>>An entire breed of slaves?
I want one!
Posted on 02/15/2007 6:38:16 PM PST by FLOutdoorsman
English tabloids are nothing if not colorful, but recently they’ve outdone themselves, splashing images of bizarre genetic mixtures of humans with rabbits and cows across their front pages, derisively dubbed “Franken-bunnies” and “moo-tants” by the headline writers of Fleet Street.
The frenzy was triggered by England’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which is pondering the legality of “chimeras,” meaning organisms that carry both human and animal genes. Such creatures may seem like science fiction, but in less spectacular form they’re already common, from cows injected with human stem cells in order to produce a human protein in their milk, which is extracted and used to cure hemophilia, to mice with human neural cells in their brains in order to test treatments for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
Those examples may seem relatively benign – after all, a cow producing human protein is still basically a cow – but it is fear of a slippery slope toward confusion between human and animal that really causes conniption fits.
That’s the terrain, for example, of Michael Crichton’s new Jurassic Park-style thriller, titled Next, about a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who mixes human and chimpanzee DNA, and then tries to pass off the resulting child as fully human. (Perhaps inevitably, wags label it a “humanzee.”) The riddles that would surround such a creature – what rights it might enjoy, whether it could be exploited for manual labor or have its organs forcibly harvested, and for the religiously inclined, whether it would possess a soul – give most ethicists and theologians a migraine.
Then there’s the “yuck factor,” the basic repugnance many people feel about species-bending mutants whipped up in labs. Such doubts notwithstanding, experts say the technology is largely in place to make it happen – and human history, they ruefully observe, is not exactly replete with examples of technologies that, once developed, were never used out of a sense of restraint.
Welcome to the brave new world of the biotech revolution.
Debate over chimeras swirled in the United States in 2005, when U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, now a Republican presidential candidate, introduced his “Human Chimera Prohibition Act,” which would have banned the creation of animals with genes from the human brain, or animals with any human genes if they could reproduce, both labeled by Brownback as affronts to human dignity. (He also contended that chimeras could exacerbate the transmission of diseases across species boundaries.)
The bill did not come up for a vote, but analysts expect Brownback to reintroduce the measure, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops supports, and probably to campaign on it.
U.S. President George W. Bush called for a ban on “human/animal hybrids” in his 2006 State of the Union address.
Redemptorist Fsther Brian Johnstone, a moral theologian at The Catholic University of America in Washington, said that the church does not have any official teaching directly on chimeras. But documents on transplants have carved out a clear principle: Transferring genetic material across species lines is OK, as long as the identity of the individual, and its offspring, is maintained. Anything that blurs the distinction between human beings and the rest of creation goes too far.
Religious leaders concerned about human dignity are not the only forces raising questions about chimeras. Animal rights groups generally approach the issue from the other end, objecting to the exploitation of animals for human use, while environmentalists worry about the genetic manipulation of nature.
Whatever one makes of them, chimeras exemplify the rapidly developing, and occasionally creepy, ethical challenges that arise on the frontiers of today’s genetic science. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith announced Jan. 28 that it’s working on a new document on bioethics, a successor to 1987’s Donum Vitae, to address this sort of new moral conundrum.
Conflict from the start
In Greek mythology, the original chimera was a ferocious mixture of lion, goat, dragon and snake, whose fury caused storms and shipwrecks. (Students of the classics will recall that the chimera was slain by Bellerophon while riding another genetic amalgam – Pegasus, the winged horse. Conflict, it would seem, has surrounded the chimera from the start.)
Today, the term is used to indicate any individual carrying two distinct genetic patterns.
As opposed to a hybrid, where the genetic materials of two species fuse, in a chimera the genes remain separate. Technically, a human being with a transplanted pig liver could therefore be considered a “chimera,” but such procedures have not generated serious ethical qualms – mostly because nobody really believes that carrying around a pig’s liver diminishes personal identity, turning the recipient into a pig-human mutant.
The basic idea for a chimera is not new. Futurists have predicted such creatures for centuries. Two decades ago, Harvard researchers patented a mouse which carries a human cancer gene, known as the “onco-mouse.”
What makes today’s debate different, at least in part, is the connection between chimeras and stem-cell research. The “holy grail” of stem-cell research is to be able to shape these primitive cells into healthy hearts, kidneys and livers, in order to replace defective human organs. Those organs, however, have to be grown and tested somewhere, and that means using animals. Ideally, an individual patient’s genes could be implanted into an animal so the desired organ would not later be rejected by the patient’s immune system.
