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."

Comments

How we would treat 'sub-humans'

[0racle]

I believe that, at least in the case of cat-girls and bunny-girls, that question has already been answered.

Re:How we would treat 'sub-humans'

[Kranerian]

Ask not how you would treat a catgirl, but how a catgirl would "treat" you.

Re:How we would treat 'sub-humans'

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've got to neuter your cat-girl then something went VERY wrong.

Re:How we would treat 'sub-humans'

[Anonymous Coward]

How we would treat 'sub-humans'?

Probrably the same thing we do today. Put them in the White House and Congress.

Just a thought

[Syncerus]

Maybe we should resolve the ethical concerns before we perform the science ...

This is opening Pandora's Box.

Re:Just a thought

[princessproton]

Just because exploring the ethical consequences hasn't been the modus operandi thus far, it doesn't mean that it isn't a cause worth considering. The fewer the people who stand up and ask for moral considerations, the easier it is for ethical abuses to occur unnoticed and unchecked. (Or, put in an even more cliche manner, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.")

Re:Just a thought

[philspear]

Maybe we should resolve the ethical concerns before we perform the science ...

This is opening Pandora's Box.

Seems to me the only time we resolve ethical concerns are when the ethical concerns become obsolete. People are still debating whether abortion is ethical. It comes down to a matter of beliefs. Does a human genetic code constitute an independant human? Your answer to that question, reguardless of how much you believe it, is not based on fact. Different people don't all share your beliefs and will have different answers. There is no resolving this ethics question. Well, there is one way, and that is to perform the science. If it turns out to be a scientific dead-end, then we'll have our answer: no it is not ethical because it's pointless.

Note that I'm not saying lets do it BECAUSE it might be a scientific dead end and then we can move on, that would be a terrible reason to do something. Just pointing out that waiting for the ethical question to be answered 100% is basically a sneaky way of saying "lets not do this ever because I am uncomfortable with it."

I've never understood the problem here

[jandrese]

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'm tired of you ethical moralists

[greenreaper]

Whatever happened to doing things because we *could*, rather than because we should?

Re:I'm tired of you ethical moralists

[Anonymous Coward]

Nazi scientists maiming and blinding unwilling subjects happened.

Re:I'm tired of you ethical moralists

[greenreaper]

I'm fine with people sorting ethics out in their own minds. It's when they start saying "hey, you can't do this unless and until I think it's OK" that I have a problem.
If you want government grants for this kind of stuff, sure. Your funding comes from taxpayers, they have to approve it. If it's a matter of some guy creating human-animal hybrids on his own personal island, I don't see that it's anyone else's business.

Re:I'm tired of you ethical moralists

[e2d2]

Whatever happened to doing things because we *could*, rather than because we should?

It ended when we exploded the hydrogen bomb.

Re:I'm tired of you ethical moralists

[fastest fascist]

Your absolute definition is, to me, simply one of many relative definitions of right and wrong. Without a supreme authority there can be no absolute definition. That doesn't mean an individual can't act based on their own morals, but they have to accept others may disagree with them. I tend to see moral certainty as a crutch. Life is not black and white, what seems wrong in one situation may seem right in another. You make the choices you make, often between one "wrong" and another.

For example, we have prisons. I put it to you that it is a dreadful thing to be deprived of your freedom. Still we put people in prison because the costs of not doing so are seen to be too great. This does NOT make it "right" to imprison anyone, to claim it does is comforting but deluded. It is simply necessary. (Well, that's a different discussion.)

What I'm getting at here is that accepting moral relativism doesn't necessarily mean accepting every kind of behaviour. It can also mean acting on your own beliefs, even to the detriment of others, and accepting that your own judgment is all you have to fall back on. Pragmatically, absolute and relative morals behave the same way. If one view - let's say mine - is absolutely correct, then everything I do that is in accordance with that view is acceptable. If every view is equally correct, then everything I do in accordance with my own view is correct in my own system, and that's as good as it can ever get. To live is to tread on others. You can try to minimize that if you wish, but you will hurt others, and no justification will make that hurt go away. You just make do.

Re:Granted I'm not a geneticist...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

No wonder it doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

"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...

Re:Granted I'm not a geneticist...

[philspear]

The point of the hybrids mentioned isn't to make freakish movie monsters or vile fringe-wank material

Now he tells me. I'm off to drop out of my graduate genetics program.

Re:That's already been answered in comic form

[Talderas]

I would like to propose an addendum to Rule 34.

If you can imagine it, there is porn and a wiki for it.