Dowd: Welcome to the Centaur for Chimera Reproduction

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Sat, 07 May 2005 08:03:40 -0700

Dowd: Welcome to the Centaur for Chimera Reproduction

 

 

 

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/07/opinion/07dowd.html?hp>

 

 

What Rough Beasts?

 

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: May 7, 2005

 

WASHINGTON

 

I love chimeras.

 

I've seen just about every werewolf, Dracula and mermaid movie ever

made, I have a Medusa magnet on my refrigerator, and the Sphinx of Greek

mythology is a role model for her lethal brand of mystery.

 

So when chimeras reared up in science news, I grabbed my disintegrating

copy of Edith Hamilton's " Mythology " to refresh my memory on the

Chimera, the she-monster with a lion's head, a goat's body and a

serpent's tail: " A fearful creature, great and swift of foot and

strong/Whose breath was flame unquenchable. "

 

Bellerophon, " a bold and beautiful young man " on flying Pegasus, shot

arrows down at the flaming monster and killed her.

 

Chimeras with " generally sinister powers, " as Nicholas Wade wrote in The

Times, seemed to be a lesson in " the pre-Darwinian notion that species

are fixed and penalties are severe " for crossing boundaries.

 

Chimeras got attention again in the mid-80's, Sharon Begley of The Wall

Street Journal noted, when embryonic goat cells were merged with

embryonic sheep cells to produce a " geep, " when a human-mouse chimera

was born and when " scientists took brain-to-be tissue from quail embryos

and transplanted it into chicken embryos. Once hatched, the chicks made

sounds like baby quails. "

 

The U.S. Patent Office balked at an attempt last year to patent a

" humanzee, " a human-chimp chimera. But as the Stanford University

bioethicist Henry Greely told Ms. Begley: " The centaur has left the barn. "

 

Knowing that mixing up species in a Circean blender conjures up

nightmarish images, the National Academy of Sciences addressed the

matter last month - stepping into the stem-cell vacuum left by the

government and issuing research guidelines.

 

While research on chimeras may be valuable, the guidelines, in a fit of

" Island of Dr. Moreau " queasiness, suggested bans on inserting human

embryonic stem cells into an early human embryo, apes or monkeys.

 

The idea is to avoid animals with human sex cells or brain cells, Mr.

Wade wrote. " There is a remote possibility that an animal with eggs made

of human cells could mate with an animal bearing human sperm. To avoid

human conception in such circumstances, the academy says chimeric

animals should not be allowed to mate, " he explained. Human cells in an

animal brain could also be a problem. As Janet Rowley, a University of

Chicago biologist, told a White House ethics panel: " All of us are aware

of the concern that we're going to have a human brain in a mouse with a

person saying, 'Let me out.' "

 

Mary Shelley was right. Playing Creator is tricky - even if you chase

down your accidents with torches.

 

President Bush's experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq created his own

chimeras, by injecting feudal and tribal societies with the cells of

democracy, and blending warring factions and sects. Some of the forces

unleashed are promising; others are frightening.

 

In a chilling classified report to Congress last week, Gen. Richard

Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, conceded that Iraq and Afghanistan

operations had restricted the Pentagon's ability to handle other

conflicts.

 

That's an ominous admission in light of North Korea's rush toward nukes,

which was spurred on by the Iraq invasion and North Korea's conviction

that, in bargaining with Mr. Bush, real weapons trump imaginary - or

chimerical - ones.

 

The U.S. invasion also spawned a torture scandal, and its own chimeric

(alas, not chimerical) blend of former enemies - the Baathists and

foreign jihadists - with access to Iraqi weapons caches.

 

The Republican Party is now a chimera, too, a mutant of old guard

Republicans, who want government kept out of our lives, and evangelical

Christians, who want government to legislate religion into our lives.

 

But exploiting God for political ends has set off powerful, scary forces

in America: a retreat on teaching evolution, most recently in Kansas;

fights over sex education, even in the blue states and blue suburbs of

Maryland; a demonizing of gays; and a fear of stem cell research, which

could lead to more of a " culture of life " than keeping one vegetative

woman hooked up to a feeding tube.

 

Even as scientists issue rules on chimeras in labs, a spine-tingling

he-monster with the power to drag us back into the pre-Darwinian dark

ages is slouching around Washington. It's a fire-breathing creature with

the head of W., the body of Bill Frist and the serpent tail of Tom DeLay.

 

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--

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

 

 

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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