(04-13-2019, 03:44 PM)Catherine Wrote: Only five of the monkeys survived....
So now we know it can be done. The real issue is whether it should it be done....
Primates and monkeys already have very similar DNA to humans. At what point do the monkeys have so much actual human DNA that technically human medical ethics rules should apply to them....
I can't see this line of research ending well and it certainly isn't fair to the monkeys.
This raises complex and serious moral issues, as you correctly point out, Catherine. The fact that only five monkeys survived shows that the procedure was dangerous. Leaving aside the issue of whether we have the moral right to use these monkeys as "guinea pigs" (I don't think we do, but some humans might argue for it), I think the "hidden agenda" here is probably this:
Experimenters in China, a country with almost no laws whatsoever against animal cruelty, want to research human diseases using live, sentient, intelligent animals rather the modern methods increasingly used in the west (tissue cultures). Chinese laws won't allow humans to be used on untried medical treatments or procedures - so their response is to convert monkeys into DNA near-copies of humans, so that they can then legally carry out all sort of cruel experiments (pain thresholds, injecting cancers, psychological torture, etc.) by claiming that these hybrid creatures still look like monkeys, even though their brains and emotions will be human-like. The Nazis used people in concentration camps for incredibly cruel medical research, arguing that extreme experiments on humans could advance medical research. This sort of hybrid-DNA research opens the door to similar treatment of monkeys with human DNA.
The thalidomide experiments, which went horribly wrong after assuming that animal results made a treatment safe for humans, is no doubt in their minds, too. Because animal results are not automatically transferable to humans, they want to genetically modify monkeys into humans - to allegedly "make it OK".
Well, it isn't and never will be OK - whether the monkeys are genetically human or not.
