Living Journey

Stuart Little may come to life!

A while ago I did a brief post called ‘The world’s gone mad!‘. In that post I wrote about some experiential scientific anomalies called ‘Chimeras’. I believe that in breaching the natural order of things by mixing human kind with animal kind is unbiblical. human_mouse.jpgYou just have to read Genesis to understand that God created kinds and those kinds are not to mix with another kind. That is how Genesis is to be read and to be understood, that each kind was to reproduce after its own kind, the way God intended.

Now it seems that we want to mess around with things in a bigger way than expected. Clearly there needs to be firm ethical outlines put in place because technology is travelling faster while society is finding it increasingly harder to keep up. We should not allow technology dictate our lives so much so that we lose the very meaning of what it means to be human.

Hold your horses, slow down… let’s really consider things here!

Dr. Mohler’s Blog has an excellent article on these Chimeras. And he quotes Nancy L. Jones who is an Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and a consultant on Bio-tech Ethics for ‘The Center for BioEthics Human Dignity‘, she has brought up some very valid points concerning the experimentation of cross-species mutations. She has brought up some very valid points that need to be discussed:

Another concern would be zoonotic transmission of disease, which occurs when pathogens cross the traditional species barriers of disease transmission. When human and animal tissues are intertwined so closely, potential mutations of once species-specific pathogens may gain a unique ability to infect organisms of other species. A more fundamental Christian concern involves violation of the divinely created order. The Bible tells us that God designed procreation so that plants, animals, and humans always reproduce after their own kind or seed. (Gen 1:11-12, 21) In the biblical view, then, species integrity is defined by God, rather than by arbitrary or evolutionary forces. The fusion of animal-human genomes runs counter to the sacredness of human life and man created in the image of God.

The creation of animal-human chimeras as a means of deriving human tissue and organs highlights the deeper issues facing our generation: the new biological genomic revolution and the resultant power that may permit scientists to redesign various species and biological life. We must not allow such an ability to outstrip the ethical analysis that must accompany it. CBHD

Dr. Mohler has further stated:

The British report reveals that “researchers have constructed ever more ambitious transgenic animals” — and this is just the start. [...]

Now, scientists at Stanford University propose to put human brain cells in mouse brains in order to replace dying neurons. In reality, that would mean a human/mouse brain.

Saletan reports that ethicists at Stanford at first rejected the proposal, but have since come to approve it, allowing the researchers to produce mice with “some aspects of human consciousness or some human cognitive abilities.”

This raises the frightening prospect of a human brain within an animal species. The proposed research at Stanford would not reach that point, but granting a mouse brain “some aspects of human consciousness or some human cognitive abilities” should be enough to set off the ethical alarms.

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