by J. D. Mahieu

Created on: July 07, 2007

In Greek mythology the Chimera was a creature composed of three animals, head of a goat, body of a lion, and the tail of a serpent. The beast was supposedly slain by the warrior Bellerophon. Many of us may already be familiar with this story. What most of us are unaware of is that chimeras are real and may soon become a major controversy.

In biotechnology the term chimera refers to a creature containing cells from another species. Scientists now wish to fuse animal and human cells to create such hybrids, in fact some have already done just that. H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau may not be so far off. The fact is, as always, today's science is yesterday's science-fiction.

Now while there is nothing as severe as a goat, lion, snake hybrid roaming about, there are creatures of unnatural origin being created in laboratories right now.

Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University fused human cells with rabbit eggs. These were reported to be the first successful animal-human hybrids back in 2003. The embryos were harvested for stem cells after a few days in the lab.

Esmail Zanjani , a professor of medicine at the University of Reno in Nevada, has injected human stem cells into fetal sheep and pigs. Zanjani hopes to grow possibly transplantable organs and tissues in these animals.

In Mayo Clinic, located in Minnesota, a team of biotechnologists successfully created pigs with human blood flowing through their veins.

Irv Weissman, director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, has created mice with brains that are roughly one percent human. He has plans for later this year to conduct an experiment that may yield mice with one hundred percent human brains. Weissman plans to inject human neurons into the brains of embryonic mice. The mice would be destroyed before birth and dissected to search for the architecture of a human mind. If they did Weissman would allow them to develop and he would look for traces of cognitive behavior. Weissman claims this is not the act of a mad scientist, he wishes to better understand the brain and how it works. He feels this would be useful in the study and treatment of diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

One experiment proposed but not executed as of this writing suggests genetically engineering mice to produce human sperm and eggs. This could result in a child being born to mice parents.

All of this raises some major ethical questions in my mind and I am apparently not

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