The Obama administration today announced it has flung the door wide open to scientists making grisly human-animal hybrids. After overturning the Bush administration limits on forcing taxpayers to fund embryonic stem cell research, this is the latest move by President Barack Obama to manipulate and destroy human life in unethical experiments.
The federal government announced plans Thursday to lift a moratorium on funding of certain controversial experiments that use human stem cells to create animal embryos that are partly human.
The National Institutes of Health is proposing a new policy to permit scientists to get federal money to make embryos, known as chimeras, under certain carefully monitored conditions.
One issue is that scientists might inadvertently create animals that have partly human brains, endowing them with some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities. Another is that they could develop into animals with human sperm and eggs and breed, producing human embryos or fetuses inside animals or hybrid creatures.
But scientists have argued that they could take steps to prevent those outcomes and that the embryos provide invaluable tools for medical research.
Bioethicist Wesley Smith has previously warned about letting scientists police themselves — because they often throw ethics and a respect for human life out the window.
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The real question is when are we going to enforce the regulations with sharp teeth? Do we need to criminalize these experiments to get scientists to stop? Because when we say, “ban ” certain kinds of experiments, we are pejoratively labeled as “anti science,” and that we should trust “the scientists” not to stray too far afield.
Talk is cheap. The truth is, I think many scientists oppose any permanent and meaningful restraints–on themselves and each other. If I am right, society will have to forcefully take matters into its own hands.
So just what will these scientists do?
Researchers in the U.S. are tinkering with a disturbing new experiment that mixes human and pig cells to produce a hybrid embryo. Scientists at the University of California, Davis are trying to use pigs as “biological incubators” to grow human organs, according to the report. Walter Low, a professor at the University of Minnesota, said scientists hope to develop a method to grow various organs for transplant, including pancreases, hearts, livers, kidneys, lungs and corneas.
Low explained that cells would be taken from the patient needing an organ and used to grow “an exact genetic copy” of that organ in a pig embryo. This method would reduce the chance of a patient’s body rejecting the organ transplant, he said.
Sometimes referred to as chimeras, animal-human hybrids have been the subject of experiments in the past. The University of Rochester implanted newborn mice with nascent human glial cells to test brain activity involved with learning and memory, LifeNews reported. The University of Wisconsin also has conducted human-animal studies.
There are serious concerns about the ethical implications of such research.
In 2009, pro-abortion President Barack Obama issued an executive order allowing funding on life-destroying embryonic stem cell research, including for human-animal hybrid embryos, LifeNews reported. This rescinded President George Bush’s policy prohibiting taxpayer-funding of the life-destroying practices.
