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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.
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.
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