Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
The goal, the team says, is to make better models for studying biological development, evolution, disease progression and treatments. "As we are unable to conduct certain types of experiments in humans, it is essential that we have better models to more accurately study and understand human biology and disease,"
Interestingly, the review paper suggests that perhaps the creation of human-animal chimeras might help people realize that humans don’t necessarily have any higher moral status than any other creature.
Yeah sorry but fuck off with this. If your explicit goal is to create living organisms for medical research / donor organs that would be unethical to perform in humans, don't turn around and justify it with "maybe our monkeyman will increase people's concern with animal welfare!" If it did then we would turn around and ban your research and/or just do it in humans directly.
Frankly I'd find it a lot more ethical to figure out how to grow a brainless human clone for these purposes than a sentient hu-monkey that can be tortured in a lab.
I also think it's a dangerous point to try and make. We should put human life first.
If you buy the former, it seems to suggest we should be going in the opposite direction with the latter.
From there, the second statement a solution to a legal problem they have, and not the moral one they don't have.
You're assuming a lot yourself by telling me how I interpret the point about the line between humans and animals, and (in fact) you have assumed incorrectly.
The article includes a quote about how they intend to follow "all the ethical, legal, and social guidelines in place". So I don't think the point I made about their stance being contradictory is way off base. Of course, they could actually be aliens from the planet Omicron Persei 8 with zero genuine concern for human or animal life. Or whatever.
In formal logical, that means it's not a contradiction, unless you've already ruled out that premise.
Generally, I think bioethicists will look askance at attempts to skirt current guidelines around experimenting on human specimens by creating human/monkey hybrids that are human enough to be useful to science but not enough for the letter of the law to call them human. That's the context.
I’m not necessarily attaching a value judgement to this. I’m just pointing out that their public position is either poorly thought out or not entirely honest.
> After 10 days, there were 103 of these chimeric embryos remaining, but by day 19 only three still survived. After that, the embryos were terminated before they developed any further.
Clusters of cells can't be 'tortured in a lab,' there are plenty of legitimate problems in the world to be outraged about but this really isn't one of them.
"A majority of people would find it unethical to continue to develop viable embryos" seems contradictory to the current legal status of abortion in the US. Perhaps it is unethical but worth doing regardless?
Now, breeding/manufacturing animals for experiments is awful and morally complex--ethically unclear (at least to me). But the line must be drawn somewhere, and we can very easily draw it at manufacturing human-monkeys, human-pigs, or human-anythings.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1945000/images/_1949073_mouse_...
From the article:
The announcement of the new chimeras will no doubt be labelled “unnatural” or “playing God” by some people – but the same could be said about many scientific breakthroughs. An iPhone is unnatural.
When lifeforms are compared to iPhones, we've reached a pretty clear David Mitchell moment of saying "Are we the baddies?" Something reeks here of amoral science.
We need a better understanding of consciousness and awareness before trying such things, or it's only a matter of time before realizing a catastrophic error that joins the many permanent stains of humanity, as we accidentally become the monster "AM" in "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream"
For example, one of the most important cell line in research is called HeLa, which was harvested from a woman with the same initials without consent from a cancerous growth. Since then, it was grown to a huge biomass (couldn’t find exact number). Other than the lack of consent which is obviously amoral, would you consider research on this human cell line bad?
"We need a better understanding of consciousness"
We do know a fair bit about the neural (physical) correlates of consciousness in humans, and the evolutionary purpose of those facets of consciousness, such as fear or pain.
This understanding can help us to make a reasoned guess that cows are more capable of suffering than a small lump of cells in a blastocyst:
(1) We can see that cows have similar brain structures to humans[1], where those brain structures (amygdala, etc) are known to be a necessary condition for pain or fear perception in humans, and those same brain structures are absent in a blastocyst.
(2) We know that pain and fear is an adaptation that all/most mammals likely have, because (i) it confers significant fitness, and because (ii) it manifests below our cortex (e.g. in the amygdala) which suggests it evolved fairly early.
My claim isn't that a blastocyst doesn't have consciousness. My claim is that its consciousness and capability to suffer is likely to be less than that of a cow (based on the above reasoning), and so society should make sure it is being ethically consistent in the way it treats both.
My first question to you would be - if your position is correct, i.e. that we should be extremely ethically cautious with blastocysts because they may suffer and have conscious states - how can society then ethically justify abortion?
My second question would be - how can a meat eater (which you might not be) express such ethical caution pertaining to blastocysts but willingly eat meat? [I am a meat eater].
[1] This is pertaining to sheeps' (not cows') amygdala, but the point is the same - https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.2...
