5 ms·

Okay, 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 unethi

Okay, 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 5y ago
[deleted]
brbsix 5y ago
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?
- warent 5y ago
  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-anythings.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    At 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 5y ago
      Good 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 5y ago
        Ear mouse cant hear the answer because its additional ear is just some cow cartliage that's been molded to resemble an ear.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        7373737373 5y ago
        Very much unlike Michael Levin's tadpole gut-eyes: https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c?t=743 https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c?t=743
    - warent 5y ago
      It'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"
      - kaba0 5y ago
        I agree that we should be maximally wary of ethical considerations here, but a uniform mass of cells is a uniform mass of cells. We do know when important structures develop. For example, one of the most important cell line in research is called HeLa, which was harvested from a woman with the same initials without consent from a cancerous growth. Since then, it was grown to a huge biomass (couldn’t find exact number). Other than the lack of consent which is obviously amoral, would you consider research on this human cell line bad?
      - fighterpilot 5y ago
        "We need a better understanding of consciousness" I disagree. A small lump of cells is not more conscious or capable of suffering than a cow which most of us accept being killed for a steak.
        7373737373 5y ago
        [citation needed] No one has any idea what consciousness is, how it arises, what its physical correlates and boundaries are, what perceived valence corresponds to, whether small systems can experience pleasure or suffering beyond what humans are used to...
    - samuli 5y ago
      At no single point, the brains, central nervous system, etc develop little by little. When the baby gets out of womb, their eyes start to gain sight. They're practically unable to focus their vision after birth. So, we have a quite good understanding on what happens at what week of pregnancy and when it is just biomass, and when it starts to have "structure".
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - alexanderdmitri 5y ago
    Here are some numbers from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/ss/ss6907a1.htm#T9_down https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/ss/ss6907a1.htm#T9_down Stats don't say what the abortions were in the name of though (that I see on first review at least).
  - iamoverworked 5y ago
    Morally complex please, as if God is real or the universe or whatever cares, what a quaint sentiment.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Abortions 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 5y ago
  Legality is irrelevant. Degrading the sanctity of human life enables those in power to normalize atrocities.
mullingitover 5y ago
What 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 5y ago
  An 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 5y ago
  If 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 5y ago
And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.
Blumfid 5y ago
The 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 5y ago
Too 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 5y ago
  https://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 5y ago
    And there's the inevitable Nazi-adjacent comparison. Didn't take long.
skissane 5y 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

brbsix 5y ago

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?

warent 5y ago
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-anythings.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  At 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 5y ago
    Good 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 5y ago
      Ear mouse cant hear the answer because its additional ear is just some cow cartliage that's been molded to resemble an ear.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - 7373737373 5y ago
        Very much unlike Michael Levin's tadpole gut-eyes: https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c?t=743 https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c?t=743
  - warent 5y ago
    It'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"
    - kaba0 5y ago
      I agree that we should be maximally wary of ethical considerations here, but a uniform mass of cells is a uniform mass of cells. We do know when important structures develop. For example, one of the most important cell line in research is called HeLa, which was harvested from a woman with the same initials without consent from a cancerous growth. Since then, it was grown to a huge biomass (couldn’t find exact number). Other than the lack of consent which is obviously amoral, would you consider research on this human cell line bad?
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      "We need a better understanding of consciousness" I disagree. A small lump of cells is not more conscious or capable of suffering than a cow which most of us accept being killed for a steak.
      - 7373737373 5y ago
        [citation needed] No one has any idea what consciousness is, how it arises, what its physical correlates and boundaries are, what perceived valence corresponds to, whether small systems can experience pleasure or suffering beyond what humans are used to...
  - samuli 5y ago
    At no single point, the brains, central nervous system, etc develop little by little. When the baby gets out of womb, their eyes start to gain sight. They're practically unable to focus their vision after birth. So, we have a quite good understanding on what happens at what week of pregnancy and when it is just biomass, and when it starts to have "structure".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- alexanderdmitri 5y ago
  Here are some numbers from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/ss/ss6907a1.htm#T9_down https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/ss/ss6907a1.htm#T9_down Stats don't say what the abortions were in the name of though (that I see on first review at least).
- iamoverworked 5y ago
  Morally complex please, as if God is real or the universe or whatever cares, what a quaint sentiment.
xwolfi 5y ago
Abortions 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 5y ago
Legality is irrelevant. Degrading the sanctity of human life enables those in power to normalize atrocities.

mullingitover 5y ago

What 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 5y ago
An 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 5y ago
If 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 5y ago

And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.

Blumfid 5y ago

The 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 5y ago

Too 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 5y ago
https://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 5y ago
  And there's the inevitable Nazi-adjacent comparison. Didn't take long.

skissane 5y 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.