Downright creepifying - Chimeras

POSTED BY: Connorflynn
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 18:35
VIEWED: 7205
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SIGNYM

Friday, February 18, 2005 1:11 AM

"As far as the mice are concerned, we already know that this has been done. It’s not talked about much. It is a secret. Have none of you heard of NIMH, the National Institute for Mental Health"

Did I miss a emoticon somewhere? Or are you setting yourself up on purpose, as in...

1) NIMH? Maybe YOU should check into it!

2) National Insitute for MENTAL Health? I thought it was National Insitute of MOUSE Health!

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Friday, February 18, 2005 1:45 AM

Only you. On the other hand, I was pretty certain it would obvious enough that I didn’t need a smiley. Although maybe you young’ns don’t get my eighties humor.

NIMH
www.nimh.nih.gov

DTUCK

Friday, February 18, 2005 1:55 AM

Wha? Choo don't think we kids know the secret of NIMH?

__________________________________

The best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. - Oscar Wilde

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Friday, February 18, 2005 2:01 AM

I thought you probably did. But it was a long time ago, and it didn’t get much fanfare.

Back before them fancy computers started cranking out Final Fantasies and digital Yodas.

SIGNYM

Friday, February 18, 2005 2:24 AM

The Secret of NIMH???

AAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHHHH!!!

Actually, I don't think I'm too YOUNG for this move, I think I'm too old! Maybe that explains the mental lapse!

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Friday, February 18, 2005 2:28 AM

That's the ticket.

REEQUEEN

Wednesday, February 23, 2005 3:57 AM

DTuck:

Quote:
I'm on the fence with the issue. I'm just gonna cross that bridge when we come to it.

Edited to say: I wouldn't mind gettin' my eyes upgraded though... *squints to see screen*

Probably the most sensible take I've seen yet.

(Rant following addressed generally, not simply to the person who happens to be the one to whom I chose to reply.)

I don't understand, myself, what all the fuss is about. Animals with human DNA? So what? How, exactly, is it creepifying?

It's not as though animals differ that greatly, speaking of DNA, from humans in the first place. Using animal tissues, of various sorts, to try and ensure longer life in human beings has been going on since (probably) the beginning of last century. Now that I think of it, probably much longer than that.

It isn't even as if the whole human bits on animals is a new thing, either. They've been growing human skin on shark cartilege for burn victims, and they've been growing human organs inside pigs for quite some time.

So we're playing with smaller and smaller bits, what's the problem? It was bound to happen, and someone wants to be a Luddite about it, then they can say "no" to any engineered parts they might otherwise be eligible for later on.

We don't live in a comic book world, people. Honestly. There are no super villains breeding strains of monstrous-looking human-animal crossbreeds to annihilate the Two Legs. As with every other technological advance, there will be good things and bad things coming out of this research, and I betcha, the good things will outweigh the bad things by a very large margin.

Things change, they will always change, there will always be something new and scary to moan about, but there is no stopping it. Get over it, get used to it, and move on.

As for the whole "human rights" thing, it's completely ridiculous. Soon they'll engineer them without brain function, or simply grow the bits in vats. That's where the research is headed, precisely because of the concerns regarding how human is human. This is why cloning is such a good thing, and we'll be lucky when the folks in charge finally pull their collective heads out of their asses.

Yeesh.

"He has a gorm horizon. All gorm that falls past it is lost forever." UserFriendly http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050114

DIEGO

Wednesday, February 23, 2005 9:48 PM

My first source of annoyance is with the claim that there is some kind of line between animals and humans that is being defied Dr. Moreau fashion.

There is no obvious "line between human and animal" that you can point to. People have been trying to define some sort of threshold that delineates human-ness from the rest of creation. I have no problem if someone believes that there is such a thing as souls and that only humans have them, but the thing about a soul is that you can't measure it. We all know about the discoveries of animal cognition and language abilities that have required constant revision of the defining uniqueness of humans. Anatomically and physiologically there is even less that we can point to as being unique characters that provide a comfortable gulf between humans and other animals. We're lucky that we only have the other hominid apes as our closest surviving relatives. If some other hominines (like Australopithecines and Homo erectus etc) had produced other extant lineages than we'd have a devil of a time defining human. As it is, physical anthropologists have trouble deciding if a fossil is an early example of modern H. sapiens or is a member of a very similar pregenitor species.

In Minnesota last year researchers at the Mayo Clinic created pigs with human blood flowing through their bodies.