The bottom line is that to unlock the potential of stem-cell research, you need chimeras. But that raises the specter of a monkey growing up with a human heart, or a pig with human eyes – prospects that some people find disturbing.
“You’re creating beings without knowing what your ethical obligations to them are,” warned Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of pro-life activities for the U.S. bishops’ conference.
Many chimeras are created today with little ethical objection. Pigs have been injected with human blood cells to study how the AIDS virus appeared; mice have been injected with human prostate cancer cells to study treatments; and sheep have been injected with human blood cells to stimulate the production of clotting factors, which are later synthesized and used to treat heart attacks and strokes.
Tara Seyfer, a Catholic research scientist who works in the Family Life Office of the Philadelphia Archdiocese, and who has written on chimeras, calls these procedures in the main “morally legitimate.”
There’s another use of the chimera that, at least to critics, is more dubious. One standard objection to stem cell research is that women have to “donate” their eggs for the procedure. While it’s illegal to buy or sell human body parts, women can have their eggs harvested for use by another woman in in vitro fertilization. Donors can be compensated for their time and discomfort, with payments of $3,000-$5,000 for a five- to eight-week treatment. Unused “surplus” cells may eventually be assigned for research.
Critics see this as little more than a way of auctioning off one’s reproductive materials, especially since advertisements seeking donors are often targeted at young college-age women, who are presumed to need the money.
In that light, some scientists believe animal eggs should be used instead, seeing it as a less morally complicated alternative. For the critics, however, such a procedure does nothing to reduce what they see as the inherent evil of creating a human embryo for research purposes.
Perhaps the biggest moral dilemma with chimeras isn’t what’s being done today, but what might be done tomorrow.
Crichton, for example, got the idea for his “humanzee” from Stuart Newman, a developmental biologist at New York Medical College, along with biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin. The two submitted a patent application in 1997 for a human-chimpanzee mix. They didn’t actually want to fabricate such a creature, but rather to tie down the patent for 20 years to prevent others from doing so.
Seyfer said chimeras involving humans and nonhuman primates set off special alarms, because the chromosomal structure of these animals is most similar to human beings, creating the risk of “genetic fusing” between the species. Primates are most likely to develop “human-like” attributes if exposed to human genes. Yet that danger hasn’t stopped many scientists, such as Eugene Redmond, a professor of psychiatry and neurosurgery at Yale, who has injected human neural stem cells into African green monkeys in order to study treatments for Parkinson’s disease.
Some worry that, intentionally or not, other research is moving into similar territory.
For example, Stanford scientist Irving Weissman injected mice with human brain cells, seeking new treatments for brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s. In this case, the genetic material represented less than one percent of the mouse’s brain. (Naturally, it was called “the Stuart Little experiment.”) In 2005, Weissman said he’d like to transplant human neural cells into mice to such an extent that the mice lose all of their own neurons, upping the ante from less than 1 percent of human genetic material in the brain to virtually 100 percent.
Granted, a mouse’s brain is so small that even with fully human genes, it’s hard to imagine a rodent Einstein. Nevertheless, how can anyone say for sure what might be going on in there?
Doerflinger said Weissman’s first experiment seemed acceptable, but his second would be “a step too far” – though he admitted it’s difficult to pinpoint where the ethical border falls between the two.
“It’s easier to see night and day than to distinguish exactly when it becomes dusk,” he said. “I’m not sure where the line is.”
Johnstone said this is an area where moral theology has some work to do.
“The Catholic position needs to spell out much more clearly what it means by human dignity,” he said, adding that to date, the theological literature on chimeras is limited.
Johnstone said he sympathizes with Doerflinger’s intuitive reservations, but “we have to have reasons to back up our intuitions.”
“Human dignity doesn’t attach exclusively to our DNA,” he said. “It attaches to the person, and we need to explore what that means.” In the meantime, however, Johnstone said he would place the burden of proof on those who deny moral status to chimeras, especially in cases where a significant percentage of human genetic material is involved.
The U.S. Patent Office, for its part, drew its own line at the “humanzee.” The creature described by Newman and Rifkin would be “too human,” the office ruled. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, it said, means that a human being cannot be owned, and hence cannot be patented.
