Are you a man or a mouse....both? Or how Mickey Mouse became Frankenstein.
Published March 16, 2005
It never ceases to amaze me at the gall of scientists who "dare to dream" all "in the name of science". According to an article written in the Sidney Morning Herald, A Stanford University researcher has gotten a preliminary go-ahead to create a mouse with a significant number of human brain cells — as long as the creature behaves like a mouse, not a human. Come again?
Recently, there has been great debate regarding scientists, stem cell research and cloning, and both sides have become very heated. On one side you have the conservatives and the other you have the liberals, including some Hollywood types such as Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve's wife.
I have my opinion and personally, I believe that life begins at conception and destroying a life for research is immoral (to me) and additionally, I am against the prospect of cloning people or farming body parts for the sake of science. Even more so, I am against tax money going towards funding these types of research and experiments.
For the purposes of this post, please understand that there should be no disagreement in philosophy on a chimera, or a creature that is part-man and part-beast. Unlike cloning, where both sides have given some reasonable and not so reasonable support for their belief, this is a manipulation of what nature and (according to my belief) what God has created. This is a real moral question. Do we have the right to play God and manipulate what God and nature has created?
According to Stanford biologist Irving Weissman, the article reports the following:
"Weissman says he doesn't want to build a smarter mouse. Instead, he is creating a furry test tube to learn more about devastating human diseases such as brain cancer, stroke, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's and Lou Gehrig's disease — impairments not easily studied in people".
In the past, scientists have had great success with battling diseases which destroy or cripple the sick but this is on the far end of what is considered right and wrong. What if this science was exploited? Do we really want to see (as humorous as it sounds), creatures that are half-man and perhaps half-monkey? Somewhere in heaven, H.G. Wells is chuckling about this, but I am not.
- Are you a man or a mouse....both? Or how Mickey Mouse became Frankenstein.
- Published: March 16, 2005
- Type:
- Section: Culture
- Writer: Richard Porter
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So scientists promise to show restraint if the mouse starts acting human and showing hman traits? That is okay with you? Do you live on the Island of Dr. Moreau?
And another thing, harvesting or farming body parts like a supermarket is not only immoral but it is way out there with regard to respect for human life. Are humans just a collection of things that can be as easily replaced as a shoe?
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Richard, I worry that you're taking a proposal to host a few human cells in a mouse's body, and inflating it into a monster.
Sounds like a reasonable approach to me, no gall...Like you, I am a conservative with grave concerns about the ethics of using cloned humans as a source of parts. Unlike your stated opinion here, though, I don't see a human soul in every human cell.
Projecting your argument to the absurd extreme, we would never be able to countenance organ donation from the dead - since each donated liver or heart would constitute a whole human being, with rights of its own.
In this case, Stanford University's