English scientists plan to combine human DNA with rabbit eggs to produce part-human, part-rabbit embryos that would produce stem cells useful for research.
Yowzers. How many gross ethical violations can you commit in one act?
They have no plans to bring the embryos to term. Frankly I'm not sure if that's good news or bad news. Having and actual chimera would be frightening, but, on the other hand, it's at least partially human, so would it be right to effectively abort it? This gets back into those thorny questions, what confers human personhood: Is it DNA? It would seem to be. How much human DNA does it take to confer human personhood? 100%? 50%? 1%? Certainly it's easy to argue that if you introduce one human gene into an animal, it doesn't make it human. On the other hand, if you introduce one animal gene into a human, it doesn't make him non-human. (I almost said "it".) Perhaps a better measure would be rationality. If the creature and reason and make moral judgments like a human, he's human. However this is a much more complicated test; it means, for example, that we can't determine if these rabbit-human embryos are persons, though we can make a morally certain guess.
My brain hurts.
(Thanks again to Matt K.)
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