Well, I haven’t had to add anything to the depressing Clone Countdown for a while, which is just as well. I don’t like feeling like there are a lot of people monkeying around with DNA, ova, embryos and life itself as if they were all TinkerToys. And I hadn’t heard anythig new on this front. So maybe all’s well? But then comes this article in the English paper “The Guardian”:

Hybrid embryos get go-ahead

The government has overturned its proposed ban on the creation of human-animal embryos and now wants to allow them to be used to develop new treatments for incurable diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

The proposal, in a new draft fertility bill published today, would allow scientists to create three different types of hybrid embryos.

Scientists would be allowed to grow the embryos in a lab for no more than two weeks, and it would be illegal to implant them in a human.

The first kind of hybrid allowed under the bill, known as a chimeric embryo, is made by injecting cells from an animal into a human embryo. The second, known as a human transgenic embryo, involves injecting animal DNA into a human embryo.

The third, known as a cytoplasmic hybrid, is created by transferring the nuclei of human cells, such as skin cells, into animal eggs from which almost all the genetic material has been removed.

ARGH! How hard is this? No animal-people! What is this, “The Island of Dr. Moreau”?

And by the way, in case that caveat about it being “illegal” to implant the hybrid embryos into a person is supposed to make us all feel good, … well, it doesn’t. It’s illegal to smoke pot, operate heavy machinery while intoxicated or cheat on your taxes, but if the English stopped those endeavors their economy would fail.

And anyway, hybrid embryos were also illegal until this change, as the government affirmed just six months ago. This paragraph might serve as a reminder that these sorts of perceived scientific advances are rarely contained for long:

The move is a U-turn on proposals to outlaw all types of human-animal embryos set out by ministers in a white paper published last December.

It seems a little silly not to know where this will end. Many people want a way out of their humanity and out of the confines of what we know about life and death. If the world’s scientists all had the best intentions in the world, there is still no way they would be able to prevent this line of research from leading to attempts to re-create mankind. They will fail in a sense, but even in attempting it, they will re-define what it means to be a human being.

Oh well. Maybe I can order up something with my dog’s ears. That would be kind of neat.