We've heard of spam filters but this is ridiculous: Pig-monkey chimeras developed in a Chinese laboratory Scientists in China are laying claim to the first ever pig-monkey chimeras to be born in what they hope will be a breakthrough for biomedicine, not just fuel for your nightmares. The apparent advancement, made by boffins at the Beijing State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology, saw the live piglets born with …
Well, the pigs are not kosher, as far as I know, because they are not ruminant (and not because of their feet). But even with my very, very limited half-knowledge of kosher or not I'm pretty sure that a pig-monkey chimaera that happens to be ruminant will still be considered unclean even if only for the monkey bits.
This begs the question: would a hybrid between two kosher animals still be kosher?
I'm not Jewish, but my understanding is that the rules for determining kosherness have nothing to do with the animal's ancestry, and everything to do with its own inherent properties.
If it's shaped like a pig and it acts like a pig, then it's not kosher - not because it's a pig, but because it's not a ruminant. If, on the other hand, you could genetically engineer a pig that chewed the cud, then it would be kosher.
A few years back a friend came over to visit from Japan and I showed her an episode of Monkey (she'd grown up with the original Japanese version). She thought the English dub was absolutely fantastic. She said that the voice actors really captured the essence of the characters.
It's a TV remake alright - except that you got the wrong show.
Check out South Park
https://www.southparkstudios.co.uk/clips/103344/four-assed-monkey
I can think of a hundred other things that scientists could be doing but this is definately not one of them..
Fucking around with ADN, cells at this level will eventually lead to something very much unwanted...... Someone will eventually take things out of the public lab, into a private lab and then the monstrosities start.... All in the name of money. pseudo research, assistance etc....
Evolution takes hundreds, thousands or millions of years to determine what should or should not survive through natural process, selection.. We are pushing that now down to a couple of days and "hoping" that nothing will go wrong.... I use the word "hope" as this is not theoretical science.....
This is seriously scary shit....
Nah. For one thing, they die quickly, within days of birth ... if they are carried to full term in the first place. For another, they probably can't reproduce if they do make it into adulthood. These things are a genetic dead-end before they breath air for the first time.
stage 2: make them reproduce
stage 3533: make them reproduce in the wild and make them feed on defenceless bi-peds
p.s. and please, don't ask me why the (...) scientists lick their (...) balls. It's not because they can, they're not animals, they have VALUES. High values, like... advancement of science and such. Ah well, and a paycheck too, but hey, DEFINITELY the advancement of science! :(
Necessary doesn't come into it anymore.
When you wrote, "Someone will eventually take things out of the public lab", it reminded me of home videos I've recently seen on YouTube, showing you how to do everything from make your own CBD oil to Gene splitting and splicing for dummies.
> I can think of a hundred other things that scientists could be doing but this is definately not one of them..
The ultimate objective, I assume, is to be able to grow pure human organs inside a pig for later transplanting into a person, something that is seen as possibly the only way to provide a supply or organs for transplant that can match the demand.
This research is an early preliminary on the way to growing monkey organs in pigs, which would allow the method to be tested before switching to human organs.
Evolution takes hundreds, thousands or millions of years to determine what should or should not survive through natural process, selection..
Humans have been selectively breeding flora and fauna for centuries now. We can alter a plant or creature significantly within a human lifetime. I'd hardly call that thousands or millions of years. It's not up to the same level as direct gene editing but humans have been fucking with nature since we first started walking upright.
(Also, this process of breeding chimeras takes more than "a couple of days" and it's quite easy to control the breeding/reproduction of animals. There's no chance of a catastrophic "humanity is screwed" type event with these particular experiments.)
"(Also, this process of breeding chimeras takes more than "a couple of days" and it's quite easy to control the breeding/reproduction of animals. There's no chance of a catastrophic "humanity is screwed" type event with these particular experiments.)"
Cats with thumbs?
I'd also take issue with the OP's use of the word "should". There is no "should", as that implies some sort of decision making process over what would constitute a desired result. Evolution ain't like that. The relevant words for survival of the fittest are "did" and "could". Without some sort of guiding conscience deciding what "should" happen it makes little difference whether evolution occurs in the natural world over thousands of generations or inside a lab within a few months.
