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Blending Mice and Men
An anonymous reader sends in this piece about chimeras - not the ones with a THAC0 of 11, but a more general term meaning any multi-creature hybrid. A comprehensive look at the moral and scientific issues surrounding this area of biotech.
The latest Chimera's discovered can be found here on worth 1000. Behold what science can do now!
The implications of a "humanzee" is enough to keep philosophers and religious thinkers busy for quite a while.
Does a humanzee really have a soul? Should they be granted "human rights"? Can we use them to test drugs or clean out clogged sewer lines? Really quite interesting.
Just another humbling experience for those who think humans are something special apart from the rest of creation.
In my opinion the "we should not do this" argument splits into three branches: it's dehumanizing for humans, we're opening pandora's box, and it's bad for the chimeras.
I'll leave the first and second branch alone and focus on the third. These sorts of experiments probably put the chimeras through a great deal of hardship: we're creating organic systems which are not found in nature, and very probably have deep physiological problems.
My grandparents' ranch bought a critter that was 3/8 buffalo, 1/8 cow, and 1/2 yak. It was a very messed up animal and walked around in a constant state of confusion- I would guess due to conflicting instincts and brain chemistry.
I can only imagine what a mouse with human brain cells (mentioned in the article) would feel like- it'd almost certainly feel unwell, to say the least. Worse yet, how a non-human critter with human brain cells exposed to culture would feel like (and thus being smart enough to 1. know how messed up he is and 2. feel more dimensions of pain).
We may be creating hell on earth for some of these critters. That's not very cool.
RD
This already happens, in a form of twin birth where a pair of fraternal twins fuse into a single embryo. This can result in an "embedded twin", where one twin is partially absorbed into the body of the other. You get individuals with second faces on their shoulders, etc. But there is the happier case where the twins get mixed up at a very early stage in blastular development and develop normally from then on. This produces a chimeral individual whose cells are of two different genotypes.
This is extremely rare; a case was discovered in 2002 when a woman needed a kidney transplant. Tissue typing revealed her to be a tetragametic individual, having developed from four gametes instead of two. Half her cells were genotypically different from the other half. During development, this woman and her twin fused into one embryo, and appeared to the world after birth to be one person. There are probably more people like this out there. I seem to remember a story where another woman surprisingly failed a maternity test for her own son, and was found to be chimeral.
See here (or its Google cache to avoid slashdotting) for details.
How about if they transplant animal stem cells into other animals first and see what happens.
I know there are more immediate 'benefits' to immediately going straight to human/animal but there would be plenty to learn by studying animal/animal chimera and we might just avoid making some serious mistakes in the process.
What's the rush all of a sudden? People have suffered from genetic disorders and trauma and disease in the past and will continue to in the future, regardless of how many discoveries we make... why do we need to find all the answers now?
The scientific community needs to learn a little patience and self-control and get their heads out of the pharmaceutical industry's ass and take a breath of fresh air.
The only way human/animal makes sense at this stage in our understanding of this area of science is that the Return on Investment is more immediate.
Is that good enough reason to jump into the deep end before we know how to swim?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Ok, maybe they're not chimeras in the sense of two radically different lifeforms, but the article considered a mother carrying DNA in their blood from their child as being close enough, so I think it's OK to consider any lifeform in which there are two or more non-identical DNA sequences present.
DNA is horribly unstable stuff. That's why mutations occur. It's also why certain cancers occur. All it takes is for a cell's DNA to be altered. A bad copy, a reaction with a free radical, whatever. What you get is a cell with different DNA than other cells.
99% of the time, that's not a problem. The cell destroys itself or gets destroyed by the body's defenses. No big deal. Some of the remaining time, the cell goes cancerous. Either the cancer or the organism is destroyed.
