The Biotech-Industrial Complex Gets Ready to Define What is Human
By Stuart Newman,
CounterPunch
| 08. 16. 2019
Newly approved human-animal chimera procedures are just some of a number of scientifically and ethically questionable techniques that are being soft-pedaled and normalized on a daily basis.
Fabricating part-human-part-nonhuman animals, with features of both, seemed like something out of Greek mythology until the late 20th century. New research then on “geeps,” fully developed, viable mixtures of goats and sheep, showed that constructing such “chimeras” was a real possibility. Still, the warning by H.G. Wells, a century before, in his novel “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” that scientific experiments like this could go terribly awry, seemed fantastical. But this will soon change. At the end of July, it was reported that the biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, director of a laboratory at the Salk Institute in California, produced fetal human-monkey chimeras. He did this in collaboration with researchers in China. And this month the Japanese government is expected to give the go-ahead to scientist Hiromitsu Nakauchi, leader of teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, to conduct similar experiments with the goal of bringing human-pig chimeras to full term. These novel forms of life will soon be among us.
Dr. Nakauchi acknowledges that the concerns of Wells and later writers like Aldous...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...