You can't claim "but we don't know what conciousness is" to justify how we treat animals while at the same time have the strongest protections for fellow human beings. Well, usually only those of your own backyard, since we westerners also tend to treat third world country populations like sh*.
We are slaughtering, maiming and torturing people (plants and animals) all of the time, non stop, since the beginning. We build ever more sophisticated machines to do it. I cant even look at the butcher robots that feed me.
Chimeras might actually improve the situation. It would force us to question our holier than thou, my shit don't stink attitude. I for one welcome our chimera underlings. It will be a revolution of philosophy.
Stopping supporting the animal-killing and animal-experimentation industries as far as you easily can, would improve the situation.
i.e. Stop eating "meat". And imagine the oceans without humans fishing them lifeless.
I'm not sure about the purpose of your comment, but it sounds like your conclusion is "therefore can do whatever we want to other species." As if ethics doesn't apply. As if we shouldn't try to minimize that hurt. Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Paragraph speculating about such arguments and why people use them:
Hopefully one day soon people aren't still offering "plant=animal" justifications of eating animals, like this. I find them very depressing. It's as if suffering is a joke to these people. Or something, I don't understand. Just repeating pro-meat arguments they've heard, I guess. Maybe it's a positive sign, and such comments try to bury unease from their growing sense of ethical responsibility to other species.
I would also like to see artificial meat to appear. Then the large number of current captive animals could be "retired".
We do have quite a good understanding of those things in animals. Yet, nobody cares and people make fun of the "animal welfare" concept. Even in this thread. But suddenly a few human cells are involved for a few days and people start screaming.
There are vegetarians who eat fish "because they don't have feelings". As long as society accepts this nonsensical hypocrisy, your line of reasoning goes nowhere.
When the baby gets out of womb, their eyes start to gain sight. They're practically unable to focus their vision after birth.
So, we have a quite good understanding on what happens at what week of pregnancy and when it is just biomass, and when it starts to have "structure".
Stats don't say what the abortions were in the name of though (that I see on first review at least).
They are a compromise to help women who made a mistake, were victims of assault, are too young to take care of a child. It's a bit less about "taking ownership of your body", than it is about "being tolerant and understanding about facts of life we can't change".
That's where it's less unethical: it's not like people support terminating a potential human life, they support instead lifting one up that took a wrong step.
Now these chimera experiments are fine to me, but I'd be okay to wait, go slow, debate in society about them rather than point at 16 yo rape victims and say "see she killed her baby and we used it to test a vaccine, why can't I mix a monkey with a human and see what grows before terminating it when I dont need it anymore"? Again, I m anti religious but I wouldnt want street riots and Trump 2.0 because scientists felt it was boring to explain to the idiots.
Even a dog with a dog brain shouldn't be subjected to arbitrary experimentation and pain. If it is sentient, then it should be treated with respect. A robot with consciousness should also be treated with respect, and if it wants love then it deserves love.
I find those experiments until a certain threshold okay.
1 day: no problem here 20 days: still no issue.
Life doesn't start just because we let a biological machine execute something.
I think both cases are probably unethical (creating to begin with, and secondly, more unethically, to bring them to further maturity, or even to the point of being self-supporting, i.e. fully alive)
If we start going down this road, eventually someone will allow them to be brought to life.
We already know the horrors wrought on other humans by our very selves in the name of "science" in the past (think unit 731, not really science, but "science"), I can only imagine we'd do worse to something not fully human.
interestingly the perpetrators received immunity from the US...in exchange for information...I wouldn't be surprised if history repeats itself and a lot of people are counting on it...
Even supposing they had, completely unethically, actually transferred these embryos into a woman or monkey, the odds of any of the three surviving to term are likely quite low. The most likely outcome would be miscarriage and probably a quite early one at that.
We don't even know if survival to term would be possible. It may be simply impossible due to some genetic incompatibility. Even if it were possible, it would quite likely take (on average) hundreds of attempts before you'd have a success.
From a Hindu perspective, consciousness begins associating with the body at the moment of conception. Though it does not fully inhabit it yet.
/s
There is actually no way to know whether this is true. About all you can justifiably say is something like, "if it turns out that clusters of cells can experience suffering, well... we are already probably causing suffering anyway all the time to chickens and cows and who knows to what else, so it would not really be much of a change".
It is tempting to say that something that has no nervous system cannot suffer, but such an attitude is not scientifically justified. It is just folk speculation.
Is it the embryonic researchers or the ethicists who should "fuck off"?
I am personally grateful for the work of both, and believe you would be too if you understood who is doing what and why.
First, they didn't develop infants. This is a cell culture. There is no animal to "torture".
