The Ethics of Crossing Humans with Animals | Glenn Cohen
- 6 years ago
Harvard bioethics specialist Glenn Cohen considers the complex question of whether humans should mix their genetic material with other animals to create chimeras.
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Transcript - So a recent set of controversies has to do with the funding by the federal government about a research that mixes human and animal genetic material sometimes called chimeras, but there's actually a broader – so again, the method is to think about a large number of cases; it's helpful to think about very different cases. So to use some real cases imagine you mixed human brain cells, so human brain stem cells in the embryonic stage into a mouse to create a mouse with a humanized brain and it wouldn't be a human brain. It isn't exactly the same. It's much smaller, for example, but has humanized elements. Another example is imagine you took a gorilla, treated the gorilla exactly as it is but were able to generate a human looking face, so a gorilla with a human face, how would we think about that entity? Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/88zyqT.
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/glenn-cohen-on-the-ethics-of-human-and-animal-hybrids
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink
Transcript - So a recent set of controversies has to do with the funding by the federal government about a research that mixes human and animal genetic material sometimes called chimeras, but there's actually a broader – so again, the method is to think about a large number of cases; it's helpful to think about very different cases. So to use some real cases imagine you mixed human brain cells, so human brain stem cells in the embryonic stage into a mouse to create a mouse with a humanized brain and it wouldn't be a human brain. It isn't exactly the same. It's much smaller, for example, but has humanized elements. Another example is imagine you took a gorilla, treated the gorilla exactly as it is but were able to generate a human looking face, so a gorilla with a human face, how would we think about that entity? Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/88zyqT.