The important question is what gives something higher moral status. So, when creating human-animal hybrids, researchers need to know whether their capacity to suffer has changed. What if this mouse was self-conscious in the way that a human is?
However, Alejandro De Los Angeles, who carries out similar research at Yale University, believes that humans and monkeys may not be closely related enough. She has an MPhys in mathematical physics and loves all things space, dinosaurs and dogs. Home Future Technology Human-animal hybrids: Can we justify the experiments? In , Louis Washkansky was the first person to receive a human-human heart transplant.
The operation was groundbreaking, paving the way for further transplants, but a lack of organs is a serious problem.
Biologically merging pigs with humans reminds us of our shared similarities, something that we mostly try to forget when savouring the smell of frying bacon.
We tend to maintain clear boundaries between those animals we eat and those we do not , as this helps to resolve the sense of discomfort that we might otherwise feel about using animals for food. It was this very confusion of boundaries that led to outrage over the prospect of horse meat in burgers during the horse meat scandal ; horses are perceived as pets or companions, not food. If confusing pets with animals we eat creates discontent, then confusing those same meat-animals with our own kind is sure to create moral and gustatory hesitation.
Beyond baffling our palate, it also confounds our understanding of whether it is an animal from whom we are harvesting our next-generation organs, or some kind of sub-human entity.
In the end, while mythical hybrid beasts may have caused alarm for the Greeks, it would seem that our own objection to growing our next heart in the breast of a pig has more to do with existential angst and a disruption of the moral order. Whether or not we should use animals for these purposes, or for the satisfaction of human needs more broadly, is a topic for another time. Yet it is safe to say that our personal fear of this scientific advance — the queasiness we feel in the gut — may be mostly to do with how it destabilises our perceived human uniqueness and undermines our own moral superiority than anything to do with broader concerns over hybrids themselves.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.
What will be the first human-animal chimera? And why will it revolutionise medicine? The uneasy truth about human-animal hybrids. Share using Email. From The Conversation. Merging animal and human forms brought terror to our ancestors — and this fear persists right the way into our modern age. Against nature? This kind of two-tier system of medical regulation could also lead techniques such as gene-editing to become much more culturally accepted in some countries than others.
Our society continues to struggle with xenophobia and racism, so we may also find prejudices and legal dilemmas developing for genetically engineered humans never mind human-animal hybrids. Would people born using technologies such as CRISPR be allowed to visit or emigrate to countries where their very creation was illegal?
Would it be illegal for them to have their own children and spread their genetically altered genome? This kind of conflict between international human rights legislation and domestic policy is yet to be tested but could have grave consequences. On the other side of the divide, if countries with strong regulations move too slowly to allow treatments that may be lifesaving or disability preventing, it could worsen health inequality.
We already have serious global problems with distributive justice , the ways in which services or technologies are only accessible to the privileged. If a particular illness could be prevented through CRISPR, is it right that someone should have to risk their child developing the disease just because they cannot afford to travel to a country where the technique is legal?
Unfortunately, the obvious solution — internationally agreed standards and regulations — may be a pipedream. We have consistently failed to find global consensus on gene editing issues, just as with embryo research. Even if it is possible to reach common ground, developing and implementing mutually acceptable terms that are flexible enough to handle the inevitable further technological progress, will take many years.
For now, proposals for concerted effort to keep track of gene editing research may be the best we can do. But it seems likely that more and more gene editing and other controversial practices will take place in a variety of regulated and unregulated circumstances.
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