odin wrote:
And at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.
:roflmao:
Cool, I wonder how that will behave :-D.
While I'm unclear on the specifics, this seems like the sort of the thing that someone, somewhere has to do once -- I gather it's a pretty specific question (don't laugh, or get too ill) of 'If we do this, how will the tissue actually organize?' Either that, or it's been overplayed, because my current thought is 'Well, duh, but how about we find that out with, say, cow tissue first, and spare the shenanigans?'
The answer, in turn, seems to be "because if it works, we could really use some living petri dishes to test human brain cancer treatments on and the like," which opens its own cans of worms... While in practice, y'know -- if the mice's heads explode, it's back to the drawing board, if they survive and act mouselike, maybe it's not much worse than what we do to mice, and if you get Pinky and the Brain, all bets are off and that line of research might stop.
...
Being 'born to mice' in germ cell experiments? Well, that's a social problem, somewhat (and as societies, we tend to consent not to experiment on each other without permissions)... The bigger problem (and the one we should be rather worried about, underneath our 'higher-order' ethical concerns over the amount of suffering we're going to put a lump of tissue through*) with 'chimeras' is that they provide potential new crossover points for disease. You have to temper
that with the fact that the planet is crawling with billions and billions of biological reactors already (and that's before counting the bacteria), but when you're breeding critters with human proteins or vice versa, you happen to create some new routes of exploit -- just like, to make a horrible analogy, porting Internet Explorer to *NIX (or if that makes you think of partitioning and protection, consider all the present work to drag Windows NDIS drivers over).
Try not to laugh, but imposing this issue on humans or something otherwise sentient is plausibly
better, because you can at least hope to convince a sentient (with something like a superego) to practice hygeine, and not have to raise it in a rabbit-hutch environment. :-o But, for our societal mores, you can't (ethically) impose that on someone from birth (they'd be less likely to listen to you, anyway :-D), and it doesn't exactly solve for, say, the organ-farming :-o problem people would presently hope to see this become a shortcut for. (And there are some further annoying problems with that, since okay, if you
do get pigs to create human organs, and if that does seem like an acceptable tradeoff, well, what do you do with the rest of the pig? Passing it on for food further increases the chance of giving a crossover pathogen a toehold, so you either assume that risk, or do some 'horribly inefficient' things, and deal with the risks of disposing of all that extra meat. Eeww.)
So, um, yep. Being made of billion-year-old carbon sure is messy, ain't it? I think the best we can hope for is for stem cell research, nanotech, and our understanding of genetics 'scales beyond' the messier ideas fast enough that they don't get to entrenched -- but we end up having to do some messy research to get us there. Even then (eww, uck, eww), things like the factory farming may be a sort of reasonable tradeoff -- you can approach the issue by staring at an empty vat, or you can approach it by doing what we know from millenia of being a messy, omnivorous species, and tackle the "KFC problem"** :-D until it's back in the vat anyway. Lovely, yes?
*Not to discount that at all, just that invoking some sort of painful death on most of the human species seems like an even worse error to make. Now, if you're an optimist, getting through this whole rough spot
might be what sees us come out all vegan and ethical, with a better respect for all the processes of life, and a greater understanding of its flexibility... at which point the chimera issue would become sort of moot, technology could conceivably outclock biology, and we'd be sure of expressing our intentions when 'engineering life' instead of just shaking the tube and seeing what comes out the end.
If you're a pessimist, well...
**Subtle reference to a specific USian
urban legend.
