Like a lot of you, I found the “human-animal hybrid” line peculiar, to say the least. But apparently it’s actually something people are talking about:
Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that’s part human, part animal.
Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created. They were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before the scientists destroyed the embryos to harvest their stem cells.
And at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.
And doesn’t that last image just make you want to run screaming out of the room?
More here.
…okay, cheap laughs aside, here’s a more informed perspective than mine:
It’s pure political calculus. He throws away the mad scientist and pig-man vote, and wins the religious ignoramus vote…and we know which one has the majority here.
But guess what? Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it’s really happening. Of course, it isn’t with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it’s the topic of ongoing debate. Let’s consider one recent example of such an experiment.
Down syndrome is a very common genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. That kind of genetic insult causes a constellation of problems: mild to moderate mental retardation, heart defects, and weakened immune systems, and various superficial abnormalities. It’s also a viable defect, and produces walking, talking, interacting human beings who are loved by their friends and families, who would really like to be able to do something about those lifespan-reducing health problems. We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them.
So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.
These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.
George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:01 am
Nah, it makes me ask, “What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”
February 1st, 2006 at 10:11 am
I, for one, welcome our new hydra overlords.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:11 am
Welcome to Mauschwitz.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:18 am
I think it’s worth pointing out that the main reason that scientists are mucking about with genetic chimeras is because biomedical research in the US is currently held hostage by the doctrine that a cluster of cells with no brain wave activity and lacking the capacity for independent survival should be treated as a human being.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:18 am
That last bit was actually a Men In Black Roleplaying adventure I wrote and ran.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:21 am
I don’t see what the big deal is, we’ve had humans with mice brains for years.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:24 am
Why not run a comic using Bush as a human / chimp hydbrid.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:27 am
I don’t want scientists to create mice which are part human to experiment on.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:35 am
Actually, the last sentence creates an image of two mice talking to each other, saying “So, what are we going to do today?” “The same thing we do every day - TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD”… but perhaps that’s just me.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:40 am
If you are talking about mice, check out the following genuine human / mouse hybrid:
http://www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/mouse-ear.jpg
February 1st, 2006 at 10:44 am
Oh, and here in Britain, we’ve just lost our 100th soldier in the war in Iraq. Not quite in the same league as US or Iraqi deaths, but worth knowing all the same
February 1st, 2006 at 10:45 am
Don’t forget about the “miracle” mouse!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1754008,00.html
February 1st, 2006 at 10:53 am
Hey “Science!”. You just posted a link from the London Times. Are you from Britain too?
How come I can never seem to buy Tom tomorrow books in bookshops over here? I always have to get them from Amazon.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:55 am
We’re all going to die.
The “London Times”? I think you mean “The Times”. The British paper.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:58 am
Yes we call the Times which is based in London (where I am right now), “The Times”, as that is it is its official title. But given this is an international blog, and the guy who writes it is based in New York, I added London to make it clear. When Tom Tomorrow writes about the Times he is usually referring to the NY Times.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:01 am
Those pesky animal-human hybrids eh?
Maybe they’re what breeched security at this chemical plant:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ARSENAL_SECURITY?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the officer saw something, but it wasn’t human,” Col. Brian S. Lindamood said. “At this time I have no idea what it could be.”
Lindamood said the officer was patrolling inside a 500-acre secure section of the arsenal where chemical weapons, including nerve agents, are stored.
“He reported that he saw three individuals on foot inside the (secure area) and when he approached in his vehicle they ran into the woods,” he said.
Lindamood said the guard was between 70 and 165 feet away at the time and the area was brightly lit. The guard won’t face any disciplinary measures.
**************************************
The explanation is that the officer saw wildlife, but it doesn’t explain how someone could mistakenly ID deer as human from 165 ft. away in a well lit area. Nor does it explain how wildlife breeched the perimeter fences with such ease.
Time to cue spooky music.
Or not.
Of course, Stalin was there first.
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=2434192005
THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.
Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”
In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a “living war machine”. The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.
Nice to see that science is catching up with cranky Soviet dictators.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:03 am
At last! The existence of Ann Coulter on the planet finally makes sense!
