The British Isle of Doctor Moreau (T.P. McWhorter)

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  Today I saw a story on the discovery channel website, and was a bit shocked.  For me, a world traveler, and adventurer, journalist, and worldly being, to be as shocked as I am is a hard thing to accomplish.

  I am usually accepting to most things and also quite open minded regarding some of the things others find odd or questionable.  But today I was alarmed that there is a new form of testing that the British have embarked upon and it has me wondering if what they are doing is correct, or maybe I am just getting old.  The Brits are now doing embryonic gene splicing to have animal and human embryoes available for testing.  Does this mean they are going to grow these creatures to full term to see what kind of new form of humanimality they can create ala Dr. Moreau?  And yes, the word you saw in the previous sentence is what you saw, "humanimality", because I don't know what it can be called other wise, and for that matter, what their attempts are about either.  I have coined the word humanimality specifically for you the reader to decide whether what the british are doing is correct or incorrect, morally or otherwise.  I am all for stem cell research because it does help and will help humanity when the things being done there are finally accepted by the US government and others as well, but the idea of cross-polinating, making human animal hybrids, is a bit beyond my old mind and wonder about this new practice.

   Years ago, H.G. Wells wrote the story The Island Of Dr. Moreau, a tale of animal/human crossing for entertainment, but also as a caution that the world can go and do the wrong thing with the right tools.  Moreau's world was littered with errors, both moral and physical, and it ended in madness and violence.  From the beginning of Wells' story to the end, there was never the ideal world Moreau was trying to create and the creatures prior to the end suffered throughout for the sake of experimentation.  I submit this commentary for your entrtainment, but also for you the reader to decide about the moral implications of such experiments, when just the idea of stem cell research is still being questioned worldwide.

The story about which I have commented here is below:

April 2, 2008 -- For the first time in Britain, researchers at Newcastle University in northern England said Tuesday they had created human-animal hybrid embryos, amid a political row over a disputed embryo research bill in parliament.

According to the university, the research, which was first presented at a lecture in Tel Aviv on March 25, has yet to be published or verified, with a spokesman for the university saying that the institution "wouldn't claim it to be final at all."

The revelation comes with British MPs engaged in a fierce battle over the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, which allows the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for medical research.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's governing Labor Party conceded in March that its party lawmakers with moral or ethical objections would be allowed to vote against parts of the proposed legislation when it comes before parliament this year.

The embryos were created by injecting DNA taken from human skin cells into eggs derived from cow ovaries with almost all their genetic material stripped away, and lasted for three days in a laboratory.

The Newcastle University spokesman said that the research would likely be published in "months rather than weeks."

At present, researchers wanting to create such embryos have to apply for a license from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which currently regulates the practice in Britain, and hybrid embryos have to be destroyed after 14 days.

The government says that the scientific advantages of allowing the creation of hybrid embryos for research purposes could help millions of people to recover from illness or disease.

Religious leaders, however, have argued against the bill, with the leader of Catholics in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, using his Easter Sunday sermon to brand the bill a "monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life" which will allow experiments of "Frankenstein proportion".

The article is posted on discovery.com at http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/04/02/human-animal-hybrid.html