The Chimera.
Chimeras are fire-breathing creatures that come from ancient Greek mythology. They were beings that were made up of different animals — a chimera could have the head of a lion, a serpent for a tail and the body of a goat.
Now, in the field of biology, the term, chimera, can be used to describe an organism that has been artificially made up of cells or genes that come from at least two different species.
A chimera cannot be a hybrid animal; ligers and tigons are hybrid animals that can occur naturally through sexual reproduction, though they are made up off two different species, lions and tigers, they are not chimeras.
You can genetically engineer a chimera. For example, there have been bacteria that have been genetically altered to produce insulin. A human insulin gene was put into a plasmid, which was then put into the bacteria so the bacteria is a chimera, a human-animal chimera. As this human-animal chimera was able to produce insulin, it is seen as a beneficial organism to people who have diabetes as they cannot produce insulin.
It isn’t just insulin, you can also create other compounds like human growth hormone that humans need by inserting the human gene into an organism like a bacteria to mass produce the compound.
Plus, if you take an animal and genetically modify it to have a humanized immune system, you can study how diseases work against the human immune system. You can try out new vaccines for diseases like HIV, malaria, dengue or Hepatitis C on the human-animal chimera before you do trail runs on humans. You can also use the human-animal chimera to grow human organs that can be used for organ transplants in people.
So, via the human-animal chimera, you can gain more knowledge on disease and how the human body works as those chimeras can have human systems and you can experiment on them like you couldn’t be able to on people. Due to knowledge gotten from those chimeras, many people’s lives could be saved from lethal diseases.
Some people think that the human-animal chimera is a fantastic idea — on the other hand, there are people who think that human-animal chimeras being in existence is not right.
There are people who think that the human-animal chimera will make it easier for diseases that originate from animals to move from affecting animals to affecting people much faster.
There is also this thought, do the human-animal chimeras have rights? If the organism has 99% human DNA but 1% animal DNA, does that make the organism human or animal? The human-animal chimeras will cause the lines between species to be blurred.
Some people wonder if it is ethical to play God by making human-animal chimeras. The experiments done on the human-animal chimeras may be inhumane or immoral as those chimeras may be subjected to painful experiments or be brought to life to just be harvested for parts for humans.
Furthermore, there might be unknown problems that arise from creating multi-cellular, human-animal chimeras.
In this post, I have written about people who are for, and people who are against the creation and use of human-animal chimeras.
