User: 8-)

Big ethical problem

On: Scientists Poised to Create Life

I heard about this somewhere else before.
The way it was stated there was that they wanted to first look into the ethical issues of their doing, which I find really sensical (for once). Genomics, and science in general, has progressed rapidly in a way that traditional concepts of moral or ethics have a hard time covering the new possibilities created by it. Imagine the following:
What the scientists did was once they had a map of the whole genome, they stripped away "unecessary" genes until they ended up with "essential"once. Now, let's say that some day the human genome is mapped. What defines a human as being a human? Strip away all the genes that make it "human" and only keep the one needed to produce organs, pharmaceuticals etc.
This is definitely outlandish (I hope). But the question is : Would that be unethical? If it's a new life form (and remember, it's not a human anymore), why would it be unethical?
BTW, AFAIK Craig Venter is the guy who want to map the humane genome faster than the multinational Human Genome Project.