Second, we use animal models to understand critical problems in biology. This is sometimes the only way to conduct research. There are protocols in place to keep it as humane as possible.
Please don't step on the science for failing to see the big picture.
I think animals have enormous intrinsic worth, emotions, and value; I think humans have even more. Maybe we should stop doing this type of testing on either one.
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“It is sometimes argued that … [the creation of part-human chimeras] will undermine an important moral view: that it matters, morally, which species we belong to,” the report reads. ”This argument assumes that we ought to preserve the view that boundaries between species are fixed, natural, and morally relevant, with full moral status reserved exclusively for humans. Yet even if creating part-human chimeras alters public attitudes in this way (and it is not obvious that it would), it is unclear why it is important for us to preserve the view that biological humanness is both necessary and sufficient for full moral status… Accordingly, it might be a good thing if the creation of part-human chimeras prompts us to rethink the significance we currently attach to species membership.”
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Love things that poke at the arbitrary borders in our heads, its part of the reason that I appreciate what the pandemic has shown us about the education system here in the US: <inflammatory-statement> we were forced to confront the reality that the main purpose of grade-school is more so to act as a glorified mass-daycare, rather a 'critical source of development of intelligence/knowledge/maturity'. </inflammatory-statement>
Notice how they said both "necessary and sufficient"? When both are included, there's an implication here that it might be possible for someone to be fully biologically human and yet without full moral rights - that, for example, someone with a different number of chromosomes isn't entitled to life - that someone can be a human and that being human is not "sufficient" for them to have human rights. That's dystopian. Maybe I'm assuming bad faith on the part of the author.
I think you are. Because while your examination of the logic is sound as far as it goes, I think you stop where the author trusts you to continue.
The idea that humans don't deserve full moral rights is so unpopular that author trusts you to infer that they hold some other view. Along the lines of "maybe there are non-human species which deserve full moral rights as well."
I will deliberately not get more specific than that about what the author, because if I did I would probably be bringing the details of my own views rather than theirs. But for myself, it seems highly plausible that other species with highly sophisticated individual social behavior may be able to suffer in ways we're used to thinking of as unique to human experience. And I think there are other people, maybe not yourself, who might accept this plausibility if they are forced to confront the reality of human chimeras.
Of course, there's also the priests, and I expect a very different reaction from them.
If you don’t view the “attached” women as a living person that can die from childbirth.. Also, there is a very real difference between a first trimester fetus and a third trimester one. The latter is only ever aborted when the life of the mother is in danger (eg. with mothers less than 18).
Just a nitpick.
Second the recommendation.
The moral reprehensibility of such an experiment is not the result of humans treating any other species as lesser, morally- rather, it is because it is immoral to create something sentient which has not been created by natural processes. To bring a sentient being into the world which is created by human engineering process is immoral because there are no guarantees that we do not create something which is horribly mutated, fucked up genetically, and experiences only pain for its entire life.
It has nothing to do with humans thinking they are better than animals, and everything to do with the fear of humans thinking they are better than God (or nature if that strikes your fancy)
I didn't put this quite as eloquently as I would like to have, but for fucks sake y'all - get your head cut in and don't drink the coolaid of these psychopathic scientists that think they have a better understanding of morality through science the the aggregate of a long heritage of human moral reasoning.
Organ transplants :
No, this is a life saving (or condition improving) medical procedure. Same for prosthetics.
I am referring only to experiments where the outcome might be the creation of a new species of sentient being. Pretty much I'm drawing the line at exactly the posted experiment.
I don't think anyone is saying that if a fucking Frankenstein's monster human/monkey hybrid were engineered, that people would say that the chimera itself had committed an immoral act. They would say that it was wrong to make that thing. You don't even understand what point you're trying to make.
If it is absolutely immoral to genetically engineer a human being that would require an organ transplant then it would seemingly also be immoral to not utilize readily accessible technology that could have prevented such a disorder, no?
Well, actually, no - that doesn't necessarily follow. It's not valid to say "if it's wrong to do x then it's wrong to not do things that prevent x" - you can substitute X for plenty of other things. It's wrong for me to steal money from a friend, but it doesn't logically follow that I'm morally obligated to buy a security system for my friend so he doesn't get stolen from. The analogy is kind of funky here, but I think you get what I'm saying.
There's an intentionality that exists with genetic engineering that doesn't exist with people having kids the old-fashioned way. If someone has a child, and that child turns out to have a birth defect that causes issues, that's a sad accident most of the time, and accidents don't have the same moral quality as intentional acts, like genetically engineering someone.
