19 Jun
Are Animal-Human Hybrids Really a Menace?
By: Patrick Kiger
I got a big bump in page-views and reader comments back in 2007 when I wrote this blog post about then-President George W. Bush's call for Congress to outlaw animal-human hybrids, which made him sound worried that some real-life version of H.G. Wells' fictional Dr. Moreau might create a freakish race of furry, cloven-footed parahumans. Actually, Bush, who banned the harvesting of stem cells from leftover embryos at fertility clinics for medical research, didn't want scientists to get around his prohibition by inserting human genes into animal egs to create human-like embryos. But the President's terminology was so tortured that it inspired a ROFL-fest across the web-o-sphere, including a Cafe Press vendor who quickly began offering t-shirts and coffee cups emblazoned with a knuckle-walking man-monkey. And indeed, British opponens of stem-cell research apparently took this idea seriously. They actually proposed requiring stem-cell researchers to implant any human-animal embryos they created into women, so they could be carried to term and born, presumably to wreak revenge upon the evil madmen who spawned them. Alas, that didn't come to pass, because it would have made a great premise for a reality TV show. And society certainly needs more of those.
