Free Republic

The Danish Council of Ethics has proposed a set of rules to deal with the prospective possibility that human and animal genes will be combined The first hybrid sheep-goat was created some 20 years ago, and science has since used cell and gene research to put a baboon heart into an infant and use other animal organs to save human lives. But where this technology will eventually lead to is of great concern to both the Danish Council of Ethics and the Council for Animal Ethics, who Tuesday presented their proposals for dealing with the unnerving prospect of combining human...

Scientists have applied for permission to create part-human, part-animal embryos as part of research to create new treatments for debilitating neurological diseases. Two teams of researchers today submitted applications to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for licences to be allowed to use therapeutic cloning to fuse human cells with rabbit, cow and goat egg. They want to create early-stage “chimeric” embryos that would be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent animal in order to produce stem cells – the body’s basic building blocks that can form different all other types of cells. The embryos would be destroyed...