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American Scientists Working On Creating Chimeras: Half-Human, Half-Animal Embryos (ibtimes.com.au)
Researchers at the University of California, Davis are working on creating half-human, half-animal hybrid embryos dubbed chimeras to better understand diseases and its progression. But not everybody is thrilled about it. IBTimes reports: One of the aims of the experiment using chimeras is to create farm animals with human organs. The body parts could then be harvested and transplanted into very sick people. However, a number of bioethicists and scientists frown on the creation of interspecies embryos which they believe crosses the line. New York Medical College Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy Stuart Newman calls the use of chimeras as entering unsettling ground which damages "our sense of humanity." They are not alone in voicing their opinion against the idea. Huffington Post adds: The project is so controversial that the National Institutes of Health has refused to fund it. The researchers are relying on private donors. Critics of these experiments say they are too risky because there is no way of knowing where the human stem cells will go. Will they just become a pancreas? Or could they become a brain? And if they become a brain, will the pigs who house them have human consciousness?
163.562 people died in 2014 due to wounds inflicted by other humans in armed conflicts around the world. 1.5 million children died in 2008 of vaccine-preventable disease and an estimated 3.5 million due to malnutrition. Considering the vast death and carnage that happens around the clock every single day, the idea that mixing genes in a test-tube is somehow dehumanizing to "our sense of humanity" is completely ludicrous
Are you really trying to form an equivalency between genetic construction of a Chimera, and research on harvested fetal stem cells?
And really with the political shit? left-wing?
I'm a lefty (I think... hard to say these days), and I'm all for GMO chow, nuclear power, catdogs, bunnygirls, and not wasting the stem cells from terminated pregnancies. I don't feel like it's... political at all for me. Just logical.
You need to get over yourself and your politics. Try to look at issues by their merit instead of whatever your coach tells you your team is all about.
Actually my first concern would be about diseases. Does having animals with human-like organs inside them make it easier for diseases which affect that animal to mutate into a version which will infect humans? Since we are talking pigs the example that comes to mind immediately is something like swine flu.
"I'm absolutely against it for organ harvesting!"
As with use of CRISPR tech, this is our first nibbling at the edges of a technology that will involve a host of delicate ethical choices as applications emerge. But the easiest of these ethical questions to resolve in favor of "go for it" is surely having farm animals grow human organs for transplantation. Even vegetarians would be mostly in favor of such a lifesaving application - or to put it another way, those who oppose it would quickly select themselves out of the population.
A pig could be engineered to grow, not just a human kidney, but your kidney, cloned from your body. No more having to spend the rest of your life on anti-rejection drugs, risking death with every sniffle and paper cut.