If we accept moral status based on a creature's capacities, such enhanced humans could one day be regarded as superior to us. This would raise other ethical issues, as it would require the newborn to be subjected to novel behavioral tests of cognition, communication and other mental capacities.įurther into the future, chimera discoveries could give humans capacities found elsewhere in the animal kingdom, like a bat's sonar. Scientists could genetically edit human stem cells so they do not become brain cells-but this may not be possible or even desirable, in the case of building models for human brain disease.Īlternatively, scientists could allow such chimeras to be born so that we can determine their moral status by studying them.
There are two ways to tackle ethical concerns over the moral status of part-human chimeras. Despite this, human-nonhuman chimeras will probably be regarded as "lesser" than humans, though by how much it is difficult to determine. Recent work on " speciesism" makes a compelling case that we have wrongly assigned animals a lower moral status. Moral status is already one of the most contested areas of practical ethics. That presents a huge challenge for those of us who work to determine the moral status of living creatures, and the rights and obligations that follow that status. In the future, some human-nonhuman chimeras could develop mental capacities between ordinary animals and humans. Moral status is linked to mental capacities such as consciousness, self-consciousness, moral capacities and rationality. For example, humans are generally thought to have higher moral status than monkeys, who have higher moral status than pigs, who have higher moral status than worms. Moral status is the concept of treating life forms according to their interests and capacities. But behind the chimera yuk factor lies a thorny ethical problem: the issue of the moral status of monkeys or pigs that could have a brain closer to that of a human. The production of the AstraZeneca vaccine, for instance, uses cell lines that originated from fetal cells. We tend to get over the yuk factor when lives are at stake. In the US, for example, more that 100,000 people are currently waiting for an organ. However, this must be balanced against the severe shortage of organs for transplantation. In Greek mythology, the Chimera was said to be part lion, part goat and part snake. Hence, primate research is a stepping stone, not a goal itself. The stated goal of the human-monkey experiments is to understand and perfect the development of chimeras in primates before transferring the technology to pigs.Īs we intensively farm and eat pigs, there are thought to be fewer ethical concerns with harvesting organs from pigs. Monkeys are evolutionarily closer to us, so there's a greater chance that cells will interact effectively with each other. However, not enough human cells "took" to create a functional chimera, and the research failed.
Previously, the same researchers explored this avenue in pigs-seen as ideal because their organs are about the same size as ours. Another goal is to grow human organs for transplantation by "deleting" the relevant organ from the animal's genetic instructions, and replacing it with human stem cells to fill the developmental niche. Human-monkey chimeras could be created to study parts of the brain, for instance, so we can better understand Alzheimer's disease. There are several rationales for pursuing this line of research. How we end up treating part-human chimeras will depend upon the moral status we assign them-a task that these latest embryonic experiments only makes more pressing. That's ethically controversial, because these creatures could possess an ambiguous moral status: somewhere between that of humans, which we don't tend to experiment upon, and animals, which we do. But for these purposes, part-human chimeras will first have to be born, and this research takes us one step closer to that eventuality. It's hoped that part-human chimeras-essentially animal bodies with some human organs or other characteristics-might one day offer clues to help us treat human diseases, as well as providing organs to transplant to humans. We have a term for this type of life form: a chimera, named after the fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology that was part lion, part goat and part snake.
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