Chimera

Not that is any of my business, but I find it hard not to comment on the US mid term elections. When Dubya was re-elected, I don't think anyone could really believe it, there had been an attitude of 'Anybody but Bush,' in some parts of the States, and yet as it happened, the anybody that stood against him wasn't good enough. I certainly have enough friends in the States to know that many of them have not flourished under an ultra conservative regime. I can see that a clear message has gone out to President Bush that the time is right for Democratic leadership, so from that point of view I understand the mid-terms, but from another, I don't, I can't see that there is anything to be gained from destabilising the government.

Well now, this news story about creating human-cow embryos for use in stem cell research is a can of worms is it not? The first visual that came to me when I read the article was from that Lindsay Anderson film 'Britannia Hospital' - there was a ward with people who had been given sheep's bodies, the stuff of nightmares.

I think the BBC article is correct, there is an instant yuck factor. But the genetic material in the cow cell will have been removed. I'm not sure why it specifically has to be bovine cells and would the yuck factor be worse or better if cells from an animal more genetically similar to ourselves were used ?

Religious objections I can see as another potential problem and like it or not, because our legal system is based originally on the ethics of the Christian faith, so are many people's personal ethics. Do human cells have some sanctity? We often talk about all life being sacred. What does that mean? It would be an odd position to take to claim that all life had the same sense of sanctity to us as human life. We take life to eat. We take life to protect our own in other ways. We incarcerate animals for entertainment/education. Given a choice between saving a human life and saving an animal's life, the majority of us would save the human.

Is there a difference between eating cow cells and using them for research? We give cow's milk to babies even. There are human with valves from pigs' hearts in them. Vaccines are made and injected into us using animal cells. Women take Hormone Therapy made from horse urine. Where are those boundaries?

Does sacred mean the same as never taking? Personally I would argue that is not the case. I believe it is a deep and abiding respect. But I would not deny women the right to abortion on demand, I would allow euthanasia, I am opposed to capital punishment, but I believe in the right to defend freedom.

This research could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of some of the worst of human diseases. Alzheimer's for example. My friend Sleepy debates the horror of that one on her blog today. I have yet to meet anyone who has encountered Alzheimer's who has not expressed the point of view, 'put me down if I get it,' quite possibly because the 'me' bit of each of us slides away with that disease. Now balance one against the other. If someone you love, really, really love, could be saved from that horror by stem cell research using bovine cells injected with human DNA, doesn't the yuck factor and most other objections fall away like so much Scotch mist?

The final argument reported in the BBC article is that humans and animals have always been separated. Oh well. And yet we have fought for and continue to fight for more respect for and decent treatment of all animals. White people and black people used to be separated and now they're not (so much) and that is a way better state of affairs. It seems to me that to maintain our difference from the animal kingdom on this is meaningless, we can die in an undignified fashion of our human diseases or we can get over it.

And God? Well I thought God fashioned the whole of creation, giving us what we need. Sure, she told us not to eat from the tree of knowledge, but we did, so hey, what difference does it make? Do we see our fellow people condemning the use of electricity? Well, not so much. And yet that came from the tree of knowledge, and I don't mean the build-it week-by-week encyclopaedia.

I think it is right that something as progressive as this is thoroughly discussed, preferably by ethical philosophers rather than the daily mail. And I hope that in the end they will decide there is no true ethical dilemma with this. Because it offers hope and because in any case, once someone's had the idea, either some Doctor Mengele will do it somewhere in a Boris Karloff laboratory or western scientists will do it in transparent conditions. And I for one prefer the idea of the latter.