Are you a man or a mouse? Chimerics are coming

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Mon, 14 Mar 2005 20:14:56 -0800

[Zepps_News] #Are you a man or a mouse? Chimerics are coming

 

 

 

 

 

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1437701,00.html>

 

 

 

Are you a man or a mouse?

 

Chimeric experimentation is producing animal-human hybrids. This time,

science really has gone too far

 

Jeremy Rifkin

Tuesday March 15, 2005

The Guardian

 

What happens when you cross a human and a mouse? Sounds like the

beginning of a bad joke but, in fact, it's a serious experiment recently

carried out by a team headed by a distinguished molecular biologist,

Irving Weissman, at Stanford University.

 

Scientists injected human brain cells into mouse foetuses, creating a

strain of mice that were approximately 1% human. Weissman is considering

a follow-up that would produce mice whose brains are 100% human.

 

What if the mice escaped the lab and began to proliferate? What might be

the ecological consequences of mice who think like human beings, let

loose in nature? Weissman says that he would keep a tight rein on the

mice, and if they showed any signs of humanness he would kill them.

Hardly reassuring.

 

Experiments like the one that produced a partially humanised mouse

stretch the limits of human tinkering with nature to the realm of the

pathological.

 

The new research field at the cutting edge of the biotech revolution is

called chimeric experimentation. Researchers around the world are

combining human and animal cells and creating chimeric creatures that

are part-human, part-animal.

 

The first chimeric experiment occurred many years ago when scientists in

Edinburgh fused a sheep and goat embryo - two unrelated animal species

that are incapable of mating and producing a hybrid offspring. The

resulting creature, called a geep, was born with the head of a goat and

the body of a sheep.

 

Now, scientists have their sights trained on breaking the final taboo in

the natural world - crossing humans and animals to create new

human-animal hybrids. Already, aside from the humanised mouse,

scientists have created pigs with human blood and sheep with livers and

hearts that are mostly human.

 

The experiments are designed to advance medical research. Indeed, a

growing number of genetic engineers argue that human-animal hybrids will

usher in a golden era of medicine. Researchers say that the more

humanised they can make research animals, the better able they will be

to model the progression of human diseases, test new drugs, and harvest

tissues and organs for transplantation. What they fail to mention is

that there are equally promising and less invasive alternatives to these

bizarre experiments, including computer modeling, in vitro tissue

culture, nanotechnology, and prostheses to substitute for human tissue

and organs.

 

Some researchers are speculating about human-chimpanzee chimeras -

creating a humanzee. This would be the ideal laboratory research animal

because chimpanzees are so closely related to us. Chimps share 98% of

the human genome, and a fully mature chimp has the equivalent mental

abilities and consciousness of a four-year-old human.

 

Fusing a human and chimpanzee embryo - which researchers say is feasible

- could produce a creature so human that questions regarding its moral

and legal status would throw 4,000 years of ethics into chaos. Would

such a creature enjoy human rights? Would it have to pass some kind of

" humanness " test to win its freedom? Would it be forced into doing

menial labour or be used to perform dangerous activities?

 

The possibilities are mind-boggling. For example, what if human stem

cells - the primordial cells that turn into the body's 200 or so cell

types - were to be injected into an animal embryo and spread throughout

the animal's body into every organ? Some human cells could migrate to

the testes and ovaries where they could grow into human sperm and eggs.

If two of the chimeric mice were to mate, they could potentially

conceive a human embryo. If the human embryo were to be removed and

implanted in a human womb, the resulting human baby's biological parents

would have been mice.

 

Please understand that none of this is science fiction. The National

Academy of Sciences, America's most august scientific body, is expected

to issue guidelines for chimeric research some time next month,

anticipating a flurry of new experiments in the burgeoning field of

human-animal chimeric experimentation.

 

Bioethicists are already clearing the moral path for human-animal

chimeric experiments, arguing that once society gets past the revulsion

factor, the prospect of new, partially human creatures has much to offer

the human race. And, of course, this is exactly the kind of reasoning

that has been put forth to justify what is fast becoming a journey into

a brave new world in which all of nature can be ruthlessly manipulated.

But now, with human-animal chimeric experiments, we risk even

undermining our own species' biological integrity in the name of human

progress.

 

With chimeric technology, scientists have the power to rewrite the

evolutionary saga - to sprinkle parts of our species into the rest of

the animal kingdom as well as fuse parts of other species with our own

genome and even to create new human sub-species and super-species. Are

we on the cusp of a biological renaissance, or sowing the seeds of our

destruction?

 

· Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Biotech Century

 

jrifkin

--

 

 

Election 2004

The Triumph of the Swill

" The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost

duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation.

It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our

nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation

of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national

life. "

Adolph Hitler, My New World Order,

Proclamation to the German Nation

at Berlin, February 1, 1933

 

 

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