February 1st, 2006 at 11:04 am
Dang Mike, no wonder I can’t find any of his references in my copy of The Times… :-)
Seriously, I’m British too… although currently living in Oregon. and I find so many things like this confusing at first.
Z.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:04 am
—”I don’t see what the big deal is, we’ve had humans with mice brains for years.”—
Yes, they’re called Republicans.
Someone had to say it.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:06 am
My vote is for humans with dolphin brains.
But I suspect we will end up with the cells from a giraffe’s neck crossed with men’s penises.
It is interesting to imagine the doomsday scenarios for various political groups:
Neocons: Arabs breed a race of super-warrior humans made with armadillo skins, cockroach blood, python arms, and lemming brains. These supermen, impervious to nuclear fallout and conventional weapons, will march into Israel, wrap their arms around a Jew, and carry him or her into the sea.
Libertarian: The government will produce a race of super policemen. Equiped with bat sonar, eagle eyes, dog ears, and shark smell, the super policeman will be able to detect a joint being rolled in a person’s bedroom from 5 miles away.
Dixiecrat/Southern Republican: The government will implement Super Affirmative Action, where all babies will have the skin cells of randomly selected animals. At birth, your child may be black, white, red, green, purple, or polka-dot.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:16 am
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beasties,
O what a panic’s in thy breasties!
…but seriously, folks, it’s just another cynical move to play on the fears of perceived yokels out there. No doubt he’s got some poll that shows that it plays well in the heartland. He’s never given a flip for the brainland.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:21 am
As someone working in biomedical research, I actually agree with Bush that the government and the scientists have to come to an agreement on an ethical framework for research. And while the human-animal chimera obviously sounds disturbing, I wonder what he really means by that. For example, many times to see if similar proteins have the same function in humans and yeast, the gene will be deleted from the yeast and replaced with the human gene. This is a direct way of testing the function of the human gene, and there are few good alternatives. Is this really a yeast-human chimera? The same method is sometimes done with mice and human genes. No one will complain when the gene is involved in food digestion, for example. But if the gene is normally expressed in human brain cells but not mice, and we want to see if it has an effect on the mouse, is this really creating a mouse with a human brain? The disconnect between what scientists are actually doing and how it’s reported in the media is often disturbing, and leads to such suggestions that we are morally reprehensible and don’t care for ethics, and do experiments just for the sheer joy of the grotesqueness of it. Experiments like these are extremely expensive and time consuming, and are done to test a specific hypothesis, not to “see what happens” or “make something cool”. I have very little hope that Bush will actually do what needs to be done, which is to have educated people coming to a consensus on ethical limits to research, but will instead assume the worst stereotypes of those who are doing such work, and defer to the religious extremists to set limits.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:28 am
“same thing we try to do every night pinky…try to take over the world!”
think about it.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:31 am
Just one more piece of the puzzle that, when completed, will spell out the following:
WE ARE WELL AND TRULY FUCKED
Have a nice day…
February 1st, 2006 at 11:32 am
Wouldn’t this violate Disney’s copyright?
February 1st, 2006 at 11:38 am
I feel a passage from the same article that Tom quoted in his post appropriately summarizes my concern over Bush’s comments. The fear he’s trying to play on is based on Greek mythology and Manimal, not science.
“A chimera is a mixture of two or more species in one body. Not all are considered troubling, though.
For example, faulty human heart valves are routinely replaced with ones taken from cows and pigs. The surgery—which makes the recipient a human-animal chimera—is widely accepted. And for years scientists have added human genes to bacteria and farm animals. “
February 1st, 2006 at 11:39 am
Mike: as far as I can tell, I’m a modern American mutt, but sometimes my links land me on the other side of the Atlantic.
