Chimeras' right to life

Rod, I think all this stuff has gone way too far (understatement of the year), but just for informational purposes what they're mainly talking about doing here is putting a human nucleus (with all the DNA) into an animal egg that has had the animal nucleus taken out(but which contains the mileu needed to kick-start the nucleus/egg to start behaving like an embryo). They would let the embryo grow for a few days, do all their experiments, and then throw it away. UK law would (for now, anyway) require them to destroy the embryo after 14 days. If, God forbid (not that that consideration would be stopping anyone), they implanted it and let it grow to term, almost all its DNA would be human (a tiny proportion of DNA would be from the mitochondria of the egg). Thus, it wouldn't look (or talk) like Porky Pig.

The reason they're doing this is because there is a shortage of human egg donors--for some reason, women aren't just lining up to be pumped full of hormones, go under anesthesia, have a laparascope shoved through their belly button, all for the benefit of a biotech company, er, ahem, for humanity.

R.

Not that I want them to have done this, but what have been the results of intraspecies (intragenus, intrafamily, intraorder) nuclear transfer?

Gene insertion in bacteria doesn't bother me a bit morally; the things mutate like...bacteria, anyway. Gene insertion in animals does - spider genes in sheep so that sheep can produce silk protein in their milk, for instance.

Wholesale nuclear transfer and chimera creation give me the willies. When it comes doing it to humans, the word is "abomination."

Yet, to people to whom it is not abomination, you cannot prove that it is, any more than you could prove that incest is.

I consider myself a scientist (well, of the mathematical/computer bent), and I am scared by even the prospect of gene insertion in bacteria, in the sense that there has to be the potential for an "oops" here or there. What terrible disease could be inadvertently created by an unfortunate combination of genetic material. My schooling in biology is high-school level, circa 1980, but I know over and over from my own work and that of fellow software engineers that we are quite capable of spectacular "oops" moments.

Until we have the potential to "back up" this planet and hit the restore button, as much as I admire the outcomes of many uses of biotechnology, I fear our abilities will outpace our wisdom and ethics.

If this is what society is coming to, perhaps an Islamic takeover would not be such a bad thing.