August 27, 2007

Certain British scientists are lobbying for what a rather disgusting-sounding medical procedure; mixing human and bovine DNA to create a hybrid embryo for research purposes. The story is in "The Guardian" as "Scientist's plea to use new hybrid embryos."

What sort of research purposes? The intent is to "create lines of stem cells" as a first step to understanding, and someday curing, "incurable genetic diseases such as motor neurone disease."

How does crossing a human with a cow help us understand a genetic disease? And how does it help us cure it? The article doesn't really say what particular benefits to curing the disease come from crossing the human with the cow, but apparently this procedure would make it very easy to create lines of stem cells. We slaughter cows every day, and cows have egg cells; just take a bunch of them, then mix in some human DNA, and pow, we've got a hybrid embryo. Just kill the hybrid embryo that has been created and harvest the stem cells.

So it's entirely possible that the scientists' plea has nothing at all to do with curing incurable genetic diseases, and everything to do with creating more stem cell lines than could ordinarily be gotten by having humans donate their own eggs.

The article quotes a scientist who claims, in essence, that we need to look beyond the "yuck factor" of this research to the potential benefits that could ensue. I'm no geneticist, but given embryonic stem cell research's failures with normal human embryos that we've had some time to understand, I find it hard to believe that an entirely new hybrid of humans and cows would help us understand genetic diseases in humans. Besides which, looking beyond the "yuck factor", what the scientists are proposing is not simply the old evil of killing a form of human life that we're all familiar with. They're proposing creating a new, semihuman life, only to kill it a short time later.

Apparently there's no getting beyond the "yuck factor" here.

If we really want to cure incurable diseases, maybe we should work with technologies that actually have a good track record, like adult stem cell research. The human-cow hybrid embryo project looks set from conception to be another immoral boondoggle.