Monkeying With Man

by Terence P. Jeffrey, Human Events: Some believe the greatest emerging threat to the human race can be found in the Middle East, where terrorists seek weapons of mass destruction. Others point to melting glaciers, adamant they have discovered proof of environmental doom. I suspect a far greater threat to our species emerged this month in a politely worded report issued by a British parliamentary committee. Last December, the British government published a white paper ostensibly calling for a ban on creating what it called "inter-species embryos." The suggested prohibition, however, was not absolute.

. . . As British parliamentarians saw it, the big question was not whether scientists should be allowed to create human-animal hybrids, but exactly what types of hybrids should be permitted and what rules should govern their willful creation and destruction. . . . The committee completely chucked the percentage approach to humanity. "We can see no clear reason why certain categories of inter-species embryo should be permitted under license and 'true' hybrids proscribed," it said. Accordingly, it re-crafted the "catch-all" rule, defining as an interspecies any embryo that has some human chromosomes as well as some animal chromosomes. It then decided to treat all embryos like animals, recommending that researchers be permitted to create them and do what they will with them -- as long as they uniformly kill them by 14 days. . . . [Read More] ARRA Comment: Shades of H.G. Wells' "The Island of Doctor Moreau." Thus the image used for this post. Does anyone doubt that eventually some scientist will bring these interspecies embryos (part human & part animal) to full form. What then?

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