LIVE FOR THE SWARM!!!
This was my favourite part:
A chimera is a mixture of two or more species in one body. Not all are considered troubling, though. For example, faulty human heart valves are routinely replaced with ones taken from cows and pigs. The surgery?which makes the recipient a human-animal chimera?is widely accepted.
As far as I can tell, this means that if someone swallows a rat, they become a human-rat chimera for the duration of time that it’s in their body… I’m sure this definition is a bit too broad.
But yeah, I’d assume that this is an attempt to get around all the legal and ethical problems surrounding the cloning of actual humans to perform experiments on. I suspect the prospect of having mice with human brains giving birth to human children will freak the relevant parties out just as much, though.
What’s that old saying? Truth is stranger than fiction. Perhaps bio-weapons will become a reality one day after all.
I’m still waiting for the world to be ruled by genetically engineered uber-humans.
“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”
“The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world.”
Same thing I thought.
I remember watching CSI one time, and a character who possessed different sets of DNA in different bodily fluids of his was referred to as a chimera… Now I’m kind of confused!
[quote=“Bluefoot”]“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”
“The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world.”[/quote]
(remembers Pinky & The Brain)
But bio-weapons? Hm… another thing to be slightly worried about! Cloning and other interfering scientific things worry me, so this does ring some alarm bells. I should read up on it before I form any major opinions, though.
Again, is this not more of a Liberal District topic, or do I just not understand the forum descriptions properly? :anjou_embarassed:
No, that’s different. If I remember that correctly, he had some of his brother’s DNA from birth, and was using it to frame him up. That’s a medical condition referred to as Chimera, not an actual chimera.
[quote=“Arcie”]
No, that’s different. If I remember that correctly, he had some of his brother’s DNA from birth, and was using it to frame him up. That’s a medical condition referred to as Chimera, not an actual chimera.[/quote]
Oh right… thanks, Arcie!
I just reworded my earlier post, in case anyone’s wondering.
This whole thing does have potential to be dangerous or just plain freaky, I have to admit…
Your probably right. The Holy District would be more appropriate, but since it is Panzer Dragoon related, I thought it’d be okay.
Related?
Anyways I don’t like the way we’re heading with this.What if it is possible that a rat can be given conscience?We don’t know if that is possible and that’s a risk we cannot take in my opnion.
Rats already have consciousness. They just don’t have any kind of moral systems.
I agree; but you know what people are like. If it can be tried, they’ll try it - regardless of how harmful it might be.
Seriously, when I consider what could be happening when I’m older, I do have to worry a little.
You may well be right, but I often wonder how far the intelligence of animals goes. Does anyone here have any opinions on this?
DO they have consciousness?
Just edited my above post about that - damn fast repliers!! Anyway, see above.
Bio-monsters, genetic engineering, “What new subhuman combination should be produced and for what purpose?”, “Whatever moral threshold of human neural development we might choose to set as the limit for such an experiment, there would be a considerable risk of exceeding that limit before it could be recognized.”
The Panzer Dragoon universe in a nutshell.
More to the point though, should it matter how intelligent a creature is when deciding what sort of rights it should have? For example, should it be OK to clone, kill and experiment on mice and rabbits, but not OK to do the same for monkeys? Or humans? Or if a creature’s mental capacity should be the deciding factor, should all stupid people be turned over to medical science?
I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about this myself, but I do find the dilemma quite an interesting one…
Well knowing you are beeing treated in a bad way can be worse than the actual pain.It’s subjective of course but consciousness matters.
I mean we don’t have any problems killing chickesn in order to eat everyday do we?
But people find it easy to justify this because it’s simply thought of as “natural” to kill animals in order to eat them - and, in essence, it is. On the other hand, splicing human genes into an animal in order to create a mutant hybrid that’s going to be experimented on and killed doesn’t really fit into a “natural” cycle at all - I assume that’s where this problem comes in.