Chimeras

R&I – FS

I ran across this article in the April ’21 issue of The Economist. Since its a subscription site I’ll try to summarize as far as is necessary for you to form an opinion. It’s a short article anyway.
Researchers have created embryos that are part-human and part-monkey
Chimera is fascinating word.
“The ancient Greeks were good at inventing fantastical animals and the chimera, for instance, was “a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle”. It was eventually slain by Bellerophon, with help from his flying horse.

Not all chimeras are mythological. To biologists, the term describes organisms whose bodies consist of cells from two distinct lineages.
In twin pregnancies, for example, one twin can occasionally absorb the other. The resulting individual is built from cells with separate genomes.

A 2019 forensic-science conference discussed the case of a man who had received a bone-marrow transplant. Since bone marrow produces blood cells, subsequent DNA tests on the man’s blood matched his donor’s genome, not his own. (More unexpectedly, the donor’s DNA also turned out to be present in swabs taken from the man’s cheeks, and in his semen.) So it happens through natural processes and through intervention of some sort.

But for several decades scientists have been experimenting with cross-species chimeras, organisms which, as in the Greek myths, are composites of different animals. They have created mouse-rats, sheep-goats and chicken-quails.

Now, in a paper published in Cell, Tao Tan, a biologist at Kunming University of Science and Technology, and a team of American, Chinese and Spanish researchers, report efforts to extend the principle to humans.

They have managed to create embryos that are part-monkey and part-human.
The researchers hope this biotechnological wizardry will help with two goals.
One hope that chimeric animals might one day provide a source of organs to be transplanted into sick humans.
Whether that can work in people is, for now, unclear.

The other hope is that it will shed light on the complicated process of embryological development, which might eventually lead to treatments for some congenital diseases.

Chimeras may offer a way around some of the ethical difficulties involved in experimenting on human embryos. Or does it?

The research into human chimeras is ethically fraught. America, for instance, forbids federal funding of such work. Most of the work reported in this latest paper happened in China.
As for now the monkey embryos are not intended to grow to maturity.
But it’s only a matter of time.

Experiments involving human  cells can break deep seated taboos about human dignity, human exceptionalism and – among the religious- stir up worries about interfering with God’s creation.

But what do those of you who are not religious think of it?

What do you suppose would be the moral and legal status of such an organism with one human genome and one non-human? ” Will it be merely a product?

And God? What do you, as a person of faith, think God or your religious equivalent makes of our efforts along this line?

Are we attempting to encroach on His territory?

Generally speaking, where do we draw the line between the human and the nonhuman?

Does the end justify the means? That reasoning would go beyond merely saying chimera research is not forbidden by law, but it asks is the research the right thing to do?

Why do some of us feel something deeply unnatural is being done? Something counter to God’s vision of who we are and how we were created.

Are we playing God?
And what is “playing God”?
How would you define “playing God”?

Do you as a non religious person have misgivings? Why? Or why not?

What are we as humans? Where do we fit into this equation? Are we just another organism?

Carried to it’s logical conclusion, what would a chimera be with re: to God?
What would it be with re: to the rest of us?

The article seems to want to insure that the research continues. And it’s their hope  that talking with the public will in some way satisfy the ethical concerns.  They don’t want to spring one of these beings on an unsuspecting public so to speak.

They have even mentioned in vitro fertilization and genetically modified crops “Frankenfoods” as an  some kind of selling point.

Stating in vitro is now routine and billions of “meals” later the food  has been proven to be safe and effective. (Effective? does that mean nourishing? eehhh 😒)

Life is a hamburger?  That’s going to be their argument?

So whadayathink?

 

Southernstar

Article URL : https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/04/15/researchers-have-created-embryos-that-are-part-human-and-part-monkey