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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, t
by mullingitover 6y ago
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.
- PostOnce 6y agoOkay, on day 19 three of them are clusters of cells, how about day 280? How about year 5? I think the argument is that a majority of people would find it unethical to continue to develop viable embryos, and even more unethical to conduct research on them were they to mature.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- brbsix 6y agoResearch 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?
- warent 6y agoJust 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-anythings.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoAt what point does a thing become a human-thing? Imagine there was a way to copy a few human genes over to a mouse so that its immune system more closely resembled a human, but it was still, in every other respect, a mouse. Would it be a human-mouse?
- halfjoking 6y agoGood question. Ear-mouse wants to hear the answer: http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1945000/images/_1949073_mouse_ear300.jpg http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1945000/images/_1949073_mouse_...
- scoopertrooper 6y agoEar mouse cant hear the answer because its additional ear is just some cow cartliage that's been molded to resemble an ear.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 7373737373 6y agoVery much unlike Michael Levin's tadpole gut-eyes: https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c?t=743 https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c?t=743
- warent 6y agoIt's a great discussion to have when the matter at hand is that subtle. Frankensteining together human stem cells and monkey blastocysts until something works is pretty far from surgically selecting specific genes. From the article: The announcement of the new chimeras will no doubt be labelled “unnatural” or “playing God” by some people – but the same could be said about many scientific breakthroughs. An iPhone is unnatural. When lifeforms are compared to iPhones, we've reached a pretty clear David Mitchell moment of saying "Are we the baddies?" Something reeks here of amoral science. We need a better understanding of consciousness and awareness before trying such things, or it's only a matter of time before realizing a catastrophic error that joins the many permanent stains of humanity, as we accidentally become the monster "AM" in "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream"
- xwolfi 6y agoAbortions are not a desired action, by society, doctors, women, families, anyone really. They are a compromise to help women who made a mistake, were victims of assault, are too young to take care of a child. It's a bit less about "taking ownership of your body", than it is about "being tolerant and understanding about facts of life we can't change". That's where it's less unethical: it's not like people support terminating a potential human life, they support instead lifting one up that took a wrong step. Now these chimera experiments are fine to me, but I'd be okay to wait, go slow, debate in society about them rather than point at 16 yo rape victims and say "see she killed her baby and we used it to test a vaccine, why can't I mix a monkey with a human and see what grows before terminating it when I dont need it anymore"? Again, I m anti religious but I wouldnt want street riots and Trump 2.0 because scientists felt it was boring to explain to the idiots.
- willmadden 6y agoLegality is irrelevant. Degrading the sanctity of human life enables those in power to normalize atrocities.
- mullingitover 6y agoWhat if we gave a dog a human brain? What if we gave a robot a human consciousness? Just offering some more scenarios that didn't happen.
- brobdingnagians 6y agoAn interesting short story about an android child who desperately wants to be loved is "Supertoys Last All Summer Long". Even a dog with a dog brain shouldn't be subjected to arbitrary experimentation and pain. If it is sentient, then it should be treated with respect. A robot with consciousness should also be treated with respect, and if it wants love then it deserves love.
- type0 6y agoIf you want to know what happens go read "Heart of a dog" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog
- kentrado 6y agoAnd if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.
- Blumfid 6y agoThe world is not black and white. I find those experiments until a certain threshold okay. 1 day: no problem here 20 days: still no issue. Life doesn't start just because we let a biological machine execute something.
- PostOnce 6y agoToo late to edit to add: when I say "continue to develop" I don't mean to continue creating new viable embryos, I mean allowing the existing embryos to mature. I think both cases are probably unethical (creating to begin with, and secondly, more unethically, to bring them to further maturity, or even to the point of being self-supporting, i.e. fully alive) If we start going down this road, eventually someone will allow them to be brought to life. We already know the horrors wrought on other humans by our very selves in the name of "science" in the past (think unit 731, not really science, but "science"), I can only imagine we'd do worse to something not fully human.
- ratsforhorses 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 interestingly the perpetrators received immunity from the US...in exchange for information...I wouldn't be surprised if history repeats itself and a lot of people are counting on it...
- dunefox 6y agoAnd there's the inevitable Nazi-adjacent comparison. Didn't take long.
- skissane 6y ago> Okay, on day 19 three of them are clusters of cells, how about day 280? Even supposing they had, completely unethically, actually transferred these embryos into a woman or monkey, the odds of any of the three surviving to term are likely quite low. The most likely outcome would be miscarriage and probably a quite early one at that. We don't even know if survival to term would be possible. It may be simply impossible due to some genetic incompatibility. Even if it were possible, it would quite likely take (on average) hundreds of attempts before you'd have a success.
- mssundaram 6y ago> 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.
- inimino 6y agoQuite odd to see this downvoted, as it just seems to be an interesting fact.
- crubier 6y agoThe Hindu take on consciousness is as relevant to this thread as the Pastafarian take on consciousness.
- _pmf_ 6y agoDiversity is only supposed to go skin deep. Anything more substantial, especially agreements between "good" religions and evil Christianity enrages the Silicon Valley hivemind.
- arthur_sav 6y agoIt's unethical.
- axguscbklp 6y ago>Clusters of cells can't be 'tortured in a lab,' There is actually no way to know whether this is true. About all you can justifiably say is something like, "if it turns out that clusters of cells can experience suffering, well... we are already probably causing suffering anyway all the time to chickens and cows and who knows to what else, so it would not really be much of a change". It is tempting to say that something that has no nervous system cannot suffer, but such an attitude is not scientifically justified. It is just folk speculation.
- mullingitover 6y agoI mean you obviously can't prove a negative, but it stands to reason that a biochemical automaton is no more capable of 'suffering' than a wristwatch. Suffering, as humans define it, is really only possible with consciousness.
- axguscbklp 6y agoYes, there can be no suffering without consciousness. However, I do not know of any way to determine whether any being other than oneself is conscious.