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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?
A pig with human consciousness? They've already succeeded! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Donald Trump.
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night.
I guess PuppyMonkeyBaby was ahead of its time.
I'm absolutely against it for organ harvesting!
On the other hand, I'm totally for it because that means we'll finally get catgirls, foxgirls, bunnygirls, etc!
If the problem is ethics, surely the solution would be to obtain military funding for this. A source of genetically engineered animal-human hybrids, combining the best features of both, would be invaluable to a modern military that needs new ways to fight a radically different type of enemy to that it was set up to do. The military could have at its disposal superhumans with animal senses, and at the same time push forward medical technology to benefit everyone.
What could possibly go wrong?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Al Gore tried to warn us about ManBearPig, but no one would listen to him.
ManBearPig
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
He couldn't get nearly this amount of press, and he's been customizing genes for a while now.
Screw half human half animal, i want half cat half dog. Loyalty of a dog yet only shits on other people's lawns!
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.
Sh*t... Al Gore was right!
We'll create this "human organ farm" deep underground and convince all the organisms that they're the world's last hope for survival. We'll explain that a nuclear war made the vast majority of the world too contaminated for life, but a lone island presents hope for survival. We'll convince them that we'll use a lottery to "randomly select" who to send to this "island". All the while, we'll keep them ignorant and secluded, distracting them with organizational tasks like mixing particular organic molecules together to help feed growing organism embryos, and entertaining them with VR live-action versions of X-Box video games. Then, as long as we keep them secluded in this "distraction-dystopia", we don't need to worry about their consciousness, right?
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 really want him to provide a definition of what a "sense of humanity" is, and apply it equally to a pool of well known individuals (Dalai Lama, Joseph Stalin, Charles Manson, Nelson Mandela) and try to avoid miring that definition in some sort of wishy-washy, mythical or biblical masturbation.
The sensations that come from our organs (other than the brain) profoundly influence our consciousness. Our mood, our thoughts, everything.
What if our consciousness is not just centered in the brain but spread throughout the whole body?
Do organs have their own consciousness that is a direct constituent of the highest-level consciousness of thought? Are there thoughts that you have that are a direct reflection of the sensation of a specific organ other than the ears, eyes, nose, and tongue?
People are trained like dogs to eschew these kinds of questions, for precisely the reason that they interfere with commerce. But they must be answered eventually or humanity's greed will catch up with it: we will develop arts too powerful and create something we don't understand that consumes us. Possible candidates so far are the media, nuclear energy, and artificial intelligence. What next?
The simple truth is this: some people are taking advantage of the relative standstill in the last ~2000 years of human moral development and education to do something horribly wrong, in every sense of the word, that they do not understand the implications of.
Indeed, this is the story of modern civilization in general.
The morality wizards are at it again. " Our sense of humanity" is so abstract that it can not be damaged. I doubt that there is much agreement at all on what our sense of humanity is. What moral wizards actually do is get attention, power, and positions for themselves. Yes, a pig could acquire a sense of self. But that pig need not know fear or know about death at all. Put the pig to sleep covertly and harvest what is needed from the pig. That pig could have a very happy life. Meanwhile you just might save millions of human lives with the parts and processes derived from these chimeras. So what kind of balance scale does one need to weigh a human life against "our sense of humanity"? Well "our sense of humanity"has zero weight on a balance beam. Hopefully even one human being has real weight.