Slashdot Mirror
Hybrid Human-Animal DNA Experiments Raise Concerns
Kevin Fishburne writes
"British scientists are calling for a new agency to oversee the mixing of human and animal DNA, which is progressing at a rate most may not be aware of: 'Among experimentation that might spark concern are those where human brain cells might change animal brains, those that could lead to the fertilization of human eggs in animals and any modifications of animals that might create attributes considered uniquely human, like facial features, skin or speech. ... Some disagree. "We think some of these should be done, but they should be done in an open way to maintain public confidence," said Robin Lovell-Badge, head of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at Britain's Medical Research Council, one of the expert group members. He said experiments injecting human brain cells into the brains of rats might help develop new stroke treatments or that growing human skin on mice could further understanding of skin cancer.'"
Do we have to include the ghastly emotive rot among the potentially legitimate concerns?
Zoonotic diseases are certainly a real issue(though we've caught plenty just through good, old-fashioned, living in close proximity), and any techniques that would hypothetically involve the production of excessively human central nervous systems in laboratory animals might get ethically dodgy; but are "skin" and "facial features" really 'uniquely human' attributes that squick us out so much we just can't stand it? The idea that having a cartilage-and-soft-tissue structure that looks kind of human, rather than having a differently shaped one, is somehow an 'ethical' problem, rather than pure squeamishness, is just emotive rot.
"The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself. People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to the character of philosophers, that their feelings, on subjects of this nature, are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary." -J.S. Mill
If making catgirls becomes illegal in Britain, we'll just make them in Japan. That would be disastrous. The Japanese are already years ahead of us in catgirl technology. We cannot afford a greater catgirl gap.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
If Slashdot had circles, I would add you to one called "fruitbat".
There are no indigenous vegetarians, let alone vegans.
If you're using your spine properly, you don't need any adjustments. Try Tai Chi.
Live naturally, that doesn't include chiropractic care! Enjoy your nasty, brutish, and short life. The last people to naturally live over a hundred years on a regular basis failed to develop their technology (this was the cost of their lifestyle) and were essentially wiped out.
Or put another way, if we were made, we were obviously made to wage war, among the other things. So by extension, all the funky food and TV watching is also natural.
In summary: I find your theories laughable, and I wish to pee on your newsletter
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As long as I can get a cat that will tell me exactly what it wants instead of me having to figure it out, I'm good.
Then they can apply that gene to women.
And suddenly you have a whole different bag of problems. Even just sequencing genomes have frequently been done by putting huge parts of human DNA into yeast or other hosts as a method for amplification and storage. Are the yeast cells human? No. Is a mouse with a single human gene (maybe a disease allele) human? No, and your suggestion would seriously hamper research. Is a bacterium with a human or rather human-derived insulin gene human? No.
On the other hand, is there a problem if one would create e.g. the equivalent of a geep (a sheep-goat chimera, really two distinctive cell lines constituting different parts of the same body) from chimp and human lines? I would definitely think so. The tipping point is not too clear, and that's really the problem here. "Any creature with human DNA" is far too broad, so what criterion should we use.
I'm afraid that I have some bad news for you: Even non-biologists might end up making some pretty massive child-support payments(and having to put up with some fairly nasty organisms).
While horizontal gene transfer, in nature, doesn't seem to be as common in large eukaryotes as it is in bacteria, there are trillions and trillions of viruses out there, and sometimes they are sloppy. You definitely contain nontrivial amounts of their DNA, some of them might have acquired a few little bits of you...