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Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

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Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

#141

Post by mssundaram »

mullingitover wrote: post #75
themgt wrote: post #60

These chimeras pave the way for more accurate models of human biology and disease The goal, the team says, is to make better models for studying biological development, evolution, disease progression and treatments. "As we are unable to conduct certain types of experiments in humans, it is essential that we have better models to more accurately study and understand human biology and disease," Interestingly, the revie…

Did you finish reading the article? > After 10 days, there were 103 of these chimeric embryos remaining, but by day 19 only three still survived. After that, the embryos were terminated before they developed any further. Clusters of cells can't be 'tortured in a lab,' there are plenty of legitimate problems in the world to be outraged about but this really isn't one of them.

> Clusters of cells can't be 'tortured in a lab,'

From a Hindu perspective, consciousness begins associating with the body at the moment of conception. Though it does not fully inhabit it yet.

Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

#142

Post by DistressedDrone »

cercatrova wrote: post #135
qazwse_ wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel morally panicked by this, unless the goal is to have "human-like" animals to experiment on. However, saying anything that advances science should be done is a crazy take. I do not believe that people should be tortured, that people should be given drugs against their will, or even be forced to take part in experiments.

It depends on which ethical viewpoint you have. There are two major ones: The deontological (Kantian) view is that anything that is wrong is so implicitly such that anyone doing something wrong is morally wrong regardless of consequences; murdering a criminal to save thousands in the future would be wrong implicitly. The utilitarian one says that the ends justify the means, that if one were to murder a criminal to sa…

I have a hard time imagining anyone commenting about the moral implications of the article would be unaware of the difference between deontological and utilitarian ethics.

Personally, I find your defense of the idea betrays a naive view of utilitarianism. We must take into account not just the immediate consequences of our actions but also the long-term ones. Any society where people may be experimented upon is one where people must live in fear of being experimented upon. To fail to take into account human dignity is tantamount to disregarding human nature, which just means your formula is wrong.

For the case in TFA, the consequences could be dire. I challenge anyone to reference a society where some people can be seen as subhuman and say they would rather live there. One might argue that the chimera is not a person, but that would still, in my opinion, fail to account for all the variables, as the current paradigm where anything with human DNA is considered human is what makes this debatable in the first place.

In short you may say that anything is acceptable but you can't declare it so, and you must also consider that there would be blood in the streets if science had no deontological bounds. You must also account for this in your utilitarian calculation, regardless of how you yourself view morality.

Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

#143

Post by iamoverworked »

warent wrote: post #117
brbsix wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research is already performed using human fetal tissue obtained from aborted fetuses. How is this significantly different? "A majority of people would find it unethical to continue to develop viable embryos" seems contradictory to the current legal status of abortion in the US. Perhaps it is unethical but worth doing regardless?

Just how many women create a fetus and abort it in the name of science? Human embryos are not manufactured for experimentation. What you're talking about is completely orthogonal. Now, breeding/manufacturing animals for experiments is awful and morally complex--ethically unclear (at least to me). But the line must be drawn somewhere, and we can very easily draw it at manufacturing human-monkeys, human-pigs, or human-…

Morally complex please, as if God is real or the universe or whatever cares, what a quaint sentiment.

Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

#144

Post by 0_gravitas »

jerry1979 wrote: post #120
deertick1 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is unnatural about the behaviour of humans. From a purely deterministic point of view, I totally see his point honestly. Ive often thought that the dichitomy between human action and natural processes is a false one.

> What is unnatural about the behaviour of humans. If we define "natural" to mean "things that happen", then sure, I would see no difference between natural things and human things. But we use the word "natural" to separate some of our actions from the actions of animals. I think we could come up with a list of things that people do that animals don't do. Looking at actions from the standpoint of culpability, intenti…

Stealing from another response:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/natural only one sub-item of these fifteen definitions of "natural" mentions a difference between human vs non-human.

Lets look at the definition for nature: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nature

Definition 2b is succint: "an inner force (such as instinct, appetite, desire) or the sum of such forces in an individual"

According to this, of course, something like murder is quite natural. Is the stranger giving you directions not following that "nature" within which makes him help you for nothing in return? Is your request for help not a natural thing?

Ultimately, I don't like arguments about definitions, because I think they're a cheap way out: "x is (not) bad because its y"; they also force discussions about all the wrong things, ignoring the core of what both parties care about regarding the issue.

Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

#145

Post by elil17 »

hn8788 wrote: post #3

Not the first time, unlike what the article says [1]. I don't know if there was any follow-up on the previous case, but a big ethical concern was that human DNA was used to increase their brain capacity, and if they had been allowed to be born, then they would have been as intelligent as humans. So it raises the question of what counts as a human, and did the scientists effectively create "humans" in a lab, then term…

What these researchers are doing is very different than that Vox article. They aren’t giving a monkey a human brain, they are just adding some human cells into a monkey so the monkey will carry them around. By my understanding the Chimera is a host for human tissue that can be used for disease research, sort of like a more effective version of growing human tissue in Petri dishes (e.g. HeLa).

Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

#147

Post by Edman274 »

brbsix wrote: post #105
Edman274 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would absolutely be immoral to genetically engineer a human to be born so that their gender identity and their biological form don't match. It would absolutely be immoral to genetically engineer a human so that they need to have organ transplants. It would absolutely be immoral to have scientists in the lab spend years doing research on how to create a human being that will be born needing to use a prosthetic leg.…

If the technology were readily accessible to conceive what could be referred to as a "super human" (without genetic disorder, resistance to disease, no predisposition for mental illness, superior athletic ability, high IQ), would it absolutely be immoral to conceive a human being via an entirely natural process? If it is absolutely immoral to genetically engineer a human being that would require an organ transplant t…

>"If it is absolutely immoral to genetically engineer a human being that would require an organ transplant then it would seemingly also be immoral to not utilize readily accessible technology that could have prevented such a disorder, no?"

Well, actually, no - that doesn't necessarily follow. It's not valid to say "if it's wrong to do x then it's wrong to not do things that prevent x" - you can substitute X for plenty of other things. It's wrong for me to steal money from a friend, but it doesn't logically follow that I'm morally obligated to buy a security system for my friend so he doesn't get stolen from. The analogy is kind of funky here, but I think you get what I'm saying.

There's an intentionality that exists with genetic engineering that doesn't exist with people having kids the old-fashioned way. If someone has a child, and that child turns out to have a birth defect that causes issues, that's a sad accident most of the time, and accidents don't have the same moral quality as intentional acts, like genetically engineering someone.

Let's not lose track of why this came up. The question was "So, are trans folks immoral? Organ transplants? Prosthetics? Where do you draw the line?" and that was in response to "It is immoral to create something sentient which has not been created by natural processes. To bring a sentient being into the world which is created by human engineering process is immoral because there are no guarantees that we do not create something which is horribly mutated, fucked up genetically, and experiences only pain for its entire life."

Asking if we're morally obligated to try to make super babies is a distraction from that earlier question. I said what I did not because I wanted to argue for or against the validity of eugenics, but because I wanted to call attention to how absurd the line of reasoning was.

The person commenting thought that they hit on a pretty solid point when they seemed to equivocate scientists making human-monkey chimeras with people that have to use a fucking cane. I pointed out that no one is intentionally genetically engineering people to force them to have to use canes, and then you've come along to say that if it's possible to ensure that someone will be born without having to use a cane, then they're morally obligated to do that. Somewhere we went off the rails, huh?

Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

#148

Post by elil17 »

People misunderstand what this would do. These would not be human-monkey hybrids. It would not be like a liger where it has properties of both species.

It would be more like a rat-mouse chimera, where a rat has a single mouse organ (e.g. a pancreas) or a human-pig chimera where a small number of human cells are disbursed throughout the pig embryo.

No one is suggesting a race of sentient human-monkey hybrids. Just monkeys which will host some human cells which can be studied for disease research or perhaps grow a human organ for transplant.

Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

#149

Post by cercatrova »

DistressedDrone wrote: post #142
cercatrova wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on which ethical viewpoint you have. There are two major ones: The deontological (Kantian) view is that anything that is wrong is so implicitly such that anyone doing something wrong is morally wrong regardless of consequences; murdering a criminal to save thousands in the future would be wrong implicitly. The utilitarian one says that the ends justify the means, that if one were to murder a criminal to sa…

I have a hard time imagining anyone commenting about the moral implications of the article would be unaware of the difference between deontological and utilitarian ethics. Personally, I find your defense of the idea betrays a naive view of utilitarianism. We must take into account not just the immediate consequences of our actions but also the long-term ones. Any society where people may be experimented upon is one w…

> We must take into account not just the immediate consequences of our actions but also the long-term ones.

Indeed. But we may not necessarily know the long term results of such actions. For example, we might experiment on people for some time in order to advance science to the point that we can cure all people, say for example, 100 years of experimentation for 1000 years thereafter of saving people. Is that enough? Is the suffering of 100 years worth of people enough to overcome the salvation of 1000 years' worth? I don't know, nobody could know, it's still a moral question. You seem to be presupposing a deontological viewpoint from my understanding given the specific sentence "Any society where people may be experimented upon is one where people must live in fear of being experimented upon."

> I challenge anyone to reference a society where some people can be seen as subhuman and say they would rather live there.

One could argue that this is current society, and it has been throughout human history if you take slavery into account; many people did in fact want to live in such societies, given that they were not slaves.

> To fail to take into account human dignity is tantamount to disregarding human nature, which just means your formula is wrong.

Why? This still seems like it comes from a deontological viewpoint. Why must we consider human dignity? It does not necessarily follow from your argument.

> you must also consider that there would be blood in the streets if science had no deontological bounds.

Again, this does not follow. Why would there be "blood on the streets" if "science had no deontological bounds?"

> I have a hard time imagining anyone commenting about the moral implications of the article would be unaware of the difference between deontological and utilitarian ethics.

Perhaps. Most people don't have academic or rigorous philosophical ethics knowledge.

Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

#150

Post by sebmellen »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #129
sebmellen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not the story of the Bible as well? > And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Now the question is if the Bible views this "inculcation" of God-like-ness to be a good or bad thing. In a Gnostic interpretation this transcendence from Man into God is the ultimate goal.

I think the real question is, why should we care what some sharmen that have been dead several millenniums would think?

Oh, I just think it's interesting to think about these things! They've obviously played a huge role in the development of our modern societies (at least in the west) and studying the theology is just an interesting and revealing thing to do.

Why do we study history? Same reason :)

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