My main issue with this sort of research is that it seems unlikely to generate the desired result (human organs from non-human sources). However, sometimes interesting science comes from unpromising starting points. Ethically speaking these ideas still beat the hell out of using Uyghurs as disposable sources of human organs, which is what the Chinese (allegedly) do now.
I can think of a hundred other things that scientists could be doing but this is definately not one of them..
To bring up a relevant quote, "Science isn't about 'why'! It's about 'why not?'!". And given that the major "why not" here is (western) ethical concerns, it's not surprising that the Chinese(with their different hangups) would pursue it given the theoretical payoff.
Its just blatant management interference to reduce the staffing of transportation services for Buddhist monks embarking on dangerous holy missions. These are valuable members of any entourage, and combining safety-critical escort roles in such a fashion is a simple cost-saving exercise at the expense of the safety of the travelling public. Coupled with this, recent attempts to shift the mission so it makes 100% use of The Cloud is utterly undermining the entire principle and rationale of undertaking a journey to Ghandara on foot.
Just supporting our brothers in the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Professional Thinking Persons. After all the Minor Deities Personification and Manifestations Guild represent the guards working alongside and protecting their members. I shall be consulting with brothers Majikthise and Vroomfondel this afternoon, and we shall have to put the matter to our combined membership.
"The ultimate goal of the experiments is not to create a race of hideous super-monsters, but rather to figure out if it will be possible to develop human organs inside pigs that could then be harvested and used for transplants."
This would then allow our rather more alcoholic, drug abusive, Hollywoord stars, politicians or otherwise , rich bastards to live for much longer thereby affording the rest of the planet the sufferance of having to put up with yet another TV interview with aforesaid has-been.
The need for transplant organs far exceeds the availability and unfortunately affect pretty much anyone regardless of income. Solving this issue benefits everyone, not just the rich! (Though it WILL benefit the rich more, since the poor are in general less likely to have access to the required health care nor the means to pay for it. That doesn't however negate the fact it will benefit everyone).
Just hope you or anyone you know/love never end up on a wait-list for a transplant organ. There's a good chance you'll be on there for the rest of a rather shortened and much more miserable life
It'll improve availability and lower cost, so it WILL improve access even for the poor. More people will have access. However, if you're living off of a few dollars a day at 3 days travel from the nearest hospital, it might not be of much help.
All other factors being equal this tech is equally beneficial to everyone. Wealth tends to scew all the other factors in favor of the rich, which is why in practice they will NOTICE the benefit of technology more.
The Bene Tleilax slig was not an a great idea for a predator but if you are going to have capital punishment then the possibility of being tied down and fed to one might actually be a deterrent. Although tasty the porcuswine sounds a bit too defensive to me. Now if we could bring back megatherium and add some smilodon teeth then we would be off to a good start. Vampire bats are a bit small but mixed with fruit bat the result could be interesting. We isn't anyone working on a Polar hippopotabear, brown recluse wasp or a rattlesnake mongoose? Are the worlds evil scientists really so badly short of funding?
How can we be so sure? One minute it's a vaguely unsettling piece of research, the next you'll be walking through a forest and a troupe of cackling porkers will come swinging through the trees and descend towards you with ravenous bellies and malice in their eyes having escaped from their sinister captors at the monkey bacon farm and ready to take revenge.
Who the fuck wears sunglasses in the forest whilst PigMonkey hunting?
What is far more likely to happen is that one of these little bastarfs will steal your Hunting Rifle, then the real problems are gonna start.. It's gonna take a bunch of well equiped Boston Dynamics PigMonkey clones to successfully remove this new threat....
and make it end with a long, bony beak (and an extra pair of legs with extra long, extra sharp talons). Long term, value-wise, it beats drones (as enemy soldier-killers). Humans are amazingly ingenious in inventing new ways to wipe out their own species...
The Two Ronnies used to do it regularly.
I think their news desk reported that scientists crossed a German Shepherd with a vacuum cleaner, and got a dog that really puts the wind up postmen (70s or 80s so gendered language).
For the monkey-pig chimera, I'm afraid that the joke I've thought of is not very good and also too suggestive for my sense of their level, they only wanted to be slightly rude. So I don't think they would have told us that scientist had bred an animal that can grind its own organ.
