“An experiment that created human ‘chimeras’ by merging male and female embryos in a test tube has been condemned as scientifically vacuous and ethically questionable by leading proponents of research into IVF. A team of privately funded researchers created the hermaphrodite chimeras — a mix of cells from two separate embryos — as part of a study into ways of treating inherited disorders but their colleagues in the field of reproductive medicine have strongly denounced the study. The chimeric embryos, which contained both male and female cells growing side by side, were not allowed to live beyond six days after conception when they were still microscopic balls of cells.” — New Zealand Herald (New Zealand)

Every week the conjunction of medicine and technology seems to raise some new ethical dilemma: cloning, stem cells, assisted suicide, reproductive technology, etc. What’s clear is that, after the industrial revolution and the information revolution, we’re at the precipice of a kind of biological revolution where hitherto “natural” processes such as birth and death are becoming an art — which is to say that they are becoming completely unnatural.

No matter how many novel ethical issues are raised, it is also clear that what can be done will be done. If scientists refrain from some procedure out of moral concerns, then a renegade freak or group somewhere will figure it out for themselves and give it a try. That alien cult in Canada may not have really cloned a human last winter, but no doubt their basic story is something you’ll see a lot of in the future: independent researchers of questionable sanity performing radical experiments on human nature. “Welcome to the future,” says Dr. Jekyll.

Given this admittedly cynical proposition (ie that what can be done will be done), scientists might do just as well to push back the moral limits to an absolute of some kind — only forbid themselves experiments of obvious cruelty, and to hell with the rest of squeamish second-guessing. Better to determine the results of obviously inevitable experiments in controlled circumstances than to allow alien cults to perform them in the wild. Make clones and she-males and people with tails. Why not? The first test-tube baby created a furor, and now in vitro fertilization is commonplace. Society has an increasing tolerance of, if not outright fetish for, extreme differences. If you crossbreed the embryos of a human and, say, a boa constrictor, you’ll end up with a wild new creature that everyone envies and admires. He’ll have modeling contracts and talk show appearances and a Hollywood agent. Teenagers will look up to him and try to get epidermal transplant surgery so they can have scales like their idol. Women will want to sleep with him to find out what boa constrictor genes did to his penis. He’ll be a big, big star, unless of course the snake part predominates in him, in which case we could always release him in a forest or swamp somewhere.

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