No inherent objection
The Catholic Church has no inherent objection to implanting genetic material from an animal into a human being. As far back as 1956, Pope Pius XII approved of transplanting animal corneas into humans, “if it were biologically possible and advisable,” in an address to the Italian Association of Cornea Donors and the Italian Union for the Blind.
Where the church demurs, however, is transplantation of either the brain or the reproductive organs, which it considers essential to personal identity.
A 1995 “Charter for Health Care Workers” from the Pontifical Council for Health, while approving some instances of transplantation, nevertheless added: “The brain and the gonads may not be transplanted, because they ensure the personal and procreative identity respectively. These are organs which embody the characteristic uniqueness of the person, which medicine is bound to protect.”
It’s not yet clear if the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will address the issue of chimeras in its new document on bioethics, but Seyfer said she hopes it will.
“We have principles, but the more clear guidance we can get on these specific issues, the better,” she said.
Others, however, believe criticism of chimeras is fueled largely by hysteria.
Deborah Brunton, an expert in the history of medicine at England’s Open University, describes today’s worries about chimeras as reminiscent of fears about smallpox vaccination in the 1800s. At the time, the vaccine involved small amounts of “cowpox,” a skin disease picked up from cows, which creates immunity to smallpox. (A scientist got the idea from observing that milkmaids usually didn’t catch smallpox. This, by the way, is where the term vaccine comes from – the Latin word for cow is vacca.)
The idea of injecting children with a cow disease caused panic about genetic abnormalities, Brunton said.
“One cartoonist showed cows’ heads and tails erupting from the bodies of people who had just undergone the procedure,” she said. “Medical practitioners actually reported children developing patches of hair, running around on all fours and coughing like cows.”
In the end, Brunton said, those reports turned out to be flights of imagination, and she believes current fears about chimeras will resolve themselves as well.
Most parties to the debate seem to agree in rejecting two extremes – one, a Luddite panic about chimeras that would squelch valuable and ethically harmless research; the other, an “anything goes” attitude that would open the door to Crichtonesque monstrosities. The problem, as always, is where exactly the “just mean” lies, with scientists pushing the envelope, and ethicists and spiritual leaders pulling in the reins.
Doerflinger said that beyond the science involved, something deeper is at stake in the chimera debate.
“Some would like to render the sanctity of human life technologically obsolete by demonstrating that species membership is fungible,” he said. “If so, then the idea of natural law based on a fixed human nature is over. You’d have to come up with some other basis for rights, like sentience.”
Doerflinger called that prospect a “real threat, a real motivation on the part of some,” and hence “something worth worrying about.”
Public opinion, however, ultimately may be moved less by such philosophical considerations than by gut-level instinct.
Leon Kass, former chair of the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics, put the point this way: “Revulsion is not an argument,” he said. “In crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”
Given this dialectic of science versus shudder, the debate about chimeras seems a long way from resolution.
Companies like Monsanto like to patent genes:
http://nationalpropertyowners.org/nonais.html
How do you say No NAIS in Japanese?
Excerpt:
>>>Genes and the products of genetic engineering can be patented and owned. In 1980, two federal landmark decisions influenced the business side of biotechnology. A Supreme Court ruling allowed patents to be granted for genetically engineered organisms, processes of transforming cells and expressing proteins, and genes themselves. More recently, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a Patent Office decision and ruled that DNA sequences that code for particular proteins are patentable.<<<
So, will this genetically modified bunny people be OWNED?
An entire breed of slaves?
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23369688-details/Scientists+to+create+'frankenbunny'+in+big+research+leap/article.do
Scientists to create 'frankenbunny' in big research leap
Scientists are planning to create a "frankenrabbit" by fusing together human cells with a rabbit egg.
It is hoped the "chimeric" embryos, which would be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit, could lead to breakthroughs in stem cell research which could one day cure diseases such as Alzheimer's or spinal cord injury.
The embryos will allow scientists to perfect stem cell creation techniques without using human eggs.
"If we learn how to do this with animal eggs, we should be able to have more success with human eggs, and I'd much rather know that if we were going to ask women to donate eggs that we were very likely to get stem cells as a result," said Chris Shaw, at the Institute of Psychiatry.
"We know this is a huge challenge after Dr Hwang in South Korea failed to get stem cells despite having 2,000 human eggs."
