Bioethics is an important subject—it’s too bad it gets sidetracked with nonsense driven by religious dogma and ignorance. One issue is the use of human-animal chimerae in research, which was enough to get our flibbertigibbet idiot of a president incensed, but I don’t see the problem. It’s not as if having weirdly modified experimental mammalian embryos in a dish is a danger to people—some devout Christian woman does not have to worry that she might bump into a lab cart and have a swine-man zygote splash into her vagina and crawl into her womb, but that’s exactly what the hysterics seem to fear. Ophelia has a good rant on the subject.
Why, exactly, does the creation of a certain kind of egg, which will be destroyed within fourteen days, undermine respect for human life? I want to know. What’s the thinking here? That thirteen-day old embryos might end up being dressed up in little outfits and enrolled in school? That they might start marrying people’s children? That they’ll make all the buses and movie theatres and supermarkets too crowded? That they’ll jostle us off the sidewalk and humiliate us? That they’ll want to spend the night in our houses and have their horrible unthinkable disgusting squelchy sex right there with us in the next room listening in fear and horror?
Somebody give me a real reason this is an ethical concern, other than that it conflicts with certain sects weird and absurdly wrong ideas about species purity.