Let's not lose track of why this came up. The question was "So, are trans folks immoral? Organ transplants? Prosthetics? Where do you draw the line?" and that was in response to "It is immoral to create something sentient which has not been created by natural processes. To bring a sentient being into the world which is created by human engineering process is immoral because there are no guarantees that we do not create something which is horribly mutated, fucked up genetically, and experiences only pain for its entire life."
Asking if we're morally obligated to try to make super babies is a distraction from that earlier question. I said what I did not because I wanted to argue for or against the validity of eugenics, but because I wanted to call attention to how absurd the line of reasoning was.
The person commenting thought that they hit on a pretty solid point when they seemed to equivocate scientists making human-monkey chimeras with people that have to use a fucking cane. I pointed out that no one is intentionally genetically engineering people to force them to have to use canes, and then you've come along to say that if it's possible to ensure that someone will be born without having to use a cane, then they're morally obligated to do that. Somewhere we went off the rails, huh?
Already you've delved into ideology.
Yes.
> Organ transplants?
OK, as long as they were taken from someone who was actually dead. Not all organs can be taken after death. In these cases, the transplant surgeon ends the donor's life in the process of harvesting.
> Prosthetics?
OK.
At one point, pulmonary arrest was considered death. Then, cardiac arrest. Now, we use the cessation of brain activity as an approximation, but there have been plenty of cases of patients with zero brain activity making full recoveries.
The best definition of death is probably information-theoretic death. But that's not something we know how to measure (yet), so the organ harvests continue:
'God' does this all the time already. Friends of mine recently had a baby girl; she is missing part of one of her chromosomes. The family is very religious, and is being torn apart trying to understand how their 'loving God' could have done such a thing. So this 'morality' you speak of is making a tragic and difficult event far worse.
You are also neglecting the 'unnatural' processes that allow many worthy people have children via IVF.
'Natural' science and medicine had it's place back in medieval times, but not now. Same goes for religion.
IVF is not creating a completely new, engineered organism. Not really what I am talking about.
And man, the idea that religion has no place in the modern world would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. Religion serves a veokry important role in society and we abandon it at our peril.
I am sorry to hear about your friend, but this is really not comparable to engineering a new unique organism. And I'm sure her pain would be just as great or worse without a god in her life. Christians realize that there are trials in the world. Re: the book of Job.
> Religion serves a very important role in society and we abandon it at our peril.
What "important role" might that be? I don't see the necessity of religion and don't think there's anything inherent of religions that can't be supplemented by the surrounding culture.
My practical argument is not that it encodes generational wisdom, necessarily, but rather that it is a source of moral reasoning that lies external to pure logic, which sacrifices what is right for what is practical, or expedient, in many cases
I don't see a use for religion other than to allow people to skirt their responsibility in having/maintaining a mature line of empathy.
Truly though, any sect of christianity that abuses non heteronarmative people or women is not living by the law of the bible.
I know this sounds like a "no true scotsman" fallacy but really, If you read the bible, 100% of awful christian behaviour is in spite of the bible, not inspired by it.
Almost all of the worst atrocities in history have be committed due to faith/some other non-logical idealism. In this way relgion does very little to create a "hard line that can't be crossed" in fact it's often used as the justification.
Empathy can be derived from logic and is sufficient for deriving modern morality.
I'm not saying all religion is bad, just that it doesn't have utility over and beyond logic. Logic is more than sufficient to establish all of the perceived benefits of religion with none of the inherent risks/downsides of organised religions.
With Christianity supposedly in decline, especially in tech, how will we replace it?
I HAVE seen the state fail to help after burning through millions in many places.
> I HAVE seen the state fail to help after burning through millions in many places.
Sure, but that's a red herring. It's fair to say both have a checkered past.
Religion and charity are voluntary. You can choose to donate to charities that will most effectively utilize your donations. You don't have that choice with a state, and the outcomes are not always good. Even in Democracies, the state social services are often such inefficient massively entrenched institutions that they are resistant to change.
Religions also serve as bulwarks against increasing state power. Depending on your perspective this could be a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm more concerned about the great harm an unrestrained state can inflict on the world than what good it may be able to do.
That's what I'm referring to, you'd donate to professionals, but would you do any of it yourself?
So, learn from europe and other social democratic states. Stop believe in the dogma of the invisible hand, and that what makes money is inherently good.
IVF seems pretty un-natural...
