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> 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.

Okay, on day 19 three of them are clusters of cells, how about day 280? How about year 5? I think the argument is that a majority of people would find it unethical to continue to develop viable embryos, and even more unethical to conduct research on them were they to mature.

Research is already performed using human fetal tissue obtained from aborted fetuses. How is this significantly different?

"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?

Just how many women create a fetus and abort it in the name of science? Human embryos are not manufactured for experimentation. What you're talking about is completely orthogonal.

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.

At what point does a thing become a human-thing? Imagine there was a way to copy a few human genes over to a mouse so that its immune system more closely resembled a human, but it was still, in every other respect, a mouse. Would it be a human-mouse?

It's a great discussion to have when the matter at hand is that subtle. Frankensteining together human stem cells and monkey blastocysts until something works is pretty far from surgically selecting specific genes.

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"

I agree that we should be maximally wary of ethical considerations here, but a uniform mass of cells is a uniform mass of cells. We do know when important structures develop.

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"

I disagree. A small lump of cells is not more conscious or capable of suffering than a cow which most of us accept being killed for a steak.

[citation needed] No one has any idea what consciousness is, how it arises, what its physical correlates and boundaries are, what perceived valence corresponds to, whether small systems can experience pleasure or suffering beyond what humans are used to...

> No one has any idea what ... its physical correlates ... are

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...

Things can't be further detached from reality. Once you ever spend a few days with a herd of cows, you get a feeling for their personalities, their joy, their pain. Comparing to a group of humans, be it kids on a playground or some factory worker, you really start to wonder why in one case we allow ownership, life-long suffering and death under excruciating pain, while in the other case those things are punished by lifelong imprisonment or even the death penalty.

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*.

Did you know that when you cut grass it sends out distress signal - the lovely smell of fresh cut grass. In principle it is the grass screaming out loud in horror. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30573/what-causes-fresh-... Unfortunately we can't survive without hurting other species.

Humans are also great at personifying non-person things. The grass isn't 'screaming out in horror', rather it's emitting a chemical that its evolved to emit in response to certain stimuli.

Its one giant organism, we are awfully hung up on that its parts are not touching and imagined some fringe type of individualism like covering your eyes with your hands makes you invisible. We are nothing without context.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language

> Chimeras might actually improve the situation

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.

> we can't survive without hurting other species.

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 like to interpret it as do least harm as reasonably possible.

I would also like to see artificial meat to appear. Then the large number of current captive animals could be "retired".

> We need a better understanding of consciousness and awareness before trying such things,

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.

Good question. Ear-mouse wants to hear the answer:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1945000/images/_1949073_mouse_...

Ear mouse cant hear the answer because its additional ear is just some cow cartliage that's been molded to resemble an ear.

Very much unlike Michael Levin's tadpole gut-eyes: https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c?t=743

At no single point, the brains, central nervous system, etc develop little by little.

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".

Here are some numbers from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/ss/ss6907a1.htm#T9_down

Stats don't say what the abortions were in the name of though (that I see on first review at least).

Morally complex please, as if God is real or the universe or whatever cares, what a quaint sentiment.

Legality is irrelevant. Degrading the sanctity of human life enables those in power to normalize atrocities.

Abortions are not a desired action, by society, doctors, women, families, anyone really.

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.

What if we gave a dog a human brain? What if we gave a robot a human consciousness? Just offering some more scenarios that didn't happen.

An interesting short story about an android child who desperately wants to be loved is "Supertoys Last All Summer Long".

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.

If you want to know what happens go read "Heart of a dog" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog

Too late to edit to add: when I say "continue to develop" I don't mean to continue creating new viable embryos, I mean allowing the existing embryos to mature.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

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...

And there's the inevitable Nazi-adjacent comparison. Didn't take long.

> Okay, on day 19 three of them are clusters of cells, how about day 280?

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.

And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.

The world is not black and white.

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.

> Clusters of cells can't be 'tortured in a lab,'

From a Hindu perspective, consciousness begins associating with the body at the moment of conception. Though it does not fully inhabit it yet.

Quite odd to see this downvoted, as it just seems to be an interesting fact.

The Hindu take on consciousness is as relevant to this thread as the Pastafarian take on consciousness.

>Clusters of cells can't be 'tortured in a lab,'

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.

I mean you obviously can't prove a negative, but it stands to reason that a biochemical automaton is no more capable of 'suffering' than a wristwatch. Suffering, as humans define it, is really only possible with consciousness.

Yes, there can be no suffering without consciousness. However, I do not know of any way to determine whether any being other than oneself is conscious.

It's unethical.

Why?

Pro life etc. pp.

/s

It seems contradictory to suggest at the same time that a) these hybrids might teach us that the line between humans and animals isn't as stark as a lot of people think, and b) these hybrids will not be human and therefore will be suitable for medical research that could not be ethically performed on "real" humans.

If you buy the former, it seems to suggest we should be going in the opposite direction with the latter.

You're assuming they're opposed to human testing, so you see the first statement as, "animals are people too" instead of "humans are just animals."

From there, the second statement a solution to a legal problem they have, and not the moral one they don't have.

> so you see the first statement as, "animals are people too" instead of "humans are just animals."

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.

It's not a contradiction if you believe experiments on human embryos should also be deemed ethical.

In formal logical, that means it's not a contradiction, unless you've already ruled out that premise.

Yes. So the point of my comment was to illustrate that either they haven't thought their position through very well, or they're being disingenuous in their claimed intent to follow "all the ethical, legal, and social guidelines in place". If they want to start rocking the ethical boat, it's at best a lie of omission.

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.

That's fair but I don't think it's quite disingenuous to follow the letter of the law, and the spirit of what the person thinks the law should be.

To me the disingenuous part would be claiming they’re going to follow the prevailing ethical guidelines (paraphrased) when in fact they disagree with those guidelines and have essentially hatched this whole monkey/human hybrid scheme to sidestep them. (hypothetically)

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.

I think you can think the line is closer than we think, but still believe there is a line.

The other disturbing thing is that it can be read two ways and the reverse is implicating that because they think they can do live experimentation on animals, they think doing the same experimentation on humans would be fine. Maybe their experimentation on monkeyman will lead to atrocities on people. That seems more likely than having people accept experimentation on monkeypeople and then deciding to stop abusing animals.

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.

I'm with the paper. I've e.g. hoped we start cloning neanderthals and whatnot to erase these artificial boundaries too.

Thank you for pointing this out!

I also think it's a dangerous point to try and make. We should put human life first.

The review paper[0] you are referring to is not the chimera lab paper.

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.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/6/1/37/5489867

People need to have the freedom to do research. If Galilio agreed to stop researching due to protests, we wouldn't be here today.

You may want to look up the works of Dr. Josef Mengele and then re-evaluate your first sentence.

You're a layperson forming opinions about a topic you didn't even take the time to read about.

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.