Life is precious, handle with care

April 3, 2008

Back in 2003, Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University "successfully" fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras created. These embryos were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before the scientists destroyed them to harvest their stem cells. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic created pigs with human blood. And, just this week researchers from Newcastle University, U.K., say they have created embryos and stem cells using human cells and the egg cells of cows. They say that such experiments would not lead to hybrid human-animal babies. The researchers hollowed out the egg cells of cattle and inserted human DNA to create a growing embryo. The embryo was then taken apart to get the embryonic stem cells.

I find this whole human hybrid topic remeniscent of H. G. Wells' book The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which the "good doctor" creates human/animal creatures. I have to ask, as the mathmetician Dr. Malcom did in Michael Crichton's Jurrasic Park, "Just because we can do something, should we?"

Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, said in his view "there is no risk of making monsters [by combining human and animal DNA] this way. The biology will not work. I come down on the side that says if you can make great gains by making embryo hybrids in preventing premature death and understanding disease, then a limited amount of such research is morally justifiable."

Experts say such work would only be an interim step aimed at understanding the biology of embryonic stem cells, and that these experiments would eventually lead to the cure for spinal cord injuries, diabetes, and cancer. However, I find it hard to believe that someone wouldn't step over the ethical boundry. I object to the destruction of human embryos and to the creation of embryonic human hybrids. Life must be treated with dignity.

Dr. David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford Univ., Calif., explains that making a human/animal chimeran is different than using "humanized bacteria". For instance, nearly all diabetics use insulin made by bacteria carrying the human insulin gene. But, Magnus says that he has reservations about creating human hybrids ethically. "One concern I have is the possibility of creating a human embryo whose parents were both mice," says Magnus. "In theory, this could happen if mouse embryos implanted with human stem cells developed the ability to produce human sperm or eggs—and then mated with one another. The chances of this happening are astronomically small, but not zero."

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