David: as much as I love kidding about this stuff, thanks for taking it seriously. In today’s political climate here in the states, I would wager that it will be tough to get federal money to fund some of this research if a suitable ethical system isn’t in place. I don’t envy today’s researchers this task of making their research palatable to shifting administrations, but I like to think that assuaging the public fears about the power of some of this new knowledge will benefit everyone in the long-term.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:47 am
I don’t know, after seeing a human with a mouse brain running our country for the last 5 years I believe a mouse with a human brain might be a refreshing change.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:59 am
This is a good example of “just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.” Mice with human brains - it’s just stupid enough to be true.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:01 pm
I want to expand a little on what David (#22) said. I completely agree with him. I also think the mouse/human brain hybrid is good example of bad reporting. They don’t reference the research, but I recently read (I think in “Science” magazine) that some human brain stem cells had been injected into mice brains, and that some of the cells grew. In other words it wasn’t a mouse with a human brain, but a mouse with a mouse brain that had a very small percentage of human cells. This is hardly ethically more troublesome than any other mouse experimentation.
By the way, did anyone notice that Bush said that it was wrong to discard human embryos? So much for in vitro fertilization.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Narf!
Pinky and the Brain taking over the world.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Sounds like a bad science fiction film to me, you know the one where the mouse grows to 6 feet tall and has fangs like a giant bat.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:17 pm
While the debate about human/animal hybridization is certainly an important topic of discusion between scientists, bioethecists, and others, its mention in Bush’s SOTU is not in any way designed to bring this discussion to light.
We all know what this regime’s attitude is towards issues of science. For reference, look at his views on stem-cel research, evolution/creationism, and of course, the Bird Flu.
This will be the 2006 fear/wedge issue. It’s got all the requirements: Athestic scientists playing God; messin’ about with things that ’tain’t natcheral, and it can easily be condensed into a five-word phrase that will almost, but not quite exactly, be NOT AT ALL about what the real issues might be.
This will, of course, give the Wingnut mouthpieces the advantage, because the first thing anyone will have to do, is of course try to reframe the debate. And we all know how well that works.
These tactics would be awe-inspiring if they weren’t so fucking evil
Yeharr
February 1st, 2006 at 12:37 pm
aren’t the mice already the most intelligent creatures on earth? we’re after dolphins on the intelligence scale (according to Doug Adams), so wouldn’t placing human brains in mice be dumbing them down a bit?
February 1st, 2006 at 12:40 pm
I don’t think the Republicans are being very foresighted here.
Banning human / animal hybrids now means some future G.O.P. candidate won’t be able to boost his election prospects with a Interspecies Dating Prevention Act.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Mouse-human hybrid…
The Disney corp. will finally be able to have real Mickey Mouseoids wandering their “amusement” parks instead of heatstroke-prone college kids!
February 1st, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Weissman has already created mice with brains that are about one percent human.
Later this year he may conduct another experiment where the mice have 100 percent human brains. This would be done, he said, by injecting human neurons into the brains of embryonic mice.
Before being born, the mice would be killed and dissected to see if the architecture of a human brain had formed. If it did, he’d look for traces of human cognitive behavior.
This is disgusting. Sniping and speculation at Republicans’ sinister motives is beside the point. If this experiment were successful we would be well on our way to creating a class of monsters with no place outside of the laboratory. Same thing with the human-ear mouse monstrosity. Growing animals for human organs is an act of supreme hubris. Doesn’t this rub anyone else the wrong way? And with a cheese grater?
February 1st, 2006 at 12:51 pm
This actually explains a lot. Bush believes what he reads in the Weekly World News (think Batboy, Lobsterboy, etc.) How much influence does the WWN have in foreign and domestic policy? When Satan’s face appears in the smoke of an oil fire in Iraq, isn’t that proof of an Axis of Evil?
Suddenly, viewed through this lens, the last five years kind of make sense.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:03 pm
Kick ass. I want a spider monkey with big human titties. That would be so awesome. Maybe a cat with wings. Or how about a president with a brain.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:05 pm
To paraphrase Swift, man is not a rational animal but an animal capable of reason.
We do not need mice with human brains. We need cattle with no legs and two-ton cuts of filet mignon growing out of their backs. Bonus points to whoever can make them into asexually reproducing meat pouches without central nervous systems so that vegetarians can have a bite. Science! Yum!