Teams in London, Edinburgh and Newcastle are to submit application to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority this month, requesting licences to create embryos that will be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit or cow.
The HFEA is encouraging the applications after legal advice. The embryos will be allowed to grow for only 14 days, at which point they will be cells smaller than a pinhead.
The upside is the Dummie Underground Panther will finally achieve what it thinks it wants.
Anyone who thinks there is an ethical question up for debate is obviously in favor of it to a large degree.
Sorry, VxH already owns them all :P
I should qualify that by recognizing two things:
1) Genes are toyed with all the time, to little or no concern.
2) "Fixing" the human germ line may become very necessary, as medicine has slowly been building up bad traits by saving so many people who have genetic diseases. (Presumably, those folks must spread their problems to offspring, whereas even a hundred years ago they "should have" died.)
The acceptance quotient regarding nascent life, for the vast majority of Americans, falls somewhere between "legal protection for all conceived individual human life" and "legal protection for partial birth abortion." A realization that ought to awaken our nation is, "with tacit acceptance of in vitro fertilization and then the apparent necessity for some abortion, our society too quickly arrived at acceptance of, no, DEFENSE OF, infanticide."
After thirty years of "somewhere in the middle," legalized abortion has lead directly to maximum cheapening of individual human life. But is that really the maximum corruption of our founding principles regarding the unalienable right to life? Perhaps we can and will degenerate further.
A straight-line course from our current inhumane reality will have us embracing "exploitation of embryonic life is needed to bolster unencumbered lives of worthy pursuit." Because of our tacit acceptance for the extreme treatment of individual prenatal life--forceful withdrawal of life support, abortion--it is assumed that we will accept conception of individual human lives and then kill those individuals for their body parts (embryonic stem cell exploitation and therapeutic cloning). That’s cannibalism.
In order to convince you that exploitation of individual embryonic life is right, someone must arrange your tacit agreement that killing and harvesting embryos is not the same as killing an individual. But scientists who would carry out these medical marvels already know the truth. Here's the key to their reasoning: individual human life is a continuum, so those seeking your tacit acceptance of embryonic exploitation must have you first agree to a blatant lie... or worse, have you agree that these are individual human lives being exploited in the earliest stage of their "less worthy life," defining a higher purpose for these embryonic individuals, to sustain others.
The first level of agreement--that embryos are not individual humans--is based on a calculated lie; the second descending level of agreement is acceptance of cannibalism based on that same specious axiom that embryos are not human individuals existing in the normal stage of a human lifetime.
Permit me to elucidate the destination we’ve reached along the slippery slope many faithful people warned of way back when the outrage over in vitro fertilization was squelched. We’ve lost our hold on the goodness of supporting life (the humane imperative of life support). Now, exploitation of nascent life is a reality: the fetal tissue harvesting industry, with more than a billion dollars in business receipts, already influences when a woman ought to have the abortion she seeks because fetal tissue differentiation makes later rather than earlier killing and harvesting of the fetus more desirable to those who will profit from the killing. But that's just the beginning: 1) embryonic stem cell exploitation now demands the conception and killing of untold numbers of embryos; 2) therapeutic cloning is based on the in vitro fertilization/conception of individual human life, with killing and harvesting as the goal when the embryo has differentiated sufficiently to make specific target-cell identification reliable.
Both of these "scientific advances" require our nation to accept the specious notion that an individual human life doesn't begin with at least first cell division (onset of mitosis).
Having read this far, some will assert "But an embryo in a petri dish is not the same as an implanted embryo, not the same as a fetus, not the same as a born child, not the same as a toddler, not the same as…" Using a continuum argument to arbitrarily eliminate one stage in the continuum glares paradoxically, for the very science now hurrying to exploit embryonic life is convinced an embryo IS an individual human lifetime begun. "Outrageous assertion,” some will say. Okay, let the goals of their scientific pursuits speak for the scientists.
It is a non-issue. How many [by appearance] humans have you met, of whom you were thinking a bit later "what a stupid cow"? [there other variants, like "swine", "baboon" etc.]. This serves to show that the so-called "chimeraes" are, and have been for millenia, living among us. So why the ruckus?
Mmmmm, beef with human proteins. Yummy. As usual the industry will not be required to label the origin.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7609492981002697843
Rat monster, one of the funniest videos ever.
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