I assume this is to serve as additional blood donors? And this is a bad thing, why? The only concern I might have is whether it might facilitate viruses jumping host species. Pigs are already similar enough to us to make them a great reservoir for inflenza.

And at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.

That's completely ridiculous. There is no way these will be "human brains" in any way that anybody should be concerned about. Fetal cells transferred from a human to a mouse would not produce a human brain even though they have he genes to make a human brain. Cells grow in an ontogenetic (embryonic development) context.

Scientists feel that, the more humanlike the animal, the better research model it makes for testing drugs or possibly growing "spare parts," such as livers, to transplant into humans.

I am not trying to comment on the ethics of using animals for research or as organ donors. I think such work should be limited and done as humanely as possible (note that humane doesn't have to apply to just humanity). But I think that's a different issue than simple paranoia about the production of chimeras.

What new subhuman combination should be produced and for what purpose? At what point would it be considered human? And what rights, if any, should it have?

These are good questions, but I don't think we need to wait for human-whatever chimeras to be produced to grapple with them. They are the sort of questions we need to ask ourselves anyway. Are chimpanzees eligible for human rights? The spectrum already exists.

And for years scientists have added human genes to bacteria and farm animals.

These organisms are, strictly speaking, transgenic, not chimeras.

What's caused the uproar is the mixing of human stem cells with embryonic animals to create new species.

For example, an experiment that would raise concerns, he said, is genetically engineering mice to produce human sperm and eggs, then doing in vitro fertilization to produce a child whose parents are a pair of mice.

I can't even imagine anyone ever thinking this was a good idea. It seems like more of a strawman extreme than the sort of research that might actually be contemplated. I agree that there should be ethical watchdogs, but I think black-and-white knee-jerk reactions can be just as bad as going overboard with a new technology or research avenue.

Weissman has already created mice with brains that are about one percent human.

What does one percent human even mean? I assume that refers to the percent of neurons that came from human cells as opposed to mouse cells. But it might be just as reasonable to say

RUE

Friday, February 25, 2005 5:26 AM

As far as I can tell, the actual experiment did not fuse human and rabbit nuclear DNA, it transferred human DNA into a rabbit egg which had already had its nucleus removed. The rabbit egg was sort-of an incubator for the human nucleus -
http://www.medtech1.com/new_tech/newtechnologyfeature.cfm/138/1 Unfortunately, reports like this one http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/6528365.htm?1c "Human, rabbit DNA are fused" are severely misleading. Further down, the article reads "They fused those {human} cells with New Zealand rabbit eggs from which the vast majority of rabbit DNA had been removed" but failed to say the reamining DNA was mitochondiral, not nuclear.

There will of course be limitations on the direct application of any of these experiments, as humans will reject tissues that carry foreign antigens (from animals). For example, pig skin is eventually rejected (sloughed off) while pig heart valves must be "decellularized" http://microvet.arizona.edu/Courses/MIC419/Tutorials/transplantation.h
tml.

Experiments using animals with select human genes or tissues will be best used to more closely study human diseases in animals other than humans.

Some recent pitfalls in stem cell experimentation recently uncovered were the stem cell contamination problem - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4201565.stm.
and the problem of cell fusion of stem cells and adult cells - http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v416/n
6880/full/416485a_fs.html.
There is also the problem of zoonosis from previously unrecognized animal viruses, as exemplified by the polio vaccines of 1954. http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/cancer/default.htm "SV40 is a virus found in some species of monkey. Soon after its discovery in 1960, SV40 was found in polio vaccine. Over 98 million Americans received one or more doses of polio vaccine during the period (1955-1963) when some of the vaccine was contaminated with SV40."

Anyway, as much promising research as there is being done on stem cells - and there is a tremendous amount of data already on how stem cells can cure fatal conditions in animals - we won't be seeing animal/human hybrid farms soon.

SOUPCATCHER

Wednesday, March 23, 2005 10:38 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by ReeQueen:
We don't live in a comic book world, people. Honestly. There are no super villains breeding strains of monstrous-looking human-animal crossbreeds to annihilate the Two Legs. As with every other technological advance, there will be good things and bad things coming out of this research, and I betcha, the good things will outweigh the bad things by a very large margin.

I've been meaning to respond because I think you hit the nail on the head. When I read the original post I made the mistake of conflating two completely unrelated issues - the research being talked about and cloning humans in their entirety - and had a knee jerk reaction (cloning humans = bad, this stuff = also bad). In retrospect, after thinking things over in a more rational manner, I completely agree with you.

Of course, the thread died out almost a month ago so I won't add to the discussion

. Just a quick thank you note for your post.

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