February 1st, 2006 at 1:11 pm
you think “the brave new world” was a fiction? think again.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:26 pm
No surprise it wound up in the speech, really, considering how often Bush wrestles with that other kind of chimera.
chi·me·ra or chi·mae·ra - noun
A unreal mental fabrication or illusion; an un-realizable dream.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Can a chimera, swinging in the void, swallow second intentions? - Rabelais
February 1st, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Seriously, the hybrid experiments are a method to study human cells by growing some of them in an animal host that can be experimented on or that is easier to study. They don’t ‘humanize’ the animal in the colloquial sense, they just provide a new way to examine the growth and differentiation of human cells. There are many techniques that can be used like human cell culture and studies of related animals like mice. Creating a hybrid is difficult and expensive (relative to other techniques) and would only be attempted when other techniques can’t do the job.
February 1st, 2006 at 2:16 pm
The population of the planet increases the three additional people per second.
All of those people want all the amusements and necessities brought to us by the consumer corporate military society.
What they need to do is start making humans who don’t breed so damn much and have a capacity to know when enough junk is enough.
Lab bred homosexuals with environmental consciousness!
Now that would be science worth supporting.
The rest is a band aid to the inevitable demise of our species, due to overpopulation, greed and pointing the finger at Bush as an answer to all problems.
February 1st, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Amazing that in this discussion among so-called progressives, I see not one mention of the immorality of inflicting suffering on other sentient beings who just happen to have less than 100% human DNA. Where would y’all move the line? OK to torture them in the name of science as long as they have less than 5% human DNA? Maybe 10%? Or if they start showing human characteristics, like intelligence, communication, empathy? Chimpanzees already do, and about 1000 are locked in US lab cages right now.
February 1st, 2006 at 2:41 pm
What’s even more amazing is that no one seems concerned about the future of Bat-Boy.
February 1st, 2006 at 2:43 pm
balloon pirate (#33) has it right.
There is legitimate and useful research being done using chimeras, both by injection of human cells into animal embryos and by transgenic techniques.
There is also a good bit of discussion in the scientific community about the ethics of this research. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a good bit of opposition from the religious right about it too, though I don’t keep tabs on what they’re thinking.
There is no rational reason that the president would need to specifically call for legislation concerning this research in his State of the Union speech other than to score political points with the religious right and lay the groundwork for a nice distracting ethical debate to keep the public’s mind off real issues.
February 1st, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Hmm then again there’s always the possibility that the president actually feels that the human-animial chimera research is an issue of national importance which needs to be addressed legislatively…
February 1st, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Cynthia: your concerns are the exact reason why we need to have ethical guidelines set out by more than just scientists. There is a line, and it needs to lay somewhere between no animal experimentation and no limits. To discuss a percentage of DNA that’s human is not a relevant measure, or even the percentage of the animal. For example, there are no good model systems for studying hepatitis B or C infection, other than using primates. There are efforts to graft human liver cells into the mouse liver, and let them grow there, so that we can study infection and antiviral remedies. The size and shape of these chimeric livers are the same as in an ungrafted mouse, and the human and mouse liver cells attach to one another and function normally. This is technically a chimeric animal, but not the work of science fiction. And if such a grafted animal had 50% human liver cells, this would hardly make it human.
While I know many people are uneasy about any research done on animals, the truth is that without animal research, very few of us would enjoy the same health and mortality expectations that we currently do. And while I appreciate that care should be taken to prevent frivolous experimentation on animals, and to reduce the pain that they feel, I would not trade the life of my wife for even thousands of mice. And I do consider myself quite progressive to hold that view.
February 1st, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Ok we’ve had the Pinky and the Brain references, the Disney references, but clearly the logical antrho-mice reference has to be Mrs. Brisby and all the rats and mice of The Secret of NIMH. Johnathan Brisby will not have died in vain!
February 1st, 2006 at 3:23 pm
David, contrary to the popular myth, animal research has had serious negative effects on the advancement of scientific knowledge pertinent to human health. See http://www.curedisease.com/Harms.html. Hundreds of chimpanzees were breed and infected for AIDS research, because they are “so much like us” (ignoring the psychological similarities, of course), but in fact they proved utterly useless for understanding AIDS in humans.
I would not trade the life of my husband for the lives of a dozen (perhaps more) human strangers; so would it be OK to experiment on them? Of course I’m not serious, but the whole “your child or the dog” argument is fallacious.
