Chimeras!

Anna Gregoline | January 15, 2005
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Kris Weberg | February 1, 2005
The idea of blending human and animal DNA certainly does raise some ethical questions. We'd have to start asking at what point sentience begins; or whether a living being with a certain amount of human DNA is the same thing as a human under the law. More than that, given the effect of brain structure on types of intelligence and perception, what sorts of intelligence would result given the tendency of human stem cells to fuse with animal cells in these "chimerae?"

I can't say whether we should try to do any of this stuff, because I can't answer that first question. (I suspect that in the long run, someone somewhere will try such things even if they're banned.)

Jackie Mason | February 1, 2005
[hidden by request]

Anna Gregoline | February 1, 2005
I'm not sure that the problem will be "how human are these animals" but given that they could be made hyper-intelligent for their purposes, the issue of animal abuse will become ever more poignant when there is no doubt that the animals understand what's happening to them.

Kris Weberg | February 1, 2005
However, a lot of the discourse on rights has to do with intelligence equaling humanity, or at least full adult humanity. After all, we restrict the rights to consent, labor, and contract of minors, the mentally handicapped, and the mentally ill as well because the standard of understanding is the standard of adulthood, Particularly in the case of legal insanity, but also in the case of children to a lesser extent, we also restrict property rights, speech rights, and so on.

The right to freedom from bodily harm is inalienable, legally, for people, yes; but there remain laws against animal cruelty and standards within labs for animals, so the "baseline" is lower but extant. The only real reason that more harm can be done to animals is genetic essentialism -- they aren't geneticall human. Chimpanzees have learning abilities, exhibit the qualities of memory, and they feel pain; they still aren't protected from harm that, to a limited extent, they can demonstrably recognize already. So it seems to me that a well-established principle of law is that of understanding, to the point that beyond an essentially genetic threshold of humanity, intelligence and rights are linked.

In that regard, genetic proportion has a lot more legal -- I'm not saying ethical -- weight from my perspective.

Anna Gregoline | February 1, 2005
But what I think will make people who wouldn't ordinarly consider an ape to be suffering will be human material - wait, he has human brain cells? He might not be suffering any more than a normal ape in painful lab conditions, but sadly, that might make the difference for some people.

Kris Weberg | February 1, 2005
I guess we're arguing at this from different ends of the same issue -- I'm going abstract, you're going pragmatic.

Anna Gregoline | February 1, 2005
Yeah, basically you are going so abstract that I'm not understanding you.

But I'm also at the end of my workday, so I'll pretend it's because I'm tired.

Kris Weberg | February 1, 2005
Hm. Let me try it in different terms.

Basically, it seems like legally, even if you're human a lot of your rights pertaining to voluntary associations and making legally binding decisions are tied to intelligence. Plus, we make a strange distinction between experimenting on humans and experimenting on animals, even animals that are mentally close to, say, a severely mentally handicapped person or even a person in vegetative state.

This is contradictory in itself already. But the basic standard on experimentation stuff seems to be human DNA, not your ability to understand what's happening to you. We share lots of genes with chimps, especially, but that still doesn't help them -- from that, you'd think it was a "whole package" deal on DNA. Since law uses precedents and tradition as guidelines, I don't expect this stuff to change.

How much actual human DNA counts as human is a brand new issue, because we've never really had the power to combine human DNA at all.

Anna Gregoline | February 1, 2005
Why a "strange distinction?"

Are you saying it's strange that the law hinges so much on our intelligence? It seems that it would make sense it's like that - could a particular person reason out their actions, know they were wrong?

Kris Weberg | February 1, 2005
No, I'm saying that the law is based on our DNA, but makes distinmctions about rights past a certain point based on intelligence despite calling them "inalienable rights" we're born with. And human DNA doesn't make you human in itself -- legally, a fetus isn't a human being, but it has nothing but human DNA. It's not human because it fails to meet the "self-aware" standard. This is a paradox, since "born with" and "smart enough for" are not the same thing, but are applied to ground, or justify, the same rights.

If an animal had human intelligence, it wouldn't meet the "born human" criterion; if it has some human DNA but nothing human-level intelligence, it could still lack lots of rights based on the "not smart enough" criterion, and it might still not qualify as "born human" because at least part of being human, having inalienable "human" rights, seems to be tied up with both DNA and intelligence at certain levels.

Kris Weberg | February 1, 2005
Maybe we need to figure out what is and what isn't "animal abuse" to start with.

Amy Austin | February 2, 2005
Definitely... this is an issue I have huge problems with.

Kris Weberg | February 2, 2005
For me, animal abuse involves harming an animal when that harm is not necessary for self-defense or in lieu of harming a human being for laboratory purposes. In the second case, however, it must be demonstrated that the harmful element of the experiment in question is unavoidable, that the research has medical merit (i.e., the result of the experiment isn't applied solely to nonessential consumer goods like cosmetics or aftershaves), and that the animals are made to suffer no more than necessary for that experiment. In addition, I'd argue that an animal used in testing should either be restored to as normal a health as possible and allowed to live in some sort of decent habitation, or, where it will be in chronic pain or disability, that it be euthanized.

Anna Gregoline | February 2, 2005
I think that's a very reasonable and ethical stance.

While I'm sure the majority of medical research on animals yields some benefits, I read a book a fair number of years ago looking at drug testing on animals that makes me skeptical. It pointed out all the times that drugs were tested on animals and were then given to people with tragic results...their point being that animals are not people (obviously) and that it makes little sense to test drugs on a creature the drugs are not intended for.

Of course, this is a simplistic view, and I am no scientist, so I have no idea what kinds of benefits drug testing on animals can have, however small.

Kris Weberg | February 2, 2005
The idea behind drug testing is that animals with similar systems to our own or similar biochemistry will react similarly but not identically. By studying hose reactions, we can make skilled estimates of their effect on humans.

One of the theoretical benefits of chimerae -- that's the porper plural, by the by -- would be that thy'd react to drugs almost exactly like humans, making testing more accurate.