www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall RC Bishops on the rights of chimera's

Strange as it may sound, I find myself in 100% agreement with the statement issued by the UK RC bishops reported in this article:

Here [telegraph.co.uk]

Please read the article with a clear head. If you don't you are likely to misread it altogether. Here are the comments I left on the website of the Telegraph:

This article does NOT sanction the creation of chimeras, nor does it bless in vitro fertilization. It very wisely, and very Catholicly recognizes that regardless of the wickedness of such things, the products of sin, in this case children and chimeras, are not to be blamed for the sin of those who brought them into being. These offspring, legitimate or not, are equally dignified with the name of "humanity" as the rest of us and must receive the same kind of respect and rights as the rest of us. It is a crass and sinful position to consider someone, chimeric or otherwise, who is different from ourselves, to be unworthy of life. I am shocked at the perversity of the responses to this article I have read. Not only at the moral degradation incipient in the comments, but at the vitriolity of those comments. Are we SO uncertain of our own humanity that we feel compelled to destroy and refuse to recognize the rights of those created by the wicked for their own purposes? Yes creating chimeras is wicked. But that does not make the chimera wicked. By your own logic you justify abortion and euthanasia not only of chimeric and in vitro offspring but of all human offspring....if they are deformed enough. Think about what you are saying people.

Jason

Why are they called "chimera"? Doesn't the label chimera invoke mythological monsters?

Michael,

You are right. Chimera is an unfortunate, though handy word.

Jason

Well,

I have to say that I can't be too harsh on the negative comments. How do the bishops know that such an embryo will be human? Since when did the bishops become expert geneticists? If it is possible to create a human/non-human hybrid and have it live and grow up to adulthood, we probably wouldn't be able to label it until we had studied it thoroughly and determined that indeed, it was a human being with a human soul. Of course, if this kind of thing is really possible and a hybrid species could be developed, then I have to say that it might really make me question whether God exists, since how could God allow man to destroy the very natural kinds of species? But what is a species anyway?

I have to confess that this article disturbs me beyond anything I've ever read in my life. It really throws into question whether there is such a thing as a "species" in reality. What is a human being? What is a person? How much human genetic material must one have to be a person?

I feel the urge to go out and by a copy of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." I just finised reading Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," not so long ago. Perhaps his book is even more appropriate as food for thought.

Deeply Disturbed in Christ,

Joe

If you really want to be freaked out, read the National Geographic article:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_chimeras.html

They are talking about making humans with mice parents (and implanting them in women via in vitro) and creating mice with human brains. They've already created pigs with human blood. And they have been successful in creating mice with a brain that is 1% human.

Joe

I wonder if people will seek to do this. I suspect that people like being human. I also suspect that most people feel horror, revulsion and outrage at crossing people with animals, robots or whatnot. So, I suspect that we won't see new races of chimeras and cyborgs. Instead, I think we will see a host of machines, drugs, programs and techniques to enhance human abilities.

Just my two cents' worth.

-- John

These bishops have committed a classic error - that of taking an essentially valid principle out of its proper context and then forcing it to an absurd extreme.

Shall we now be faced with demands for the ordination of trolls? Ought I to organize missions to the leprechauns? Shall we seek out the Easter Bunny and baptize him (or her)? Does anyone have the words to the Woad Song?

Fr. Serge

Father, bless.

Do you, perchance, mean "The Woad Ode"?

What is a 'woad'. I liked the 'ode', but would appreciate it better if I knew what was meant by a 'woad'!

As for this:


Why have the Leprechauns not been evangelized to?!?
As for the Easter Bunny, he is probably too elusive to be baptized, since he hops about way too much.
And if we continue to have a shortage of priests, perhaps trolls might be good recruits!

.... ONLY kidding, lest anyone's feathers get ruffled

You know what, I've never heard anything about any missions to the Sibh or any of the other ancient races inhabiting Ireland. The leprechauns are really just the tip of the iceberg.

Many thanks to Kobzar for the words of the Woad Song. I'm vewy pwowd of you.

The song, by the way, is sung to the tune of "Men of Harlech".

Woad is a form of blue body paint which was customarily worn by the early Brits when fighting their enemies - they did not wear anything else for this purpose, which explains somoe of the odder lines in the song.

In some recensions, the song concludes with the singing of:


W - O - A - D Woad!

Fr. Serge

Well, some of those trolls do post online from time to time . . . and some of them could use a good baptizing. I don't know about ordiantion, though some of them sure seem to think they are already ordained and even canonoized.



::: ducking:::

[anonymous]

SO very true!

Hello,

I do not think the statement from the Bishops is all that absurd. It might be a little irrelevant, until we see what these techniques are able to produce, though.

First, we need to define what we understand by the term "chimera". If it is an embryo with genetic material from organisms of different species, then this is absolutely nothing new.

Mules would be chimeras, by this definition, and mules are not considered to be unnatural monsters.

Mules, however, are not considered horses or donkeys, but something else, a new species altogether.

What the Bishops are saying is that if genetic engineering is able to produce an embryo with human genetic material mixed, at a nuclear level, with genetic material from other species, then the embryo is to be considered human, and treated accordingly.

Now, this is not the case of the pig heart valve implanted in a human being, or the human neurons implanted in a mouse embryo's brain. These are tissue-level implants.

The article deals with sub-nuclear level genetic mixing.

We have also routinely used human genetic material to "teach" other organisms how to produce substances that are useful to us. This is the case of implanting human DNA in bacteria to teach them how to produce human insulin, so diabetic patients can use that, instead of the pig insulin they used to use before that technology came along. Nobody seems to be complaining about this, because there is no destruction of embryos of any kind (the genetically altered bacteria would never develop into a baby, it doesn't know how to do that).

Chimeric embryos, on the other hand, do know how to do the one thing human embryos do: multiply its cells.

For all intents and purposes, an early chimeric embryo has human genetic material and behaves just like a fully human embryo of the same age would.

These embryos are destroyed relatevely early in their development to harvest their stem cells, so we actually do not know what kind of organism, if any, develops from it.

Here the possibilities are almost endless.

My intuition is that this embryo would NOT develop into a viable organism. The genes from two species different enough, would not be able to "play along" with each other in order to create a viable living creature and therefore, the embryo would die naturally in the early fetal stage.

The question here is, in this case, was it a human being what died?

All the Bishops are saying is that it could be, and I am not ready to discard that opinion "a-priori".

Now, manipulating mice to produce human sperm and human eggs and then using them for in-vitro fertilization seems to me even more bizarre and poses an even greater moral dilema, regarding the product of such fertilizations.

Shalom,
Memo

Now, regarding the ordination of trolls and the evangelization of leprechauns, I know a priest who knows a monsignor who works with a bishop who got a letter from a cardinal who says the Pope has a Motu Proprio signed an ready to go on the subject, so it should be out any day now.

Shalom,
Memo