The Chimera Dilemma Manifested in Sheep

Rollie Hawk writes "While many limits on stem cell research exist in the United States, scientist are finding wants to straddle or at least blur the line between man and animal. It's not quite The Island of Doctor Moreau, but it's bringing a pantheon of ethical dilemmas, nonetheless. The creation of chimeras, named for the mythical beast composed of parts from several different animals, has been in the news off and on for the last few months. The latest case involves around 50 sheep said to possess at least partially human organs. These heavily modded sheep are growning human-like organs such as livers, hearts, and blood. All of these could eventually be close enough to the real thing to be harvested as replacements parts. If that doesn't shock you, consider one other human organ that is being grown in some of these sheep: human brains. While it is doubtful that anyone would want a brain transplant from a human-sheep chimera, it does hold the possibility for doing brain research that would never be allowed on human beings. That is, unless, the brains end up being too human. Just the possibility of a human mind bouncing around inside a sheep's head is a scary proposition."

Comments

Bioethics

[geomon]

Two researchers were discussing this topic on Science Friday last week.

The thing that kept running through my mind as I listened to the discussion was how someone with enough money could run circles around these ethics panels and produce chimeras off-shore.

Now that Bush has made the political (rather than scientific) decision to limit stem cell lines, this activity will most certainly occur outside of the US and beyond any jurisdiction of American ethics organizations.

That's *COOL*

[fazil]

Human brains in sheep? Now that's just plain *COOL* Hacking the genes.. loads of fun!

I don't know why so many people get upset about this kind of thing.. I mean, if my mom had something like CJD from eating euro-beef 10 years ago, and you could sacrifice a legion of humo-sheep hybrid brains to save her.. Sacrifice away! Myself, I have a damaged heart.. if I could have a new one, I'd kill any number of chimera sheep to get it. I want to watch my boy grow up, not die at 35. Oh, and you go tell that hypotetical burn victim why he'll be deformed for the rest of his life, because he can't have the artificial skin developed from chimera sheep in Qwai Pong Province china, because his narrow minded government doesn't think it's ethical.

In the balance of life, they're sheep. Who cares? Grow them in vats for all I care. As long as this is all done in a clean room environment, so we can minimize the risk of having superbug's crossing the sheep human barrier...

Uhhh

[quantaman]

the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice's behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior.

You know when considering a solution to that particular ethical dilemma that wasn't the first idea that came to mind...

Re:"Heavily modded sheep"

[Rei]

What the article *doesn't* mention is that if you poke the sheep enough, they'll explode on you.

On a more serious note, was anyone else distrubed by the fact that it was recommended, concerning human-brained mice, that they monitor for signs of humanlike behavior in human-brained mice, and if they find such behavior, they were to... immediately kill the mice? Excuse me? If a mouse is starting to think like a person, shouldn't the appropriate response be to cease testing, ensure a good life for it, and only euthanize it if there are signs that it is suffering?

Go back to writing about run-away brides

[John Newman]

Every once in a while you read a story that seems to have been written by a science writer with at least a quarter of a clue, and then you find that one fateful line that reaffirms the proper order of things: that science writers are complete idiots who have no business writing about science:

First, human stem cells were injected into bacteria, then mice and now sheep.

We inject human stem cells into single-celled prokaryotes that are probably less than one-thousandth the volume of a stem cell? I'd like to see that trick. The writer presumably confused human stem cells with human DNA, and probably wouldn't know the difference if it were pointed out to him/her, anyway.

I despair of scientific literacy in this country.

Re:I agree completely

[Fwonkas]

Ok, maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't eat chicken mcnuggets. ;)

That aside, while I see the validity and importance of most of your points, I think you're setting up a bit of a strawman argument here. Nuclear weapons programs are often implemented to ensure that other nations can't intimidate them with their nuclear arsenals. It's unpleasant, but at this time there are not many other options. I believe that's part of the reason for the so-called "Star Wars" program(s), as much as I question their usefulness.

More importantly, you question the ethics of the opposition to this research. You're brushing off their concerns by saying, "give them legal rights and a social security card". The concern is that when you start to muddy up the distinctions between human and animal, it's less clear what sort of things are ethical. One wouldn't remove a healthy human's heart without their consent. If a sheep is part or mostly human, is it ok to remove their heart for transplant? That is an ethical question. Once it becomes ok to remove a quasi-human sheep's heart, how far a leap is it to remove a human's heart?

That's totally disregarding the question of whether we're justified in doing these sorts of things to non-human animals capable of suffering anyway.

I agree with some of your sentiment overall, and I think this sort of research can benefit humanity tremendously, but I just wanted to point these things out. I think it's unfair to characterize objections as being due to just "grossout factor(s)".