A story in today's Reformer is worth noting:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MICE_HUMAN_BRAINS?SITE=VTBRA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
The headline reads:
Mice Created With Human Brain Cells
> SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Add another creation to the strange scientific menagerie where animal species are being mixed together in ever more exotic combinations. Scientists announced Monday that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease.<
We have probably all heard about the stranger alterations made to lab animals, especially rodents. The most bizarre perhaps being the “glow in the dark” mice that had the glow added from the genetic material of a deep sea squid that had bioluminescence properties.
The article continues:
>…[T]he work adds to the growing ethical concerns of mixing human and animal cells when it comes to stem cell and cloning research. After all, mice are 97.5 percent genetically identical to humans.
"The worry is if you humanize them too much you cross certain boundaries," said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Medical Center for Biomedical Ethics. "But I don't think this research comes even close to that."<
The “new” mice were created with about 0.1 percent of human cells in their brains. In the article this is described as “a trace amount that doesn't remotely come close to ‘humanizing’ the rodents.” This statement is not attributed to anyone in particular, but apparently we are expected to accept that as truth. So now mice have been engineered that are 97.6% genetically identical to humans. What if succeeding lab technicians, or as the papers always describe them, “scientists”, add additional human genetic material to these same mice and then they are 98% genetically identical to humans? When is a line crossed where these mice are clearly no longer “just” mice and are something else entirely?
And how “human” do they need to be before we as a species or the fundamentalist politicians begin to say that experiments shouldn’t be performed on them? I guess that probably isn’t a concern because mice have no soul so they cannot be as sacred as a few stem cells from a frozen embryo.
The article has the somewhat eerie passage speculating on fearful Dr Moreau type outcomes:
>Doctors have transplanted pig valves into human hearts for years, and scientists have injected human cells into lab animals for even longer. But the brain poses an additional level of concern because some envision nightmare scenarios in which a human mind might be trapped in an animal head.<
It leaves my animal head with a number of questions.