Reality is stranger than fiction after all. Human-animal chimeras aren’t flights of fiction, they’re real and Republican Senator Cindy Clyde Smith just blocked an IVF bill in the Senate, claiming it ‘would legalize the creation of animal-human chimeras.’ She’s not wrong.
The bill, spearheaded by Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, would instantiate a statutory right to (ART) Assisted Reproductive Technology and offer IVF facilities the ability to assist patients without fear of legal appraisals.
While widely criticised for being against ‘women’s right to IVF’ Clyde Smith insisted that the bill opened the door to being interpreted to allow for human cloning, human chimaeras, commercial surrogacy, and gene editing.
She’s right. The bill’s failed to define what exactly ‘assisted reproductive technology’ means. It’s failure to define means it will be exploited and re-created in the image of madness.
Clyde Smith’s concerns aren’t some ‘right wing conspiracy.’
In 2016, MIT’s Rudolf Janiesch created human-mouse chimeras. The white mice in his laboratory have tiny brown patches on them. That’s because they were created using the cells of an African American person.
In 2021, scientists from China, the U.S., and Spain claimed they had successfully created a human-monkey chimera embryo. They went on to claim they terminated the embryo after 20 days. In 2023, the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health claimed they successfully grew human kidneys inside pig embryos.
Their experimental research claims to help us understand disease and its origins.
The Western world can barely agree on basic biological facts let alone handle questions of moral status of human-animal chimeras. If legislation like this is passed, the floodgates of madness will be opened and it won’t be long until some people start demanding they be allowed to give birth to ‘human-animal chimeras.’
Let’s not forget that we live in a world where people identify as ‘dolphins, birds, and pelicans’. There are some deranged people who would happily carry this belief out.
It’s not absurd to imagine a situation where people would want to bring human animal chimeras to term. It’s not inconceivable that some IVF candidates would want to have ‘animal human chimeras’ either.
Our immaturity as a society has gone far enough. It’s one thing to claim you identify as a ‘dolphin’, it’s another to create a biological human-animal chimera, not to mention the plethora of moral, ethical, and biological quandaries it would raise. For instance, earlier, I mentioned that MIT scientists had created a mouse-human chimera. You could argue that the ‘mouse’ has some ‘human moral status’. After all, it was created partly by human cells. Where does the creation of chimeras lead us ethically, socially, and morally?
Imagine that sometime in the future, human animal chimeras were viewed as assisted reproductive technology by the same people who identify as monkeys? Now imagine that individual wishes to mix their human DNA with that of an actual monkey and bring a chimera to term? It’s not absurd to imagine a scenario like this, given the bizarreness of modern society.
Opening Pandora’s box will create even more problems. The West ought to get its house in order so that we can steer ourselves away from morally absurd propositions like human-animal chimeras. Senator Clyde Smith was right to block the bill in the Senate. The moment any leeway is given in a confused and unstable civilisation, societal madness takes root. At first, ‘gay marriage’ was seen as an innocent fundamental right between two people who love each other; now gay couples are raising kids. At first, climate change made us think about taking care of the environment; now we will be sold dangerously made synthetic meats. At first, immigration was sold as a net benefit for society; now, the U.S bleeds with open borders. It’s time we admit that we don’t have the moral maturity to re-create traditions, norms and values in our own image.
There are some moral lines we should never cross, and human-animal chimeras are one of them.