February 1st, 2006 at 3:27 pm
OK, look, I’m not a fundamentalist by any stretch of the imagination, but some things are just plain unnatural. This does pass for Playing God (I’ve got problems with cloning, actually). There is a point at which “This could save lives” is just not enough, IMHO. I mean, really, this isn’t far at all from “creating clones of humans to experiment on.”
February 1st, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Wait, nobody has made a Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Reference yet? Get with the program, people, the mice are smarter than we are!!!
February 1st, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Cynthia: I think that we agree with each other in fundamental ways, but disagree on a few specifics.
For the AFMA website you linked to, well, there are Intelligent Design websites too. And anecdotal evidence is not evidence of a widespread problem. Obviously you can come up with examples of any kind of study failing, it does not mean the whole system is failing. There are certain diseases or conditions where there is no alternative to animal research. In the liver graft experiments I mentioned earlier, these were being done because there is no other system for studying hepatitis virus infection. Believe me, we would much rather use cell culture, or cell free systems, they are cheaper, easier and more flexible for use than animals. But even if there were a cell culture system, how could you test if new drugs that have an affect on the virus were toxic to whole organs? On humans? We don’t do animal research for fun. I have yet to meet anyone who enjoys killing animals for research. And while there are certainly examples of animal research not helping, or even hindering an understanding of human health, I know way too much that has been learned through animal research that could not have been learned otherwise. Are you really saying that because some carcinogens didn’t cause cancer in animals, that we should stop screening them? That we should wait until we have evidence that they cause cancer in humans first? There is always the argument that we can’t link cigarette smoke to lung cancer because of the lack of a double-blind placebo controlled study, how hard would it be to get rid of other things we are used to once they are used by commerce?
Where I also disagree with you is that I wouldn’t sacrifice 12 strangers for you husband. But I would sacrifice lots and lots of mice for him. So the argument isn’t really spurious.
Finally, we agree that there have to be ethical restraints on scientific research. And that’s the big thing. Neither of us thinks that it is acceptable for us as scientists to make our own guidelines, without taking into account the public view. That’s all my posts were intending to say, that I was happy that Bush brought the subject up, and I have huge doubts that he will follow through in any meaningful way.
February 1st, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Behold the Rabbiturn: A rabbit with the head of a intern, and the body… of an intern. Oh look! He’s hopping away!
February 1st, 2006 at 7:09 pm
Damn! I scrolled all the way to 50 thinking I would be the first with a Secret of NIMH reference (and shocked it wasn’t in the first 5).
Oh well. Pleas put sum flowrs on Algernon’s graev fur me.
56. I prefer the mythical Esquilax!
February 1st, 2006 at 7:14 pm
Hate to get all zoological on everyone, but could we please stop referring to them as “animal-human chimeras” or “animal-human hybrids”? Humans ARE animals (not only that, we’re apes). Let’s go with “human-mouse (or whatever) hybrid”.
As for “playing God” and doing “unnatural” things…geez, we’ve been doing that from the beginning. I wonder what the other members of the clan thought when the first human made his/her own fire. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, but we wouldn’t have gotten very far without “playing God”…
February 2nd, 2006 at 11:30 am
Many people are alive now becuase of human genes added to pigs that allow for less rejection in swine heart valves transplanted to humans. There are indeed ethical questions regarding the treatment of animals but the sad part is that while Bush wants to ban this practice, he also wants to maintain the prohibition on stem cell research which could well make abuse of animals for human parts obsolete by finding ways for us to “grow our own” replacement parts.
All this while wanting to expand support for science? If Bush’s definition of science is anything like his definition of “intelligence” he may be funding “faith based” scientists to find evidence that our 6000 yer old flat world is indeed at the center of the universe.
February 2nd, 2006 at 6:12 pm
I agree — Big Deal — We’ve had half human - half prentious asses for years, and yes, they are called Democrats.
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:50 pm
“Wouldn’t this violate Disney’s copyright?”
(Early teen’s reaction to first trip to DisneyWorld.)
TEEN: “Disney keeps their parks SO neat and clean. And orderly.”
DAD: “Yeah, well … .”
TEEN: “I know! I know! Why don’t we just have Disney run the world?”
DAD: “????!!!”