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[arethinn]

Of Mice, Men and In-Between: Scientists Debate Blending Of Human, Animal Forms

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm baffled that some people are upset about such things. In addition to both finding this sort of genetic tinkering innately cool, it has great potential for medical advances, and I very much consider the possibility of improved medical care and possible life-extension to be vastly more important than any (to me) trivial or foolish arguments about the ethics of playing around with the human genome. Then again, I'm also looking forward to narcissistic rich people having clone-children. I'm against projects likely to produce birth defects, but creating healthy designer animals and even designer humans increases diversity and I'm all for that. I'm also very much looking forward to the creation of intelligence-enhanced animals (more about that here).

[halyn.livejournal.com]

This reminds me, perhaps unavoidably, of a dystopian sci-fi series written by S. Andrew Swann, something like "Forests of the Night" being the first book. It was an attempt to write about Real Live Furries and how they came about, the message being that there was a massive need for soldiers to fight wars, human life was too valuable to sacrifice and no one wanted to muck with the genome to make a better human, so humans make sentient animals.

Personally, I've very little beef with genetic engineering of this type at a controlled and delicate pace. It has much potential for much good, and to me it's just another form of evolution, however artificial. Will it be legislated in the future? Of course. That doesn't mean it's bad, just that people have a tendency toward being dumb and fearing eachother.

Re: chimeras...it's very rare but true human chimeras are born once in a while, with a good portion of their body cells belonging to a different genome. It's not the standard twin-absorption thing either. More often, they have some auto-immune problems because some of their organs and tissues are read by the body as being foregin and get harassed.

I'm in favor of seeing animals with increased intellegence, but I doubt the rest of the world is, and I don't think this species is ready to parent another yet :/ We have enough problems of our own.

[halyn.livejournal.com]

Other fictional books dealing with animals of elevated intellegence...David Brin's "Uplift" series, especially "Startide Rising" and "The Uplift War".