Albert Mohler:The Chimeras Are Coming
Monday, June 25, 2007

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.

As William Saletan reports in The Washington Post:

We've been transplanting baboon hearts, pig valves and other animal parts into people for decades. We've derived stem cells by inserting human genomes into rabbit eggs. We've created mice that have human prostate glands. We've made sheep that have half-human livers. Last week, Britain's Academy of Medical Sciences reported that scientists have created "thousands of examples of transgenic animals" carrying human DNA. According to the report, "the introduction of human gene sequences into mouse cells in vitro is a technique now practiced in virtually every biomedical research institution across the world."

Human stem cell research is driving this latest push, since therapies for use on humans must first be tested on animals. This means far more than the use of a pig valve. This means tampering with combinations at the level of cells, genes, and chromosomes. the rest image