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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."
I believe that, at least in the case of cat-girls and bunny-girls, that question has already been answered.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Maybe we should resolve the ethical concerns before we perform the science ...
This is opening Pandora's Box.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
But would cow and rabbit be the most likely candidates for human hybridization? Wouldn't chimp make a lot more sense?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
To bad DNA doesn't work like this. This is almost as bad as someone thinking the can make 'atomic super men' ala Futurama.
Rabbit eggs? I guess the easter bunny has to make money somehow in the off-season.
My one hope for not dying a virgin geek...crushed like a grape under a giant anthromorphic fighting robot's foot. I'm doomed...
Guess I'll have to go with my backup plan to hack into a government mainframe and accidentally create Kelly LeBrock during a lightning storm. ;)
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
...but the question of how we would treat sub-humans will have to wait until we actually figure out how to make them.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Hell, we're still dealing with how people should treat other actual humans.
This guy's the limit!
This has a lot of the same false problems that seems to plague morality based discussions of human cloning. The idea that a clone is going to be some sort of non-human entity with no moral standing one way or the other is just plain nuts. If you clone a person then that person has all of the rights any other person would have. It's really just a complicated way of giving birth. Even these human-animal hybrids are badly named, as they aren't going to be catgirls or manbearpigs or anything of the sort, just normal people with a really weird birth.
The only time ethical concerns should really come into play is when you're attempting to convict someone of a crime based on DNA evidence, but it's not like the law has not had to deal with this sort of problem before. Identical twins have already generated plenty of precedents to draw from.
It drives me crazy when congresspeople are spending hours and hours talking about how cloning is an affront before god and has to be stopped, but can't seem to make a good argument as to why other than citing bad movie plots or vague "They won't have a soul!" type arguments.
I read the internet for the articles.
Hierarchy of geekdom. Published scifi authors at the top, furries at the bottom, erotic furries below that.
http://www.brunching.com/geekhierarchy.html
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Whatever happened to doing things because we *could*, rather than because we should?
"Just" elected? No, man, that was eight years ago.
Such an ugly term. How about Parahuman?
Privet hedges is the only other species to have 23 pairs of chromosomes - the same as Man. We should be cross-breeding humans with plants!
Skunk included a short comic exploring the result of getting a catgirl in your bed. It wasn't pretty!
enough about some other guy's sexual fantasy life being destroyed
can we get back to the urgent need to make fully human women with four breasts and two vaginas now please?
Unless you want to share with your friends, two vaginas and four breasts are useless.
The key is to give men four arms and hands, that way even if the woman only has two breasts you can still use the other two hands to grab her ass. As an added bonus if they ever develop a four breasted woman humanity would be ready for it.
Vaginas? You don't nearly watch enough porn.
In todays environment two assholes would make more sense, or maybe three, or maybe asshole coupled together with mouth at each entry for easy A2M. Assholes with teeths?
Anyone else read the title of this Slashdot story, and thought it was about how much anime and furry fans fail? ;)
I really find myself wondering, where's the "duh" tag for this article? Sheesh. We've known for *decades* that radical hybridization simply don't work. Anyone remember the totato / pomato? Not the grafted gimmick plant, but the actual genetic hybrid? Yeah, didn't think so. That didn't work either.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"putting human DNA into cow or rabbit eggs"
No wonder it doesn't work. Cows don't even lay eggs!! Must be the UN scientists...
And when it smells blood it goes into a biting frenzy, and it breeds out of control.
Yeah, but what if it all goes wrong, and we end up with a killing machine that loves meat and breeds like crazy? Oh wait...
Why am I the first to post this? Man, the slashdot community is getting lazy.... :)
No "first post" not "I for one welcome our new Furry overlords".. Not even a think of the children!
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
Of course, neither of those is the goal of the research.
The idea is to create animals that can manufacture various human tissues, whether it's a particular protein, a new heart, or stem cells.
We used animals to produce insulin for a long time, until someone figured out how to genetically engineer bacteria to produce human insulin, or even modified human insulin with particular properties. Now there's interest in engineering plants to produce human insulin.
