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 us creating 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 our respect, or is respect about survival only,in which case we only need to apply to our own genetic stock?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find an on line 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

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve redone the site’s layout. If anything isn’t working, please let me know. Since I’m still fiddling with it, this is also a good time to throw in any suggestions you might have about what you would like to see in the layout. I’ve moved the blog from boldlygo.org/blog to boldlygo.org. This was done because having my main page be at a subdomain was causing the page rank to be split between both urls.

I’m going to be shifting the focus of my posts. From now on, most of my posts are going to be both based around and reference science fiction stories. My first post is an example of this. I originally intended for this site to be focused on science fiction rather than items in the news. I think the former is a better idea. Pulling ideas from science fiction stories and discussing them should make it easier to find ideas to post about, and also should make my posts more unique. Although, I’m still withholding the right to write the occasional rant about current events.

Write! I would love for this to be a community blog. Posts need to be on topic, but they do not need to specifically reference science fiction literature. On that note, I know I haven’t been posting very often. I’m going to be trying very hard to return to posting at least once a week.

I want to thank pro-blog reviews for giving boldygo.org a positive review. Your aide in helping people find this fledgling site is appreciated.

The review can be viewed here: http://pro-blogreviews.blogspot.com/2008/03/boldly-go.html

It’s hard to be more impressed with 365 Tomorrows than I am of it. The site presents what is calls flash fiction, short stories of 600 words or less, on a daily basis. They also regularly podcast and encourage submissions of original stories. There can never be enough speculative fiction on the market, especially if it’s free.

1. Sci-Fi as Philosophy: Clive Thompson shares the same sentiment that inspired this blog.

2. Rediscovering RNA: Brushed aside as only playing a support role to DNA, scientists are revisiting RNA and how it affects mutations.

3. 1901 and Beyond: HG Wells as futurist.

4. Twilight of the book?: Is literacy on its way out? I think this report is greatly exaggerated.

5. Native Science Fiction Minds: William Gibson comments on Cloverfield, and the screenwriters’ gaffe.

6. Pop Science Reporting: Mark Liberman on Michael Crichton’s commentary on sloppy science reporting.