this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Biology
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‘chimeric monkey’ what could go wrong? If the aim is to improve human life, couldn’t we still get a lot further with basic food, clean water and health provision rather than screwing round with monkey dna and making fated hybrid species.
Your plan can only help people on the lower end of the economic distribution. What we need is technology to let rich people live longer so that they can continue to enjoy the fruits of what can only be their completely deserved and meritorious wealth.
/s
A possible long term goal here is to improve human life by creating a monkey with some human organs for drug testing. This field also has the prospect of growing human organs in pigs for transplants.
To be clear, being chimeric is not inheritable because the DNA is not being mixed. The animal has some cells from one species, and other cells from a different species.
Though you can argue about the ethics of this kind of animal research, I think biomedical research in general is valuable. To improve human welfare, I think it's important for humanity to have both low risk short term strategies (providing people with food and water), and long term high risk strategies (basic biological research).