IGMC
"The experiments mark the first time scientists had been able to successfully develop pigs with monkey cells and carry them to birth."
Are you saying there are lots of teams of scientists trying to produce genetic freaks around the world, and it just so happens that China is first? Or actually, it's probably more likely that only in China are ethics so fucked up that this sort of thing is not considered truly hideous.
Recent research has shown that virtually all of us are chimeras on some level. Whether it's because over time the DNA in our various stem cells diverge due to (local) mutations, because of the cells from a fetus growing inside our uterus making into our tissues, or in the case of a lucky few, because of a merging of two embryos into a single individual.
By definition, a chimera is only viable if the cells can cooperate sufficiently to sustain a functioning body. This implies a strong level of compatibility. For us human chimeras (I'm an XX/XY chimera, AKA 'true hermaphrodite'), it's still a bit of a lucky process, as most human chimera pregnancies never make it to term. There are simply so many points during the development process where things have to go just right or the self-destruct mechanism of the host body kicks in. And even after those hazards have been cleared, there are still internal hazards that may pop up. For me personally that most popped up in the form of one of the most confused and drawn-out puberties one could imagine.
Basically what I'm trying to get at is that a chimera isn't necessarily something unusual or scary. And that we're all a bit of a chimera, just some more than others :)
Female (XX) mammals are chimeras, because of the Lyon effect, where either the X from the mother or that from the father is inactivated at random yielding a 50:50 mix of cells. (think tortoiseshell cats).
But what about this chap?
EDIT: I see Fruit and Nutcase beat me by an hour
Was going to make it a Boris joke but David is the goto pig guy.
Unfortunate we can't count Boaris out yet.
I may not like the idea of him as PM for another term, but I would vote for him in a UK remake of Monkey.
Hell, he'd be an almost perfect cast as pigsy.
"The ultimate goal of the experiments is not to create a race of hideous super-monsters, but rather to figure out if it will be possible to develop human organs inside pigs that could then be harvested and used for transplants."
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
What Orwell failed to mention was that this will greatly trouble the medical ethics committee.
One of the benefits of working for a company that has a multi-hundred million dollar supercomputer is that its "Scientists" many times get access to its computational capabilities during off-hours and/or during any commercial downtime.
And since a very large computer system with 240,000 processors CAN be used for gene sequencing AND CRISPR editing (of prokarayotic things such as bacteria and anything extremophile), it means we can INTRODUCE new codons into BOTH human and animal genomes. AND ONE of the idiotic things TWO of my colleagues are doing on their off-hours/self-directed-research is trying to sequence AND edit Chicken genomes to find out which is modern DNA and which is older inactive/junk Dinosaur DNA.
They have stated to me they want to bring back Velociraptors and T-Rexes which are ANCESTORS of modern birds AND they have stated to me that they have FINISHED figuring what WHAT codons are modern or not, ...AND... that they are a mere year or two away from figuring WHAT the "Junk DNA" did so many millions of years ago. They are using CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) software that looks to see what amino acids would be expressed by those codons and what chemical synthesites would contribute to fast and LARGE growth of what specific types of Bird vs "Dinosaur" tissue.
After seeing some of the graphic output of that codon simulator software, I actually DO BELIEVE they are a mere one to two years away from getting bacteria to recut and fill in "Junk" Chicken DNA to create an egg that would output a fast-growing Raptor or TRex! If we had more of ou GaAs Super-CPUs, we could run more codon simulations but since we only have one supercomputer system being use for WBE (Whole brain Emulation), they only get it on weekends and downtime. ANYWAYS !!!! Its a scary thought that we humans are actually NOW CAPABLE of differentiating between epoch-origin DNA within birds and figuring out which codons to fill-in and/or re-cut of a larger DNA string to get highly specific and targeted tissue growth.
YES! I asked whether humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) too have inactive Junk DNA that can be re-expressed into viable codons AND I asked what all of that Junk DNA of ours did?
They're answer is quite telling!
"We're not allowed to tell you cuz it's Classified --TS-EO--"
That is a rather high classification for MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE unprecedented in ANY SAP/CAP research program apparatus that I am familiar with. I wonder what they found?
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