Government Lifts Ban on Creating Human-Animal Hybrids
So the federal government announced this week that they won’t be removing marijuana from the list of schedule 1 substances. They did, however, announce that it’s now totally cool to experiment with creating human-animal hybrids. Wait what?
First of all, no, I’m not getting this information from the Weekly World News or Info Wars. The federal government announced last week that they have decided to lift the ban on experimenting with human-animal hybrid embryos and has also removed the ban on public funding for these programs. So um, why? Remember the “space-race” between the US and Soviet Union? Well replace “space-race” with “modified people” and the Soviet Union with China. China has been experimenting with “editing” human embryos for a while now. In April, Chinese researchers were working on creating an HIV-resistant human. So we aren’t talking about mutant people here or anything– just yet– but this kind of medical technology is very marketable. So obviously the US isn’t going to let China out-do us here– if we can avoid it.
So back to mutant people; yeah that’s why the US had the research banned in the first place. See the research they plan on doing involves creating chimeras: human-animal hybrids. Which scientists will be able to experiment on in order to develop new technology like transplant-organs. But the problem is, when you create a chimera, you might end up developing an animal with human consciousness. And well, that raises a lot of ethical concerns.
But scientists have said “nah it’s cool we can avoid it.” Which is kind of questionable in my opinion. Not the ethics part (I know, I’m cold), but that they are so sure they can avoid it. Scientists plan on doing a lot of research that involves implanting human brain tissue into animals. This is how they intend to study Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other brain-diseases. But rest assured (I guess) because they insist the studies will undergo “extra scrutiny” if there is a “substantial functional modification” to the animal’s brain. They are however developing an entire government committee to oversee the process.
But they aren’t just going to study brain diseases. Now here’s where it starts getting really weird. See they also plan on studying infertility; so scientists plan on potentially creating animals with human sperm or eggs. In this situation, their main concern is how they will stop the animals from breeding.
So I guess the next question would be to ask what the standards will be? And how can you tell if an animal has developed human consciousness if it doesn’t have the ability to speak? As you can imagine, most of these questions probably won’t be answered. Letting the general public in on this kind of research opens the door to theft. So if they end up creating a crazy human-animal hybrid we probably won’t hear about it.
So bottom line: you still can’t smoke pot, but you can make human-animal hybrids. Isn’t the future great?!
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Randi Nord lives in Pontiac, Michigan. She is a journalist for the The Fifth Column, co-founder of Geopolitics Alert, and co-hosts a podcast about geopolitics.