A Day in Paradise

Frightening article on BBC about creating human/cow hybrids:

The hybrid human-bovine embryos would be used for stem cell research and would not be allowed to develop for more than a few days.

But critics say it is unethical and potentially dangerous.

Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris - a member of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee - said: “If human benefit can be derived by perfecting therapeutic cloning techniques or from research into subsequently-derived stem cells, then it would actually be immoral to prevent it just because of a ‘yuck’ factor.”

Creating chimeras isn’t something that’s exactly new. However using them to harvest human organs is pretty wild.

I’ve blogged about the second “tech boom” and traditionally biotech follows closely on the tech wave. From experience I know that Venture capitalists are just dying to get their hands on some of the money that is bound to be made in the biotech industry, so while the money is flowing I expect to see a lot of “brave new techniques” come out into the open. A company that is pretty hungry in this market is the secretive candadian biotech company Genada, not much word as to what they are actually doing (sounds like the late 90’s) but a lot of investors wanting to cash in on the next “leap for mankind.”

So here’s to holding our breath and see what these companies come up with before the money stops flowing!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Scary, Sci-fi, Internet, Humor, Holy Cow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.