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Human-Animal Hybrids Fail
SailorSpork writes "Fans of furries and anime-style cat girls will be disappointed by the news that attempts to create human animal hybrids have failed. Experiments by British scientists to create embryonic stem cells by putting human DNA into cow or rabbit eggs had raised ethical concerns, but the question of how we would treat sub-humans will have to wait until we actually figure out how to make them."
The point of the hybrids mentioned isn't to make freakish movie monsters or vile fringe-wank material; but to substantially lower the cost and difficult of generating and working with stem cells. Getting human DNA is trivial(cheek swab, skin cells, blood, whatever) human sperm is also pretty easy; but obtaining human eggs in any quantity is an unpleasant experience for the donor, requires some costly and potentially risky procedures, and is an all around nuisance. Monkeys might be modestly cheaper; but nonhuman primates are still quite expensive to work with, and are often subject to greater scrutiny than other animals.
Cows and rabbits are super cheap, and are slaughtered by the thousands all the time. Obtaining needed tissue should be relatively simple. That is the point of the exercise.