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Japan to Allow Human-Nonhuman Mixed Cloning
Sara Chan writes: "Japan has decided to allow combined human-animal embryos to be produced through cloning, which could result in mixed-species creatures. The intended purpose is to permit transplant organs to be produced in specially-bred animals. The original story is in a Japanese newspaper, but you can get an English summary here."
What the hell are you talking about? Oh wait, you don't know either.
Developing and testing vaccinations in animals is and has been a very common practice in medical research. It also has absolutely nothing to do with cloning.
All nuclear reactors in the US were built with negative temperature coefficients. They are the safest reactor designs in the world. Chernobyl had a positive temperature coeffecient, this is true, but the meltdown was due to operator error, not poor reactor design. And the US reactors, even with their failsafe designs are not completely immune to accidents.
It is also important to note that it is cheaper to build reactors with positive temperature coefficients. Reactors are built this way because of politics, not because scientists don't know what they are doing. BTW, there was plenty of anti-nuke propaganda in the 50's and 60's.
As for the bit about geneticists not knowing what they are doing... how do you think science works? Pop culture tends to lead people to believe that scientists sit around blackboards with nonsense mathematical equations surrounding them until they come to some epiphany and boom, we have a warp drive. That is not how science works people! Science is a lot of experimentation, trial-and-error, and guesswork. A lot of things are discovered by accident. Mapping of the human genome doesn't suddenly mean that we know everything about human genetics. There is a lot of stuff we don't know, and we are only going to be able to further our knowledge if we experiment and try new things.
You say that opposition should not be allowed to be disregarded as ignorance and superstition. Well, all I have to say is that maybe the opposition should come up with some intelligent and coherent arguments. It is easy to be disregarded as reactionary if you don't sound like you know what you are talking about.
We can only hope the scientists in Japan are as cautious. Adding carefully selected human genes to replace closely related animal counterparts could result in a source of transplantable organs, and a huge supply of failed test subjects. However, reckless experimentation could create monsters. We wouldn't see catgirls, we'd see the sort of deformed, unrecognizable things I'm sure a few of the trolls are going to link to. (Don't worry, I'm going to spare you the sources for all of these) A pig with one and a half heads, a calf with organs on the outside of its body, and retarded mice with skulls too thin to protect their brains from being damaged by wind have all been documented in nature, but they are extrememely rare and immediately culled by natural selection. A laboratory environment makes these disasters very likely, and allows for propagation of their genetic lines.
Even if we put aside the moral implications of creating and sustaining these creatures, there are practical dangers. Such organisms would likely possess immune systems too weak to defend against the sort of pathogens normal organisms never notice. Look at what happens to late stage AIDS patients-they often contract rare diseases doctors have never seen before. They fall prey to bacteria assumed to be harmless, or fungal infections that have never been observed growing in living things before. These diseases could use a large supply of debilitated mutants as incubators to develop until natural selection produces strains capable of surviving in healthy organisms. We could see the emergence of a virus as unexpected and deadly as ebola. This is only one of the dangers posed by genetic experimentation. However, the potential benefits are too good to resist. There is no choice but to experiment, and we can only hope the experiments are done responsibly.