From Manuel Alfonseca's popular science blog.
Faced with this situation, Françoise Baylis, an expert on bioethics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, believes that research on human-animal chimeras will eventually be banned because of the faulty assumption that human life is more valuable than that of non-human beings.is And he adds this:
The hope that one can ‘forever’ avoid the tough ethical questions by simply ensuring that the nonhuman animals are not ‘substantively humanized’ is flawed (short-sighted),”
7 comments:
I don't see how relative value has any bearing on whether we mix.
a) If humans are more valuable than cockroaches, we can freely exploit the cockroaches and co-opt their useful genes for ourselves.
b) On the other hand, if humans and cockroaches are equally valuable beings, then it's totally appropriate for us to merge as equals. One set of genes won't devalue the other set, or anything like that.
PETA is against chimeric animals for the same reasons they are against raising animals for food.
I think humans are worth more than anaimals
that does not does give u the right to be unncessarily cruel to animals.
I have rats in my shed. Big ones. Eight to ten inches long (OK, six). I caught three so far. There is at least one more to go. Maybe more if their breeding has been successful. I bought a plastic rat trap with teeth. The trap caught the first one my the mouth. The rat dragged the trap our of the shed. I found him still alive outside the shed. It was fairly difficult to finish him off with a shovel on his neck. We only found a foot of the second one. The dog chewed up the trap. I bought another trap. This time I used a string to tie it to a nail. This rat was also caught by the mouth dangling by the string. I again finished him off with a shovel and reset the trap.
I do not understand this conversation about valuing animals the same as humans.
too think humans infinitely more valuable than animals. OP seems to warn us that incorporating more and more human DNA into lab animals will evt. present us with some of the same ethical challenges as does abortion.
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