fact, it's a serious experiment recently carried out by a team headed by a distinguished molecular biologist, Irving Weissman, at Stanford University.

Scientists injected human brain cells into mouse foetuses, creating a strain of mice that were approximately 1% human. Weissman is considering a follow-up that would produce mice whose brains are 100% human.

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Now, scientists have their sights trained on breaking the final taboo in the natural world - crossing humans and animals to create new human-animal hybrids. Already, aside from the humanised mouse, scientists have created pigs with human blood and sheep with livers and hearts that are mostly human. The experiments are designed to advance medical research. Indeed, a growing number of genetic engineers argue that human-animal hybrids will usher in a golden era of medicine. Researchers say that the more humanised they can make research animals, the better able they will be to model the progression of human diseases, test new drugs, and harvest tissues and organs for transplantation. What they fail to mention is that there are equally promising and less invasive alternatives to these bizarre experiments, including computer modeling, in vitro tissue culture, nanotechnology, and prostheses to substitute for human tissue and organs.



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Some researchers are speculating about human-chimpanzee chimeras - creating a humanzee. This would be the ideal laboratory research animal because chimpanzees are so closely related to us. Chimps share 98% of the human genome, and a fully mature chimp has the equivalent mental abilities and consciousness of a four-year-old human.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1437701,00.html