Might be behind a paywall. Anyhow! Here’s a question: Medical research fluffies. Making them human enough for testing, but not human enough for rights. The big thing would be that they could actually give feedback to researchers, and have more things that can be measured (like how a treatment might affect someone mentally).
n the latest advance, researchers in the U.S. and China announced earlier this month that they made embryos that combined human and monkey cells for the first time. So far, these human-monkey chimeras (pronounced ky-meer-uhs) are no more than bundles of budding cells in a lab dish, but the implications are far-reaching, ethics experts say. The use of primates so closely related to humans raises concerns about unintended consequences, animal welfare and the moral status of hybrid embryos, even if the scientific value of the work may be quite high.
“There were lots of breakthroughs in this experiment,” says bioethicist Nita Farahany of Duke University. “A remarkable step has been taken scientifically that raises urgent issues of public concern. We need to figure out what the right pathway forward is to help guide responsible progress.”
Scientists have been creating partly human chimeras for years. Researchers use rats with human tumors to study cancer, for example, and mice with human immune systems to conduct AIDS research. What makes the latest experiment unique is that the scientists injected human stem cells, which can become any kind of tissue, into an embryo of a closely related primate.
“Not human enough for rights” is a bit if a complicated subject and likely would fall on how powerful the companies and countries doing it are, with the inevitable east/west divide plus both bad actors in the side that is more liberal towards rights and some who ban the testing and grant some protections.
Given China not only requires extensive animal testing but also has not-so off the books human experimentation in the labor camps, no engineered creature aside from the inevitable government-made “supermen” would have any rights and what little it did would be on paper only.
Well, it says at the bottom of the snippet I put in. Medical research. I’m very curious if I’ve personally/directed benefitted from any of it so far? Or indirectly (have a number of friends/family that have dealt with cancer in one form or another).
The Obama administration responded to tech CEO fears of unchecked AI development by demanding companies share what they were working on with the US government.
Now, as a side note, the fact that in Robocop and Terminator 3 the test robots were armed with live ammunition during tests indoors connected to every other part of the company and when not in use was considered an unbelievable contrivance.
Wanna guess what the government found every company working on advanced robotics in the US was doing?
I think it’s about damn time we stopped messing around with boring old regular science and went straight to MAD SCIENCE!
We’re fucked anyway once the monkey super soldiers turn on us, we might as well have some fun!
Come on. Haven’t you ever wanted to create a time paradox? Go! Shoot your grandfather when he was a baby, just to see what happens! Clone a T-Rex and ride it through the McDonald’s drive-thru! Build a rocket to Mars and piss in a Martian’s face!
Because I’ve been interested in the news and politics since my early teens in the start of the Bush JR years, and shit like that stood out as particularly memorable?
Finding out the companies showing the cute dog robots and the ones that made a robot who could get up again after falling over were literally reenacting the ED209 scene stands out.