Most of the remaining incidents would likely be chimeras of a kind, especially if the organism is still developing. There's absolutely nothing to stop a cell mutating subtly and then copying that mutation into every copy of that cell ever made. If it's a useful mutation (it can survive and it confers an advantage) AND it occurs early enough in life that descendents acquire that mutation, we call it evolution. But I can think of absolutely no reason why a useful mutation cannot occur at any time in an organism's lifetime. It's just going to be rather more regional and it probably wouldn't be conferred to descendents.
Although much less likely than a single cell mutating, I can see absolutely no reason why it would be impossible for multiple cells to mutate in a way that would (a) individually function and (b) function together as a single organism.
Exposed to an environment that is sufficiently hostile to DNA, there is a non-zero probability of just about any imaginable set of mutations occuring. This creates an interesting philosophical problem. There's a lot of debate as to when human life begins. But by the arguments given above, there is a non-zero probability that any life could be human, and a (much higher) probability that any human is not entirely human.
If cells can mutate, blend, fuse, do whatever cells like doing on weekends, etc, then is it meaningful to consider how human a chimera is? We must all be chimeras. It's just a matter of degree.
"Human" cannot, then, be the state of an organism, because no organism is guaranteed a uniform state, unless it's unicellular. At best, it can only be a composite of states. However, that might not be good enough, either. Let's take the most extreme example possible - some idiot decides to blend humans and chimpanzees - not through breeding, but through genetic and chimeric techniques.
Now what happens? The cells will very likely fuse extremely well, being far more similar in nature than the pig/human example in the article. Let's say that the result is a "perfect" 50/50 mix. Are they human or not? Would it be possible to tell, without careful DNA analysis?
Ok, now let's say that the ratio is 90% human and that it turns out most people accept the person is human. Fine. Let's also say that, as a result of normal cell mutations (as outlined above) and/or cell replacement the ratio falls over the lifetime to below 50% human. Are they still a person?
Or take the reverse scenario. They start off 90% chimp, and (through cell mutations/replacement) become over 50% human. In other words, can you "become" human after you're born?
It seems to me that the entire problem is very complex and that existing definitions of what an organism is simply aren't good enough to classify organisms that are non-trivially chimeric.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I myself, though mildly religious, am a believer in Kantian ethics: and thus, I base my judgments of morality not on Religion (which has morals but no rational grounding for them), but rather on Philosophy (which sometimes has morals but always has a more or less reasonable rational explanation for why).
I suspect that an Athiest who agrees with me on this issue (anti-Chimerian) is appealing to one of those non-Religious moral theories.
-Vendal Thornheart
And the bullshit starts.
No, dogs do not know how to communicate to other dogs at birth, and no, humans are not vocally clean at birth. You simply do not know what you're talking about.
Yes indeed, humans have a communication instinct. Humans raised with only their siblings develop their own language.
Animals do indeed reason. "Convince". Very subjective word there. Reason is seldom built upon right vs wrong, which are abstractions open to individual interpretation anyway. Humans base their reasoning on hunger, play, rest, sex, etc.
Every living thing has a Spirit - an Anima - it's form of respiration gives that creature a spirit in the truest sense. The spirit leaves with the creature's last breath.
A soul is what is left after the biological organism is gone, the life history of a complex spirit.
If you imagine yourself as a pen, and your life as that pen on paper, the life history you live draws a picture. When the pen is gone (death) - the picture in history will forever remain.
So the soul is the life history, its impact on others, its relationships to other people and the world, that is the soul - that which remains forever.
To the effect that Soul is recorded, people will remember it, but that soul remains, recorded or not.
All the great heros of Time have well recorded souls.
I think if an Animal has a well recorded life, it can rise to the level of a Soul - Benji, A Triple Crown winner, Flipper - creatures who live with a measure of Fame, well the qualify as having a soul too - because their life had some major impact on Human Society.
If/When humans ever travel the stars and meet other species traveling space, I think they would take great exception to think that humans alone had souls, and they did not!
I would say that any creature that is capable of a high level of thought, emotion, and expression is a human. This includes most politicians, unfortunately.
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