With the body of a sheep and half-human organs, a University of Nevada professor has perfected the technique of injecting adult human cells into a sheep's fetus, producing an animal that is 15% human cells and 85 percent animal cells.
A harmless practice? Humans playing God? Laying the foundation for the introduction, as is suggested by some, for the introduction of viruses into the human population for which there is no cure?
Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% human
The imagery that one can conjure up of such scientific efforts is disturbing. While the picture that accompanies the article shows an animal on its exterior that is a sheep, there is still something reprehensible in it, to my way of thinking.
While I fully favor freedom of speech, I am not so inclined to say there is an equivalent freedom to practice science like this. It comes too close to the movie in the last year or so where human clones were raised for their body parts, to be harvested when needed.
There are times when government should intervene to protect citizenry with science, such as stem cell research, but times when it should interven to protect citizenry from science. Chimera creation is a science that falls in the latter, in my opinion. And if one has no problem with the creation of this first chimera, query if the exterior appears half human, and the internal organs appear fully as that of a sheep--is that then not also acceptable? Or, appears externally 75% human, and internally only 5% sheep?