It's not too clear what "completely new, engineered organism" line you're taking here.
but your friends may also consider this:
any suffering in this life is rewarded in the next life (the life after death)
god doesn't give us tests that we couldn't possibly pass.
if you are compassionate, i hope you won't ridicule your friends for their belief but try to help them come to terms with their situation using their own belief to strengthen them
I get that you’re framing this in a context that OPs friend might take solace in, but when you put it like that it just sounds like a cruel joke to me.
it just sounds like a cruel joke to me
what would be the alternative?
when anyone suffers, they need help to end that suffering, but also hope and encouragement that they will get through it, because some things just can't be fixed with material means.
if you look at this as if there is a god out there that goes: hmm, this family needs a test. how about i mess up their baby?
that would indeed be cruel. but that is not what i believe is happening. i don't know what that particular child suffers from, but by now we can explain many birth defects to some humans mistakenly or intentionally doing something wrong, like poisoning water with chemicals or malfunctioning nuclear reactors, or what not. i don't believe that any of these are pure acts of god. but they could all be prevented if humans as a whole were more diligent. (i don't mean that any individual could have done anything by themselves, but that as humanity we need to work together to avoid and remove things that cause people to suffer[1])
this is a consequence of free will. bad things happen, because if god were to prevent them, then we would not have free will.
nevertheless on an individual level god does promise that whatever suffering we experience is rewarded in the next life, and that we are all given the capacity to pass the tests that we experience and get through that suffering.
[1] that is in fact happening. we have eliminated many diseases and quality of life on average is improving globally. there is more work to be done, but we are getting there.
I disagree on two parts:
1. I think it’s immoral to oppose the creation of sentient beings.
2. If we create sentient beings, those beings will have been created by a natural process, because we (and our actions) are natural processes.
On point 2 : well you got me there. Let me be more precise : its not the "natural processes" part that is important, but my point was rather that this type of hybridizing results in the creation of organisms which have not been time tested and weathered the refining pressures of evolution. We have no gaurantees of the probabability of a successful organism - could be, as I said, some fucked up abomination which only exists to plead for death. Quite tragic in my view if this is the outcome.
I just think we'd better not even go there.
> “time tested and weathered the refining pressures of evolution”
Those refining pressures are not kind or gentle.
We can stop ourselves from being unkind, though
Although I think this is unlikely, let's accept it as true for the sake of argument.
Eventually I think it's fair to presume we'd come to understand which variations of the process produce your 'abomination' and solve that problem, such that we go on to produce many, many more organisms that don't suffer this same experience.
Would this not be a better outcome than 'not even going there'?
What would be the point of creating new species? Sow more division and war and violence. I just dont see it turning out well. Inherently humans would be the "creators" of the other species. Sounds like a recipe for some horrible problems with speciesm.
I've not given it a lot of thought but off the top of my head:
Imagine a monkey or ape that possesses above-average (for an ape) intelligence that could be a home-health assistant, taking care of an elderly person who wishes to maintain some independence and not move into a nursing home. Or a disabled adult who needs special care throughout the day.
Speciesism seems a remote risk when you consider the fact that our moral circle of concern has only widened across history.
Evolution is not kind. And evolution doesn’t optimize for happiness or even health beyond reproductive.
Evolution has produced plenty of humans who plead for death. We treat it as a disorder and try to fix it.
I’m wholeheartedly on board with (1) not creating more suffering and (2) reducing suffering. However I’m not convinced that evolution does better on either of those two fronts than empathetic humans.
you are applying a different definition that is problematic. by your definition murder could be considered natural
since we obviously agree that murder is not good, and you also agree that not everything natural (by your definition of natural) is good either, using natural in support of your argument no longer works.
this doesn't invalidate your argument. we can still discuss whether creating sentient beings is acceptable or not. just arguing whether it is natural or not does not help us here
Lets look at the definition for nature: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nature
Definition 2b is succint: "an inner force (such as instinct, appetite, desire) or the sum of such forces in an individual"
According to this, murder is in fact quite natural.
I don't like arguments about definitions, because they're a cheap way out: "x is (not) bad because its y"; they also force discussions about all the wrong things, ignoring the core of what both parties care about regarding the issue.
i agree. i do however like to clarify definitions so that we all know what we mean. i am quite happy to continue the discussion with OPs definition of natural, because now that we understand what that definition is we can get back to the actual core of the issue.
Ive often thought that the dichitomy between human action and natural processes is a false one.
If we define "natural" to mean "things that happen", then sure, I would see no difference between natural things and human things. But we use the word "natural" to separate some of our actions from the actions of animals.
I think we could come up with a list of things that people do that animals don't do. Looking at actions from the standpoint of culpability, intentionality, objectivity, language, and planning might shed some light on what actions we would consider "natural". For example, feeling attracted to another person would fall under the "natural" category because we would not consider ourselves "culpable" or "use intention" for such an action. Another example: desire paths made by humans in the grass would probably fall under the "natural" category because people do not plan the paths with language or use objectivity to create the paths. We simply walk "mindlessly" and the paths spring up from under our feet. Another example: asking a stranger for directions would fall under the category of "unnatural" because we need to use language and an objective view of the world around us to engage with another person to share information.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/natural only one sub-item of these fifteen definitions of "natural" mentions a difference between human vs non-human.
