To do biological and medical research you need to put aside or turn of a lot of human emotion and become more machine than human being. It is necessary to go in and cut something in order to save it, or kill it in order to find new knowledge. I know from first hand experience the price to pay, since it was one a I had to deal with in getting my BS in Biology. You become cold to the life that was when you dissect (and has young people ‘play with’) cadavers and corpses of dead animals. This need to become completely logical without much feeling can turn some people not into healers, but into cold harded abusers. Once you see a living thing as a path to riches, glory or simply new knowledge the living become a means to an end, not something worth preserving at all cost. Not something to be cherished. Living tissue becomes something to manipulate.

This is why science needs a moral code of ethics which cannot be bent or broken. Exceptions to discover the next mythical fountain of youth only open the flood gates to minds who fathom living things as only resources, and themselves as masters of knowledge who alone can create the greater good through their manipulations. And thus we can to the point we see bizarre and dangerous concepts where DNA is mingled in two species without and serious thought to what is being created and how it could effect life as we know it on this planet:

Making human-animal embryos for scientific experiments should be allowed because of the benefits to science and medicine, British experts said in a report released for Sunday.

Such embryos should never, however, be implanted into either a woman or an animal, said the Academy of Medical Sciences.

The combinations would include animal eggs and the nucleus, containing the genetic material, of a human being, or human embryos that carry the genetic material of an animal, the independent advisory body said.

There is absolutely no scientific need for this kind of playing God. Intermixing species outside the natural process of conception could lead to all sorts of unknown and sick biological abberrations. There is no need to mix genes like this. All genetic triggers can be worked out on animals first, and then tried in humans if they show sufficient benefit versus risk. In addition, there are adult stem cell therapies and the new promise of making endless stem cells from human skin. This is a boondogle, a shot in the dark in the hopes someone can get rich. But we have no idea what may produced during these blind trials and errors.

Scientist need to remember that they checked quite a bit of their humanity when they selected their path and that they need help from others to remind them where the barriers to reasonable behavior exist. After the ‘medical tests’ done by the Nazis and the Japanese on prisoners in World War II we would think we would remember how dark mankind’s thinking can be. Even when it is not trying to think with malice to others, it can rationalize the most brutal acts as it tries to save humanity from itself and reality.