Chimera!!
The following excerpt from a New York Times article was sent to me by friend who knows such things intrigue me. In the interest of working up some sort of musing on the topic, I'm going to quote it here so I have to deal with it later. Maybe between naps or this weekend? We'll see. The article was from April 10th (a day on which I was otherwise engaged) and was titled "The Other Stem-Cell Debate" by Jamie Shreeve.
"By virtue of the human material added to his brain,
monkey XO47 is a chimera -- that is, an organism
assembled out of living parts taken from more than one
biological species."
"While the objections to stem-cell research have
largely revolved around the ethics of using human
embryos, there is another debate bubbling to the
surface: how ''human'' are chimeric creatures made
from human stem cells?"
"We have been engaging in unnatural acts upon nature
for centuries, grafting plants onto one another or
breeding dogs in visible shapes and sizes that diverge
wildly from their natural state -- let alone
performing heart transplants and in vitro
fertilizations. I'm not sure I would undergo a crisis
of truth at the sight of a sheep with a human arm,
especially if it were the best means available for
replacing a lost one. But everyone has a squirm
threshold. What would you make of a sheep with a human face?"
I'll go ahead and point out the usefulness of one of Anime's central themes here: Where do you draw the line between human and not human? Whether it's a vegitative state, an embryo, a cyborg, a fossil, or a few human brain cells in a monkey's head we come nauseatingly close to echoing the 1/8 human ruling on blacks . I find it amusing to watch humans decide their own definition.