And we're tired of people like you who treat a sentient life form as fucking science project! Then you scream, "but... but... I'm not a Nazi! I'm experimenting on ape-men, not Jews!"
... that ever read the Ballad of Lost C'Mell?
Or the Dead Lady of Clown Town?
The Underpeople?
Come on slashdot...
And more to the point, if we can't use the technology to give ourselves night-vision eyesight, superstrength and the like, what's the point?
Part of why I mentioned the pomato is that the potato and tomato are both members of the same genus, Solanum, a.k.a. the deadly nightshade family. For that matter, tobacco is part of the same grouping, making the apocryphal tomacco another intra-genus hybrid. Yet none of these intra-genus hybrids is viable.
Now, what the article is talking about is hybridization of species even further apart, walking back up the taxonomic tree by several nodes. If we cannot even produce viable intra-genus hybrids, we sure aren't going to be producing viable intra-family, intra-order, or intra-class hybrids any time soon. FWIW, my own guess is that it'll take us 10-20 years to get an intra-genus hybrid, and much longer for hybrids of species further apart -- partial genetic borrowing notwithstanding, such as the glow-in-the-dark pigs crafted using certain jellyfish genes.
Basically, my point is that, in the absence of any hybrid between humans and chimps or bonobos, the two other extant species widely regarded as the most closely related to H. sapiens, we should not be the least bit surprised that hybrids with species that aren't even *primates* should fail in utero, and I would go so far as to say that their failure would fall firmly in the "No shit, Sherlock" category of unsurprising. (No offense meant, just stating my personal view of the article.)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Rule 34: http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/wikiality/images/3/31/ManKissesGiraffe.jpg
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
SailorSpork writes "Fans of furries and anime-style cat girls ..."
I call bullshit on this right out the gate.
There is NO SUCH THING as a fan of a furry.
None.
Furries are mocked and persecuted throughout the internets. In real life, parents (realizing that it is too late to leave them hobbled in the woods) disown them. The feeble-minded openly deride them. Even juggaloes cannot abide the presence of furries.
I understand the occasional grammar or spelling mixup. I really do. But to allow such an egregious error to be posted is on par with a summary detailing the efforts of General Fred Rogers leading his unicorn cavalry against the Mongolian horde.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
Furries are fans of each other.
It has been known for a while now that enucleating an egg (i.e. removing its nucleus) and putting the nucleus of an adult cell inside it seems to do somewhat of a reset. This makes a little sense, since mammalian eggs have chemicals and chemical gradients necessary to uncover the right genes to start off the process.
Given how hard it is to get eggs from humans, other animals would be ideal.
The thing is, the nuclei of these eggs are removed. There is one thing of the animals' genes that would remain, though: the mitochondria. That's why you can trace just your maternal line through your mitochondria - they are provided almost exclusively by the egg. If this ever gets used for actual cloning, imagine how this could screw up a deep ancestry project!
Mitochondria do pretty much the same job and have done so for aeons. They do mutate faster, though, so there *might* be other jobs that they are doing for us that are slightly incompatible. On the whole, though, probably not. In the end, chances are that the only fantasy "hybrid" part of this is human cells with animal batteries.
There's a lot of basic research left to do to see how cow and rabbit eggs (especially the ever-copious rabbit eggs!) differ from human eggs in terms of the chemical environment they provide, but once we figure that out, we will have another avenue of making stem cell equivalents, valuable for all sorts of things including spinal cord repair.
Cloning is a little different than therapeutic stem cell application would be, however. You cannot just throw cloned 'stem' cells into a body - you will get a teratoma: a disgusting ball of flesh with all the body tissues in it. You need to coax it down other development paths first. You can wait for a cloned embryo to develop and take out that particular kind of tissue, which is where some ethical considerations come in, or you can apply hormones and other chemicals to do the job.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
Because then I could argue that" Yes, they may be experimenting on their own kids but at least they did not abort them.
Where do you draw the line?
Hard to say, which is precisely why I have a problem with abortion. At some point, between conception and the age of legal majority, we have a legally protected person. But birth seems arbitrary.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I'm not too sure you understand the premise.
No sig today...