UK Scientists to Combine Human, Animal Embryos
By CNN,
Headline News [interviews Marcy Darnovsky]
| 05. 21. 2008
GLENN BECK: You know, sometimes I get up in the morning and I read the paper and I read a story that, you know, will shock me. Sometimes I read one that really outrages me. Sometimes I read stories that make me pray for the future of mankind. This story does all three.
Lawmakers in the UK have given the green light to plans to combine human embryos with animal embryos. You know, for research. The result, cutely called cy-brids, are embryos that are 99.9 percent human. But they have a law now that these cells have to be destroyed within 14 days, which is just enough time to harvest them for stem cells. Isn`t that great?
You know, if all we ever needed were laws to make sure that everything runs right, then why do we have so many prisons?
Marcy Darnovsky, they`re actually taking a cow embryo and sucking the cow stuff out and putting human stuff in it?
MARCY DARNOVSKY: Well, that`s what some scientists want to do. It`s not clear that there`s a convincing medical or...
Related Articles
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