Lets look at the definition for nature: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nature
Definition 2b is succint: "an inner force (such as instinct, appetite, desire) or the sum of such forces in an individual"
According to this, of course, something like murder is quite natural. Is the stranger giving you directions not following that "nature" within which makes him help you for nothing in return? Is your request for help not a natural thing?
Ultimately, I don't like arguments about definitions, because I think they're a cheap way out: "x is (not) bad because its y"; they also force discussions about all the wrong things, ignoring the core of what both parties care about regarding the issue.
I want to find what essential quality separates people actions from animal actions. It seems to me that all unnatural things got "affected by human discernment". Using that rubric, I find it interesting that all of the definitions of "natural" you provided fall into those categories of either "fundamentally affected" or "not affected" by human discernment where things left in their base state we call "natural" and things left in their affected state we call "unnatural".
Examples:
1. Natural justice - that humans have a kind of justice beyond what nature provide which also implies that humans have sussed out the various justices allotted by nature.
3. Adopted vs natural child - human convention creates long-lasting parent-child relationships without a birth connection.
10. Growing without human care
13. (a) Closely resembling an original, (b) freedom from artificiality -- both of which require a human to create the artificiality.
The definition of "unnatural" toward which you're extensionally groping here is "things only humans, and no other animals, do". I suspect you are going to find it a considerably narrower category than you presently appear to imagine. I also don't think it is going to lead you anywhere useful; many anarchoprimitivists have trodden this ground before you, and if nothing else it may be worth familiarizing yourself with some of their work lest you find yourself in one of the same pitfalls they so often do.
Do you see a narrow difference between human output and animal output? Would you consider that difference somehow not "useful"? I think the bird and bee examples do not provide a compelling sense of language in the same way human talking does because animal language appears tightly bounded and human language through its recursive features appears possibly limitless.
Off-topic, but responding regarding US schools: as a licensed physics teacher I generally agree; schools are holding pens, with an upside of strengthening peer-bonds through suffering together. The experience that best lined up with helping students find joy in learning (so they might continue on their own, at the library, etc) was teaching at an alternative public school. The small team of teachers was able to get to know all the students (in a community-size below Dumbar’s number) enough to genuinely care and get closer to meeting individual needs, as if everyone were on an IEP (individualized education plan). I don’t know what changes to prioritize except early-childhood education to minimize trauma and educate our first teachers (parents). It’s a big, complex system with inertia.
-Shadowrun RPG
It's scary to see this article because it's essentially "proving" Alex Jones right. This is a very bad precedent.
The issue at hand is serious, but it's obscured because of the comedic/crazy veil that Jones's delivery and accompanying distortion/exaggeration of the facts causes.
This reminds me of his erroneous "they're turning the friggin' frogs gay" comment, which has links in a serious issue — atrazine feminizing male frogs: https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/.
Life imitates art, after all.
Alex Jones is an awful person. He lies about so much, some of it will end up being accidentally correct. What he says or thinks should be shunned by any decent human being, and he should not be brought up here.
My point here is that a lot of people who are not very informed, who may be susceptible to his conspiracy theories, will see this news come out and think, "Oh, he was right. Maybe he's right about something else."
IMO the problem is that it was ridiculed when he said it. Now he can look back and post a link to an NPR article stating that human-monkey chimera embryos have been created.
I make this comment only because a friend of mine sent me the NPR article [0] with a note saying "man maybe Alex Jones is right about a lot of stuff, lol." I don't know how common this sentiment is, but it's another talking point lodged in Jones's favor (to the detriment of all of us).
[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/04/15/9871645...
Obviously it's not an intentional government plot... but that doesn't mean we _aren't_ "turning frogs gay".
Agreed.
> What he says or thinks should be shunned by any decent human being, and he should not be brought up here.
No. He should not be a taboo topic. Let it out in the open where rational people can see for themselves how crazy he is and make up their own minds.
I really hate this whole cancel culture thing, I don't even wish it on the Alex Joneses of the world.
What has been challenging, as an adult growing up into the internet is seeing younger kids exposed to polished and talented psychopaths. These people are very, very good at exploiting social systems and have no qualms about leveraging social norms for their personal benefit. This goes well beyond partisan media. I'm sure this will all sort out someday, but it usually takes years to develop resistance to the sort of manipulation techniques they employee to leverage standard weaknesses that all people have, and the internet has given them massive leverage. People are now exposed to this well before their cognitive development is complete. It is a lot to ask of kids to be able to develop defense mechanisms to military grade propaganda while their prefrontal cortex is still a work in progress.
