Are human-animal chimeras a good idea?

Many people say no!

But why don’t those people think human-animal chimeras are a good idea?

You could create human-animal chimeras that can grow a whole host of human organs like livers or hearts. That is good for humanity right? No more transplant lists or people waiting for organ donors to kick the bucket to get organs like the heart. Lives will be saved.

The problem is that the human-animal chimera may be brought to life to just be harvested for parts for humans. Is that right? Some people don’t think so. Lives will be saved but lives will still be lost. Are human-animal chimeras’ lives worth less than humans’ lives? What is the human-animal chimeras’ worth as a living being?

For example, if you created a human-animal chimera that has human brain cells for neurological research, could the organism have intelligence, consciousness or self-awareness at the level of a human being? If they did, then what?

Do human-animal chimeras get to have rights?

And if they have rights, then what kind of rights do they have?

Would the human-animal chimeras have the rights of a human or the rights of an animal?

If the organism has 89% human DNA but 11% animal DNA, does that make the organism human or animal? Are people who have heart valves from pigs or cows any less human, though they are not fully, one hundred percent human? What percentage of human DNA gives you human characteristics?

Human-animal chimeras could have behavioral/emotional problems arising from the fact that they may have human and animal behavior that is in conflict. It happens in natural hybrid species like in ligers — they could inherit both the social, pride-living habits of the lion, and the solitary habits of the tiger, which would inherently be in conflict.

Basically, human-animal chimeras will cause the lines between species to be blurred. This will help scientists to use human-animal chimeras to study disease pathways of diseases that affect humans. But to what end?

Sure, experiments could be done on human-animal chimeras that might not be possible to do on human beings. The wealth of knowledge gotten from those experiments could be great! But those experiments done on the human-animal chimeras may be inhumane or immoral, the chimeras may be subjected to painful experiments which would be the reason why the experiments couldn’t be done on humans. It doesn’t matter if you are an animal or a human, pain is pain. We don’t infect people with live diseases and see how the disease works, why should we be allowed to infect human-animal chimeras?

Plus there is zoonoses to think about. Many diseases that afflict people were originally found in animals. Zoonoses is the term for any infection/disease that can be naturally passed on from vertebrate animals to humans or from humans to vertebrate animals. Zoonoses agents can include bacteria, parasites, fungi, and viruses.

Ever heard of rabies, swine flu, avian flu, SARS or mad cow disease?

Where did those diseases come from?

Animals.

Those diseases just jumped from the animal species they were in, to the human species. Human-animal chimeras may make that leap from animal species to people much easier for zoonoses agents. That wouldn’t be good.

There is no simple answer to why human-animal chimeras aren’t a good idea. There are biological, philosophical and ethical problems to having multicellular human-animal chimeras.

Furthermore, there might be more unknown problems that arise from creating multi-cellular, human-animal chimeras.