Chimera?

From Telkoth.net

National Geographic News had a crazy kind of article this 25th... Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy.

Basically people are getting in a tizzy about things like putting human brains inside of mice, or the possibility of mice giving birth to humans. We've already got human blood flowing through pig veins, and since growing human bits for organ-harvesting isn't legal, we tend to grow them in animals instead, so in a form we've already got chimera going.

There are some fun quotes in that article: "It would deny that there is something distinctive and valuable about human beings that ought to be honored and protected," and "animals have the right to exist without being tampered with or crossed with another species."

Ahh, this is a crazy subject... it would definitely be extremely odd to have humans born from mice. Ha-ha! Unless you made them tiny humans :)

I don't know about protecting the distinctiveness of humans, but I can't exactly say where to draw the line, either. In general, I think that science in increasingly reaching points where ethics will be called into question. Cloning, stem cells, chimera. The biological ones get the most attention, but file-sharing, encryption, and privacy all come up in computer science, and in astronomy we may be coming to a point where we can find earth-sized planets (check out New Class of Planets Found at Universe Today). Once that happens, I don't imagine it will be long before we find one that harbors life, in some form or another, and that will certainly raise all sorts of questions. Who knows what'll pop up in other fields, and I'm sure I'm not all caught up, either, in all of them :) Fun stuff.