Anyway, Alex Jones is bad, and while I don't care for cancel culture like I said earlier, I will worry about that after the many other more pressing problems facing life on Earth are in a stabler place.
Doesn't the global economy essentially hinge on an ever growing supply of workforce?
If you spout out every random conspiracy theory you know, some of the things you say will be true.
(Also turning frogs female is not the same as turning them gay - if he meant that it would propagate harmful stereotypes)
To paraphrase — a liar has some respect for the truth, because he knows its power and shies away from it. A bullshitter doesn't care if something is true or false, only if they persuade their listener, and therefore the bullshitter has no respect for the truth.
The point I was trying to make, and maybe I did not make it well, was that this is another thing Jones's adherents can point to to say "well, look, he was right about this." That means he can persuade more people, which is clearly not good.
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/12/us/researchers-claim-embr...
The people inclined to be more outraged than excited likely didn't understand the technical details.
Not saying scientists of faith don't exist, but there doesn't tend to be a heavy representation of the sciences in fundamentalist communities.
> "Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was the first person to attempt to create a human–chimp hybrid by artificial insemination."
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/12/18306867/china-...
We don't actually apply the set based standards properly but instead based upon imaginary ideas of human level. If we did consistently operate on set logic and the directive people reduced to brainstem autonomous functions only would eithervmake eating plants unethical or we would be arbitrarily excluding humans from the set for reasons other than absolute ethical.
To go more fantastic it would be consistent with ethics to declare obligate murderous vampires who must eat humans non-human because their existence literally depends unconditionally on taking human lives and it falls into paradox of tolerance.
Instead our standard for the irreversible brain stem only is to eventually withdraw life support or harvest their organs as they are effectively judged dead.
Are you sure you really want this to be the basis on which we decide the morality of terminating life?
I get what you're getting at but I don't think your example serves to make your point. Keeping people alive against their wishes can be really fucking barbaric, especially in cases of irreparably debilitating brain injuries.
Really dissappointed at the level of flippant and useless commentary in this thread. HN is inching closer to a tech oriented reddit every day.
It would be more like a rat-mouse chimera, where a rat has a single mouse organ (e.g. a pancreas) or a human-pig chimera where a small number of human cells are disbursed throughout the pig embryo.
No one is suggesting a race of sentient human-monkey hybrids. Just monkeys which will host some human cells which can be studied for disease research or perhaps grow a human organ for transplant.
IRENE: computer-guided design tool to increase efficiency of cellular conversions
However, saying anything that advances science should be done is a crazy take. I do not believe that people should be tortured, that people should be given drugs against their will, or even be forced to take part in experiments.
The deontological (Kantian) view is that anything that is wrong is so implicitly such that anyone doing something wrong is morally wrong regardless of consequences; murdering a criminal to save thousands in the future would be wrong implicitly.
The utilitarian one says that the ends justify the means, that if one were to murder a criminal to save thousands, it would be morally right.
There is not necessarily a right answer as this argument has been going on in philosophy for a long time, but I'm a utilitarian. If people need to be experimented on in order to advance science, then let it be so. You seem to be less so on this side or even on the deontological side.
Personally, I find your defense of the idea betrays a naive view of utilitarianism. We must take into account not just the immediate consequences of our actions but also the long-term ones. Any society where people may be experimented upon is one where people must live in fear of being experimented upon. To fail to take into account human dignity is tantamount to disregarding human nature, which just means your formula is wrong.
For the case in TFA, the consequences could be dire. I challenge anyone to reference a society where some people can be seen as subhuman and say they would rather live there. One might argue that the chimera is not a person, but that would still, in my opinion, fail to account for all the variables, as the current paradigm where anything with human DNA is considered human is what makes this debatable in the first place.
In short you may say that anything is acceptable but you can't declare it so, and you must also consider that there would be blood in the streets if science had no deontological bounds. You must also account for this in your utilitarian calculation, regardless of how you yourself view morality.
Indeed. But we may not necessarily know the long term results of such actions. For example, we might experiment on people for some time in order to advance science to the point that we can cure all people, say for example, 100 years of experimentation for 1000 years thereafter of saving people. Is that enough? Is the suffering of 100 years worth of people enough to overcome the salvation of 1000 years' worth? I don't know, nobody could know, it's still a moral question. You seem to be presupposing a deontological viewpoint from my understanding given the specific sentence "Any society where people may be experimented upon is one where people must live in fear of being experimented upon."
