Say "No" to Moreau

Prison Fellowship has run a nice and concise critique of chimeras. Link. Excerpt:

Even the magazine Scientific American says that some human-animal chimeras “disquietingly blur the line between species.” It notes that “no one knows what the consequences will be as the proportion of human cells in an animal increases.”

One possible consequence is that this “intermingling of tissues could . . . make it easier for infectious animal diseases to move into humans. . . . This hopping of species barriers can be particularly devastating because the [human] immune systems . . . are so unprepared for them.” The list of pandemics thought to have originated in such “hopping” includes the 1918 flu pandemic that killed at least 40 million people, and HIV/AIDS.

But even if the research were safe, we ought to be opposed it. The embryonic stem-cells needed to produce a chimera can come about only by destroying a human life. And the assault on the dignity of life will not stop there. What would be the moral status, for example, of the human-animal chimera? Would it be human or an animal? The temptation would be animal, of course. And as in Wells's novel, man's proclivity to view his fellow creatures as a means to his own ends is well-documented.