Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Map DNA of Rhesus Monkeys
KingKong writes "Scientists have unraveled the DNA of another of our primate relatives, this time a monkey named the rhesus macaque — and the work has far more immediate impact than just to study evolution. These fuzzy animals are key to testing the safety of many medicines, and understanding such diseases as AIDS, and the new research will help scientists finally be sure when they're a good stand-in for humans. 'Having a third primate will allow scientists to compare the three genomes, with an added emphasis on singling out the genes possessed by humans alone. The end goal is to reconstruct the history of every single one of the approximately 20,000 genes, to determine when they first appeared in history, and in what species. All of this requires an extraordinary amount of information.'"
"This brings us much closer to understanding what makes us human," said Richard Gibbs, the project leader and director of Baylor's Human Genome Sequencing Center.
No scientific effort will ever differentiate the basic category of "human", much less tell us "what it means". From the perspective of DNA, we're simply a biological continuum with animals, and no further objective conclusions will be forthcoming on this question.
The basic ability to formulate this necessary distinction is based purely in metaphysics.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
The Rhesus monkey is close enough to our genetic makeup to help us research many diseases. But of course, the closer its DNA, the more helpful it would be. I wonder how much temptation there is to start modifying Rhesus monkey DNA to be closer to our own. How much human DNA can you splice in there before you have something that is in effect human? What do you have if it's only half human?
This could become rather weird.