Mark Steyn on Parthenogenesis

It may not be a violet, or a triolet or whatever you call it, but it is another alarmist rant from the author of After America: How Weird, How Soon?

From London’s Daily Mail: “Scientists have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories.”

You don’t say. Now why would they do that? Don’t worry, it’s all perfectly legit, the fruits of the 2008 Human Fertilisation Embryology Act. So some scientists have successfully fertilized animal eggs with human sperm, and others have created “cybrids,” using a human nucleus implanted into an animal cell, or “chimeras,” in which human cells are mixed with animal embryos.

Well, you might think, there goes Steyn, banging the same old gong again. It’d be one thing if experiments like these were confined to a few weirdos at UCLA or the old duffer in his laboratory in Aberdeen. The trouble is that everyone is getting into the game.

So the Brits retain a bit of squeamishness in this area: They’re aware of the pitfalls of injecting Ozzy Osbourne’s brain into an orangutan. Who might be less concerned about this fine ethical line? It was recently disclosed that China has a herd of 39 goats with human-style blood and internal organs created by injecting stem cells into their embryos, the work of Prof. Huang Shuzheng of Jiao Tong University.

I wonder what else the Chinese are sticking human stem cells into. I’m sure they’ll tell us when they’re ready.

Brave New World, here we come. And then some.