The following pictures are from a report earlier this year from the U.S. based Advanced Cell Technology on the Reprogramming of Human Somatic Cells Using Human and Animal Oocytes.

Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, imagine that scientists would actually produce an organism that was part human, part cow?? And, yet, it’s being done, right here in our own country!!

Recently the legal counsel for Missouri Right to Life composed for us a policy statement for on “chimeras” (mixed human-animal creatures). The explanation he came up with is just beautiful:

“For scientists deliberately to produce a mixed biological creature that is part-human and part-animal is to show contempt for human beings. In such a project, all respect for humanity is abdicated in favor of ruthless utilitarianism, by which any travesty may be practiced upon another human (or part-human) who is not strong enough or conscious enough to resist. The scientific hubris – the desire to “play God” – that drives such experiments is minimized in public pronouncements; they are projected as founded upon humanitarian motives, especially finding cures for disease.

“Missouri Right to Life insists that human beings be treated as subjects, not objects. Every human being is unique, with capacities and promise that are too boundless for measurement. On this earth, only humans have minds that are capable of contemplating the infinite and the unknown. Only humans can make promises and keep them. Only humans can write and appreciate poetry, or paint icons and landscapes, or dream of justice and peace. There is something inherent in the human heart that longs to voyage beyond mere laboratory data into limitless depths of truth and good and beauty, of which the most sublime symphonies or elegant ballets are mere hints and whisperings.

“No mechanistic and materialistic view of the world can account for such things as love, sacrifice, imagination, or beauty without reducing them to unrecognizable caricatures of what people actually experience in their lives on a daily basis. No one is justified in reducing humanity to an object for manipulation in laboratories. Missouri Right to Life condemns the production of mixed human-animal creatures by whatever means may be invented in the mind of man.”