Chimeras and Bioethics

Two discussions of chimeras and bioethics caught my attention recently.

• Al Mohler: The Chimeras Are Coming
• Telegraph: Chimera embryos have right to life, say bishops

(The image to the right was doctored up in Photoshop and is for illustrative purposes only.)

From the Mohler article:

For some time now ethicists have warned that the development of real animal-human combinations—known as chimeras—was nearing on the horizon. Now, according to some reports, the future has arrived.

. . .

Scientists have already produced humanized mice with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Now, scientists at Stanford University propose to put human brain cells in mouse brains in order to replace dying neurons. In reality, that would mean a human/mouse brain.

. . .

This raises the frightening prospect of a human brain within an animal species. The proposed research at Stanford would not reach that point, but granting a mouse brain “some aspects of human consciousness or some human cognitive abilities” should be enough to set off the ethical alarms.

. . .

We need a set of rules and policies in force right now—before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie.

Read the whole post.

From the Telegraph article:

Human-animal hybrid embryos conceived in the laboratory—so-called “chimeras”—should be regarded as human and their mothers should be allowed to give birth to them, the Roman Catholic Church said yesterday.Under draft Government legislation to be debated by Parliament later this year, scientists will be given permission for the first time to create such embryos for research as long as they destroy them within two weeks.

But the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, in a submission to the Parliamentary joint committee scrutinising the draft legislation, said that the genetic mothers of “chimeras” should be able to raise them as their own children if they wished.

The bishops said that they did not see why these “interspecies” embryos should be treated any differently than others.

Read the rest of the report.

Both articles are worth reading. These issues pose some real ethical challenges, but give good opportunity for our theology to be fleshed out.

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