Washington, D.C. (Rightcommentary.com) - The Timesonline is reporting today that scientist have successfully mixed human DNA with cow embryos.

The Times reported:

Embryos containing human and animal material have been created in Britain for the first time, a month before the House of Commons votes on new laws to regulate the research.

A team at Newcastle University announced yesterday that it had successfully generated “admixed embryos” by adding human DNA to empty cow eggs in the first experiment of its kind in Britain.

This presents a difficult dilemma for me - and for most people I imagine - in deciding what constitutes “good research” and what constitutes “bad research” from a bio-ethicist perspective. I am not a particularly devout catholic - however - even I take some warning in the passage of Psalm 100:3 “Know that the LORD Himself is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves.” Mankind has a rather dubious environmental management history - we tend to be poor at development of artificial bio-stasis. Thus, I am always concerned that as man learns more about the building blocks of himself and the universe - our knowledge of what the “parts are” will exceed our competence to manage it.

Genetic engineering of humans cuts down to the most basic existential questions of humanity - who am I, why am I here, what is the soul, what is the value of life. While I support genetic research, as I believe the promise of curing disease and better understanding how our bodies work is a positive thing, situations like this one - xeno-transplant cytoplasmic research -or more generally transgensis - give me some cause for worry. As the article states, the resulting embryo is 99.9% human; the remainder- the one tenth of one percent is what? Cow? Spider? Ape? Or whatever else the cytoplasmic shell was initially?

While the purpose of current research is to clone these cells so that their stem-cells may be extracted, as we continue down the road of understanding the most fundamental building blocks of life, we must ask ourselves some hard questions about the value of life and how “we” (mankind) relate to each other and to God (if one believes in a supreme deity).

It would seem to me, in part, that life is valuable because it is scarce and has been beyond our means to create. Mankind, in its earliest periods of development, quickly began to value life and developed a spiritual understanding of himself, his fellow man, and the universe. While I am not looking necessarily to engage in discussion and debate about “god, man, and religion,” Cicero said, “Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.” For almost all of humankind’s existence, the belief in a deity has been a core value of his existence. The relationship has been, with respect to the creation of life, one way. Man has been unable to create life synthetically - from nothing. Those who believe in the existence of God believe essentially something similar to Psalm 100:3 -although it may be worded differently.

If man can now make life independent of God - how would that change our relationship? How would it change the value of life? What about the value of life of those whom are created - 99.9% human… are their lives somehow less than the lives of those who are 100%?

Unfortunately, I have a dim view overall of humanity and its ability to be tolerant or to be nondiscriminatory. Like Pierre Boule, I believe Planet of the Apes is reasonably possible given the fact that humans have a history of discrimination and domination. There is little doubt in my mind that sub-human species would ultimately be made to serve humanity - by force if necessary. Such drones would provide humanity with free labor - the motives for exploitation are too great.

And besides - they’re not really human anyways. We made them - they’re only copies. If I made a copy of the Declaration of Independence, is that the same as the original document? If i burn the copy - have I harmed or cheapened the original? Does anyone really care?

These arguments can be easily applied to sub-human species that could be “made” by humanity.

This is but one problem - and our need to confront it is probably 100 years or more away. So I’m not terribly worried about it - but when I read these articles - the first thing that comes to mind is Planet of the Apes.

But more readily at hand is understanding the value of life and our ability to create and manipulate it. As a political issue, stem cell research has been divisive between democrats and republicans, however, both are generally against the idea of human cloning or implanting cytoplasmic cells for the purposes of attempting to procreate with cloned DNA. But we have not reached a clear political consensus about what constitutes “right and wrong” with respect to cloning research.

I want to help the sick - I believe most people do. I believe the research could be invaluable to understanding ourselves and curing disease. However, we must tread very carefully in this domain.

I liken it to the difference between owning a house and being able to fix a light switch or put in a lamp - and being an electrician. One can easily learn the rudimentry concepts of how your house’s electrical system works. That knowledge ill-applied - can very easily burn your house down if you make a faulty repair or attempt to extend upon your house’s electrical network. This is a basic problem with networks more generally - its much easier to understand how they work, than it is to make them. Understanding how a network works is not necessarily adequate training for understanding how to make and control one - hence my original observation that mankind’s record in development of bio-stasis, self-sustained biological systems, has been poor.

In short - what I’m worried about is either a) we accidentally burn our house down when we genetically short-circuit our electrical system, or b) I’ll be pounding my fist on the sand of a beach staring at the Statue of Liberty going, “They’ve blown it all to hell!” while being chased by Planet of the Cow people… who rose up against their human masters… and who pray to a picture of S. Truett Cathy (the founder of Chick-Fil-A).

Note: For those wondering, Bos Tarus is the binomial specie designation for the the family of bovines that we generally refer to as cattle, steer, and “cows”.