http://news.scotsman.com/internation...?id=2434192005

Could such a thing work? Splicing humans and animals? Is it ethical? Would they be effective?

Stalin was insane, you know that right ?

Stalin sure was wacky.

And no, I don't think it works.

It doesn't work and never will. Different races cannot breed. The last I heard, it was the very definition of "race".

Obviously you haven't noticed this thing called "genetic engineering." In the U.S. at this moment, fully 1/2 the tomatoes you buy on the shelf have been "bred with" or rather engineered with fish genes -- for increased shelf life. Fully 75% of our soy and corn has been "bred with" bacteria -- the BT bacteria to be precise -- and most of those have also been "bred with" an herbicide resistance gene sold under the name "Roundup Ready." Roundup Ready seeds are made by Monstanto, maker of Roundup, so that you can spray vast amounts of the herbicide Roundup on your crops, without killing your crops.

I believe all of these uses of genetic modification are not only unethical, but also illogical and stupid. So I of course believe any genetic modification of humans themselves is completely unethical.

It's funny, though. The EU rejects the US's genetic modification of food, and they fight over it. The US rejects the EU's willingness to genetically modify humans (that's what all this "stem cell" stuff is about), and they fight over it.

Humans and chimpanzees are different species, not just different races.

Besides, you can cross, say, a tiger and a lion. ;)

<font color = lightgreen>Such weirdness is not only possible--search for the recent news story about the phosphorescent jellyfish genes being spliced into pigs, creating "glow-in-the-dark" pigs--but [img]graemlins/erm.gif[/img] inevitable.

Someday...somewhere...someone is going to splice animal genes into a human fetus just to see if it can be done. The technology to do so already exists, but I doubt any person in the world is willing to take that plunge at this time. I certainly hope this is one time that I am wrong.

When it happens, it will probably rank as one of the most unethical things to occur in all of human history, unless society has made some emotional advancement.</font>

Can you tell any spesifics of what they do to those tomatoes? I'm curious.

As a rough generalization based on guessing, I would say that plants are simpler than animals. To make a tomato tastier, you just need to make more chemicals that make it tasty in the first place. To make an ape immune to pain you have to remove a part of it's nervous system without removing any other parts. And it gets even more complicated if you still want the ape to be somewhat functional, to know when it's time to stop touching fire.

I don't think genetic modification is inherently evil. Most of the time it doesn't work anyway.

And I don't know much of stem cell research, but I was under the impression that it didn't have much to do with genetic engineering. Just take some unspecialized cells and spray them elsewhere. Then hope they become something like the cells surrounding them.

I meant to say species, I just couldn't remember the word.

I forget, can Tigons And Ligers reproduce?

Yep the offspring is a mule called a liger (I think it may work like mules and one pairing produces one set of traits and the other produces a different set)