Human-Animal embryos

[danielle]

I am sure many of you have seen this or at least heard about it, but I had to post. First of all I am pro stem cell research and find this article extremely interesting though at the same time a bit scary-whats your take?

http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341bf67c53ef00e54efab6038833

http://blogs.discovery.com/good_idea/2007/10/human-animal-hy.html

I know this is an old story btw it just came up again at work

 

[ghosthousecorns]

I am also pro stem cell research but I'm not sure how I would feel about a "Manimal" being deliberately allowed to exist as anything more than an embryo to be researched. Though many feel all life is sacred, is this something that would have naturally occured without a lab setting and gene manipulation? No - it is man made and as such has no "right to be born" in my eyes. But many diseases could maybe be cured by studying it.

 

[danielle]

I'm in the same boat. I believe stem cell research may be the key to curing or improving quality of life for those with disease and by all means possible should be studied. If anything researchers have already been able to grow cancer cells, AIDS, nerve cells, and other debilitating maladies we knew little about conclusively until recently to learn why and how specific treatments work, or don't work.

Adult stem cells are not as pliable or versatile because they are already specialized as a type of cell with a specific incoded function, but fetal tissue is a blank slate waiting to become whtever you tell it to be and can be harvested in greater numbers. Now fertility clinics "dispose" of unneeded embryos to make space for more so why not use them to help the living?

However, not destroying a hybrid embryo so it could live is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Can a manimal live, work, function, or breathe, and why would anyone believe allowing something like this to live is anymore just and humane than destroying it after it has been used to improve living human life?