On April Fools’ Day 1998, within hours of reading U.S. patent application No. 08/993,564, the Honorable Bruce Lehman did something no other commissioner of patents had done in the two-hundred-year history of America’s oldest government agency. He stepped before a cluster of microphones and announced that the patent would never be approved. No half-human “monsters” would be patented, Lehman declared angrily, or any other “immoral inventions.”

From “Gods and Monsters” by Mark Dowie, an essay published in “The Best American Science Writing 2005

Mark Dowe wrote an extremely insightful essay on the current conflict surrounding “chimeras” in modern biological research. I’m going to hit on some of the points he brought up, as well as adding in my own two cents.

Chimeras are organisms which have genes from more than one species. This can be done through various means including PCR in simpler life, and through injecting embryonic stem cells of one species into the embryo of another species in more complex life. One has to go no farther than the local grocery store to find examples of chimeras. People are generally tolerant of the idea of swapping plant and bacterial genes around, and many people are even okay with the idea of having animal genes in their tomato, but the idea of putting human genes into other organisms seems to make most people uneasy.

A chimera could look like one creature and have the genes organs and possibly even the intelligence of another creature. One common example of this is creating pigs with human organs for transplant purposes. There are currently many laboratory animals who have human genes, the patent which Bruce Lehman so vehemently opposed, and is being fought about in court to this day was about the creation of creatures that are a 50/50 human, animal mix.

We’ve had the ability to create 50/50 animal hybrids for a while now. Back in 1984 a sheep/goat chimera was created, called a “geep”. We would probably be creating 50/50 human animal mixes today if the right scientists received funding and legal permission. In Michael Crichton’s book “Next”, a chimpanzee/human chimera was secretly created. The chimpanzee had increased intelligence and a larynx.

Such possibilities bring up many ethical questions. Would such a creature be entitled to human rights? Since identical expressed qualities can be created with drastically different genes, it doesn’t make sense to base whether a being deserves rights on genes. This becomes even more apparent when you take into consideration that out genetic pool is continuously changing.

Does someone actually need to look human to qualify for rights? Or should the criteria be narrowed to judging a few features like the organisms ability to think abstractly and feel? People born in vegetative states wouldn’t be able to pass an iq test. An either or definition could be used. A being must either have the genes or certain expressed qualities. Okay, so should a creature that normally has human like intelligence, but is born in a vegetative state have human rights? That might sound silly, but I don’t think it’s far fetched.

It is rapidly becoming easier to modify genes, additionally, our knowledge of plant, microbial, and animal genomes has been increasing exponentially. We have massive public databases where we have sequenced thousands of life forms. Without requiring some sort of apocalyptic catastrophe, I have a hard time imagining this knowledge not leading to chimeras with human-like intelligence.

I don’t think creating something that is a mix of human and animal is inherently unethical. Genes aren’t in and of themselves important, and we share a lot of genes with animals anyway. If a 50/50 human animal hybrid were created that was happy with its lot in life and how it‘s treated, I think that would be ethical and would more than you can say about a lot of humans.

While I don’t think creating hybrids is inherently unethical, I do think it opens doors to many ethically questionable possibilities. Most of which center around creating something human-like and then not treating it like it’s human. Such cases bring up an important question for the human race. Do characteristics such as human-like intelligence and the ability to feel automatically demand respect, or is respect about survival only,in which case we only need to apply it to our own genetic stock?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find an online version of the entire essay. The first part of the essay can be read in the link below.

http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/chimerapatent.htm

Yet, bioplastics are rarely mentioned. I think the reason politicians don’t talk about this, is because most people aren’t aware this is an issue. (72% of Americans don’t know plastic is made from oil) Scarce oil without a cheap bioplastic alternative means expensive plastic, and expensive plastic would drastically change society.

What is stopping us from switching over to bioplastic?

1. Bioplastic is more expensive than regular plastic.

2. Currently, for a product to legally be a bioplastic, it must meet high standards for biodegradability. For example, the European Union mandates that bioplastic undergo 90% degradation in 90 days(EN13432). The U.S. requires 60% degradation in 180 days(ASTM6400).

3. The belief that the components of bioplastic need to be used for feeding people, by both direct consumption and to aide in growing plants as compost.

4. Plastic is easier to recycle.

Overcoming these hurdles:

1. This hurdle will be overcome whether we like it or not. Oil based plastic will stop being cheap due to oil scarcity. At some point in the near future, the scarcity of oil will raise the price of plastic above the price of bioplastic. The price of producing bioplastic needs to be lowered through research before this happens, so that the negative effects of the transition are minimized.

2. Bioplastic production needs to be deregulated. Bioplastics could degrade 10 times slower than what the regulations require, and still be a significant improvement over regular plastic. It doesn’t make sense to have laws under the guise of being environmentally friendly, when these laws discourage research into creating long lasting plastic from renewable sources instead of nonrenewable sources.

3. We currently have the resources to feed everyone. If the starving had the ability to buy the food, the market would provide them with food. Evidence of this includes how wasteful rich countries are with food, the vast amount of relatively unused land that could be converted to farming, and the wide spread practice of growing plants for meat animals instead of feeding more people by directly growing the plants for people. The market could change to accommodate an increased demand for plants and food. In fact, since roughly 75% of malnourished people live in rural areas, an increased demand for argicultural development in poor countries probably would reduce starvation by creating jobs in these areas.

4. Having a variety of bioplastics with a wide range of degradation rates, would make directly converting old bioplastic into new bioplastic complicated. The solution is to turn all of the plastic into compost, and to use the compost to provide nutrients to new plastic producing plants. According to the EPA, less than 6 percent of plastic is recylced . Since current plastic is only recycled to a minor degree, and since bioplastic can be recycled as compost, I do not think the possible inability to directly reuse biolastic is a significant con.

Society has become dependent on plastic. And the problems hindering the development of bioplastic can be overcome. Widespread awareness of this issue will aid in overcoming it.

The Drake Equation is often used to calculate the number of civilizations in our galaxy which we might be able to communicate with. This equation takes many factors into account, including the number of planets that can sustain life. While the equation itself makes some sense, it’s hard to know which values to give to each of the factors. We have fairly good guesses for factors like R*(the rate of star formation). But the values for factors like Fi “the fraction of planets which have life that develop intelligent life” are pretty much shots in the dark.

The Drake Equation depends on the idea that life requires planets. If life can evolve outside of planets, the Drake Equation needs to be adjusted. The factors R*, fp, and ne all become irrelevant. The factor fl needs to be changed to something like: the number of lifeforms with independent origins. The remaining elements of the equation can remain untouched. Ironically, the remaining variables, fl, fi, fc, and L are the ones whose values we know the least about. It’s still not possible to calculate the odds, but seeing an example of self-replication in space sure makes it seem more likely.