Chimeras at NYT
The New York Times this morning weighs in on chimeras. Excerpts:
Distinguished groups of ethicists and scientists have been pondering what steps should be taken, if any, to head off the nightmarish possibility of a human brain's becoming trapped inside an animal form, silently screaming, "Let me out," or a human embryo's being gestated by mice.
Fortunately, real-world scientists have much more prosaic experiments in mind. In the superheated area of embryonic stem cell research, for example, they want to put lots of human-brain stem cells into mice to see how they perform in a real body as opposed to a laboratory culture, possibly shedding light on how to treat neurological diseases. The researchers appear to be proceeding cautiously, and the scientific community is erecting ethical barriers to guide such research.
Link.
The NYT has a good point, of course. Most of the scientific community probably will proceed responsibly, but there are a number of objections:
1. It's not the responsible scientists we're presently worried about.
2. What's deemed irresponsible today might become responsible tomorrow, without regard to moral norms, as the barriers are inched toward freakdom.
3. Most importantly, the op-ed misses the bigger point: all new techniques (inventions, capabilities, processes) have the potential for goodness or abuse. We don't care if it's lawn fertilizer or nuclear technology or a baseball bat. All things in the physical world, including tiny cells, are good but subject to abuse. The questions of goodness and abuse, though, are non-physical questions. They deal with the moral, which ties into philosophy and religion--unscientific disciplines. The NYT's failure to mention this is noteworthy. The presumption behind the op-ed is that the scientists will control everything just fine. That's scary because that won't happen. Scientists manipulate physical things. That's what they're trained to do, and they do it well. But they aren't equipped to deal with heavy issues of morality and philosophy.
