My $19/month Wall Street Journal subscription is pricey, I admit, but every so often there comes a story that makes the investment worthwhile.
Or at least causes you to do a double take.
Such was Monday’s piece titled “Creation of First Human-Monkey Embryos Causes Concern.”
Excuse me? Do read on:
Imagine pigs with human hearts or mice whose brains have a spark of human intelligence. Scientists are cultivating a flock of such experimental creations, called chimeras, by injecting potent human cells into mice, rats, pigs and cows. They hope the new combinations might one day be used to grow human organs for transplants, study human illnesses or to test new drugs.
In the latest advance, researchers in the U.S. and China announced earlier this month that they made embryos that combined human and monkey cells for the first time. So far, these human-monkey chimeras (pronounced ky-meer-uhs) are no more than bundles of budding cells in a lab dish, but the implications are far-reaching, ethics experts say. The use of primates so closely related to humans raises concerns about unintended consequences, animal welfare and the moral status of hybrid embryos, even if the scientific value of the work may be quite high.
The idea of chimeras brings up images of half-human, half-beast gargoyles.
The bottom line: This story screams for some kind of input from religious leaders and academics. After all, doesn’t the creation of these … things have something to do with the whole concept of what is human or not?
