Future Ben

Our president wants to illegalize all “human animal hybrids.” Clearly, I disagree. Human animal hybrids are real people, living and working among us. They could be your doctor, your physical trainer, even your favorite biotech futurist blogger.

I’m having fun, but therin lies the central phalacy of the president’s arguement. We are simply part of a spectrum of speciation that extends from us to whales to the tiny protoshrew we all decended from. Species occur only because there is a narrow threshold of tolerence for chromosomes to properly separate. The amount of genetic difference needed to cause speciation can be less than a percent. Even so, surprizing crossbreeding is possible as evidenced by Ligers, Beefalo, and even the probably mythical Humanzee.

Furthermore, what constitutes a hybrid? Is a transgenic mouse expressing a defective human gene a hybrid? Would all transgenic animals with human genes become illegal? What about human genes expressed in cell culture? In solving structures of human proteins those proteins are expressed in hamster, insect and most often in bacterial cells. Aren’t those hybrids too. This line of legislature could wipe our half of the NIH! Of course you could generate a gene de novo based on its sequence. Would it still be a human gene if you synthesized it base by base. The president’s statement that human animal hybrids should be illegal is beyond luddite, it is pure ignorance. The horrifying part is that a certain percentage of people will take it seriously.

Whether he is ignorant or not, is it the president’s place to decide what makes us human? Who can answer that question? The answer does not lie in genetics. (I wish it did.) This is the realm of philosophy or even theology. And for that reason I beleive that nobody has the right to define it for me. All I can say is that if the president can pass something that even remotely resembles what he proposes, I am turning to supervillany. Or leaving the country, whichever is more feasible at the time.