Transgenic chimeras.
Transgenic chimeras.
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转基因嵌合体。
DOI：
10.1162/15265160360706507
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发表时间：
2003
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Sagoff,Mark
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Sagoff,Mark
Jason Robert and Françoise Baylis (2003) focus primarily on “human-to-animal embryonic chimeras”(emphasis added). The ethical issues they discuss, however, surround not the status of transgenic blastocysts and early embryos cultured a few days in vitro for research and then discarded but an “animal born following this research;” that is, such an embryo brought to term. An obvious example would be the Harvard OncoMouse, which in 1988 was genetically engineered to contain a human cancer-causing gene. Thousands of different transgenic mice have by now been engineered in laboratories to be discarded after a few experiments. Such a creature is not part human and part mouse; it is (as Robert and Baylis suggest)“just a mouse with a few human cells.” Robert and Baylis ask,“But what if those cells are in the brain, or the gonads? What if the chimeric mouse has human sperm? And what if that mouse were to mate with a chimeric mouse with human eggs?” I agree that in a fantastic science-fiction scenario, one too incredible for any but the most lurid cinema, a mad geneticist could produce a transgenic embryo, implant it in a surrogate mother, and bring to term a Caliban that is neither clearly animal nor clearly human. As Robert and Baylis point out, this would “constitute an unacceptable threat to valuable and valued conceptual, social, and moral boundaries that set human beings apart from all other creatures.”