> I challenge anyone to reference a society where some people can be seen as subhuman and say they would rather live there.
One could argue that this is current society, and it has been throughout human history if you take slavery into account; many people did in fact want to live in such societies, given that they were not slaves.
> To fail to take into account human dignity is tantamount to disregarding human nature, which just means your formula is wrong.
Why? This still seems like it comes from a deontological viewpoint. Why must we consider human dignity? It does not necessarily follow from your argument.
> you must also consider that there would be blood in the streets if science had no deontological bounds.
Again, this does not follow. Why would there be "blood on the streets" if "science had no deontological bounds?"
> I have a hard time imagining anyone commenting about the moral implications of the article would be unaware of the difference between deontological and utilitarian ethics.
Perhaps. Most people don't have academic or rigorous philosophical ethics knowledge.
Remaining in a utilitarian paradigm, I hardly think societies with slavery maximized utility, this was more or less my point.
More to the actual point, science must have deontological ethics for science to, well, exist. Any world where science has no moral rules is a fantasy, and a rather dystopian one. There must be some sort of social contract between scientists and the general population for it to actually be useful. We are already witnessing a rise in anti-scientific sentiment even with the rigorous reviews we currently have. And it has led to many deaths, directly or indirectly.
Now imagine that scientists are allowed to conduct experiments purely for the sake of progress without consideration of absolute morality. People would actively be burning down science labs, and science itself would be seen akin to witchcraft. This would no doubt slow progress to a halt.
To summarize, the idea of a world where we can have science without deontology is fictional, you seemed to argue it should be this way, I'm arguing that it can't, in practice, be this way.
There just has to be rules, man.
This is an extremely naive take that ignores some dark history.
This is great news. Anything that advances science should be done. I don't necessarily understand those that are having a moral panic at this news.
Regardless, very, very few things are inherently "evil" as in actively harming humanity. We got nuclear energy from the atomic bomb. If something like ice-nine were created, it is a fallacy to think that it is only negative in its effect, that no positives could be discovered of it in the future. In fact, it is bordering on "we might discover something bad so we should stop discovery of science in that field as a whole" which does not follow logically.
> ( ... ) researchers from the Salk Institute and Kunming University of Science and Technology ( ... )
> In lab tests in culture, the team started with monkey blastocysts. Six days after fertilization they were injected with 25 human extended pluripotent stem (hEPS) cells, which contribute to the tissue as the embryo develops.
> And sure enough, when the researchers examined the batch of embryos 24 hours later, they detected human cells in 132 of them. After 10 days, there were 103 of these chimeric embryos remaining, but by day 19 only three still survived. After that, the embryos were terminated before they developed any further.
Saved you a click.
I'm guessing that the reason why this is called a chimera and not just a blob of cells from two different species is that the number of human cells increased from 25 to 132. But this seems like a very low bar to me...? I'm guessing that if you keep cells which you just extracted from a living organism and keep them in a comfortable bath, division might occur before they quickly die out.
Even if you’re atheist, you cannot escape the underlying reference to a Biblical story: I want the freedom to be like a God.
Any mastery of nature could be viewed as rebellion against mysticism. Viewed in that context, humans have been rebelling since they learned how to create fire on demand rather than relying on 'God' to gift it from the heavens.
> And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Now the question is if the Bible views this "inculcation" of God-like-ness to be a good or bad thing. In a Gnostic interpretation this transcendence from Man into God is the ultimate goal.
Why do we study history? Same reason :)
If it's done for ethical reasons then I don't see how injecting human cells in an monkey embryo then killing them is more ethical than just killing human cells.
This is quite possibly the worst take about anything I've ever heard. Intelligent human-monkey hybrids brought in to the world for the purpose of having their organs harvested, vs lil pocket computer.
Saying "clearly" is not offering any counter argument; it is just an assertion.
Science is an amoral tool. It's up to humans to figure out how to use that tool properly. Personally, I'd say there's nothing wrong with lab-grown organs, but creating them via a hilariously dystopian method reminiscent of Michael Bay's "The Island" is almost certainly a Very Bad idea.
Every day the people running the world seem to be trying harder and harder to become the cackling comic book supervillians that conspiracy theorists have always made them out to be.
Sounds trivial but it is not. He actuall has said a lot of shocking and true shit way before it was public knowledge : e.g. he's been talking about epstein since way before any mainstream media was.
Recently he has been saying that the government is using methods of intravenous dmt injections to talk to interdimensional aliens in order to obtain next gen technology. Inb4 that's true. (/s)
(But only kinda /s )