As I recently saw in the news, those wily scientists "have created embryos that are a mix of human and monkey cells." Well I'll be a monkey's uncle. Or aunt. Or something.
The embryos, described...in the journal Cell, were created in part to try to find new ways to produce organs for people who need transplants, said the international team of scientists who collaborated in the work. But the research raises a variety of concerns.
"My first question is: Why?" said Kirstin Matthews, a fellow for science and technology at Rice University's Baker Institute. "I think the public is going to be concerned, and I am as well, that we're just kind of pushing forward with science without having a proper conversation about what we should or should not do." (Source: NPR)
When it comes to that first question, I'm with Kristin Matthews. And not that I want to take part in a proper conversation, but I sure hope the scientists and ethicists, and the scientific ethicists, and the ethical scientists, are having that convo.
I understand the importance of organ transplant. I have a cousin whose husband got about twenty bonus years out of life thanks to his heart transplant. A close friend's cousin was kept alive for about the same number of years with a double lung transplant. My father died in his fifties of kidney disease. Perhaps if kidney transplants were more of the norm back then, and there'd been a kidney out there with his name on it, he'd have gotten a few decades more, too.
Demand for organs outstrips supply, and plenty of people die while on lists, waiting for some unlucky person to get killed in a car crash and have their organs harvested. So, yep, there's definitely a need for more organs.
And I realize that just mucking around with a few cells suspended in agar (or whatever they suspend cells in nowadays) isn't necessarily going to end us up with Zira and Cornelius from Planet of the Apes. Nobody's - at least nobody that we know of - is trying to create a hybrid human. Yet.
Such mixed-species embryos are known as chimeras, named for the fire-breathing creature from Greek mythology that is part lion, part goat and part snake.
Sure, there's part of me - a fully human part, I must say - that wouldn't mind seeing something that was part lion, part goat and part snake. But part human, part monkey. Not so much. That little DNA mix is a tad bit too close for comfort. Then there's another crazy killer virus to worry about if, say, the monkey had been in touch with a carrier pangolin or a bat.
Nonetheless, I'm sure that, from a scientific perspective, this fiddling around could produce something valuable. Still...
But this type of scientific work and the possibilities it opens up raises serious questions for some ethicists. The biggest concern, they said, is that someone could try to take this work further and attempt to make a baby out of an embryo made this way. Specifically, the critics worry that human cells could become part of the developing brain of such an embryo — and of the brain of the resulting animal...Another concern is that using human cells in this way could produce animals that have human sperm or eggs.
And if one of those boy monkeys with human sperm ends up meeting up with a girl monkey with a human egg, say by swiping right on Tinder, the rest could be a mighty gruesome history.
Of course, we all know it's going to happen. Not in the well-run, supervised labs at universities or the NIH or the CDC. But in some crazy rogue lab somewhere, staffed by crazy rogue scientists.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather be replaced by a robot than by something that's half human/half ape. (Now that I think of it, when I look around at some of the folks out there, maybe half ape wouldn't be half bad.)
So much to worry about, so little time.
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