January 23, 2015 • 38 mins
Scientists have been investigating ways to mix human biology with that of other life forms. How far can we go? How far SHOULD we go?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking pay and welcome to Forward Thinking the podcast
that looks at the feature says, as he strong listen Bud,
he's got radioactive blood. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bocaton,
(00:21):
and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be
tackling another listener request topic. It's a kind of creepy one.
I almost wish it was Halloween season to do this. Yeah,
it's actually not that creepy as it turns out, which
is kind of the point of this entire show. Basically,
you can stop listening spoilers. If you were expecting creepy,
We're largely going to be dismantling some of it is
(00:44):
totally creepy. Okay, read, let's let's read these listeners right well, Actually,
more than one listener has, in in different kind of ways,
asked us to cover this topic. And the first one
is from our listener, Amy, who actually wrote us a
really long, super interesting email full of excellent ideas. Eventually,
I want to get to all of Amy's ideas. But
(01:04):
the part of her email that's relevant was she asked us.
Have you ever done human animal hybridization? If they could
grow an ear on a mouse, poor mouse? She says parenthetically,
can they give humans the nasal capabilities of a dog?
What about the muscle strength of a gorilla? M O?
And it's worth asking, and we will we will attempt
(01:28):
to answer some questions in this, but we have another listener.
Uh yeah. Lee wrote in on Facebook and said, Hi, there,
I had an idea for an episode. I'm not sure
if you've covered genetic hybrids or not, but all the
superhero episodes got me thinking of this. Since I grew
up before why it was really a popular genre. I've
been going back and reading some of those books now,
including Maximum Ride, which has characters that are genetic hybrids,
(01:50):
humans spliced with a bird or a wolf. I know
they have created such genetic hybrids with some food and plants.
I think there was a tomato with fish genetics senet
or something, and just one it. If you could talk
about this technology in general and the possible future of it.
Is there something in the science that would prevent us
from using such technology with humans or animals or is
it purely an ethical concern? Well, guys, I mean Amy
(02:13):
and Lee, thank you for writing it, and this gave
us a great opportunity to look into this and discuss it.
It's a I mean, this is a hot topic issue
in many ways because while it's not like we're seeing,
you know, cheetah boy running around outside, but we are.
Science is reaching a level where we've got a lot
of questions that pop up around things like this. Yeah,
(02:35):
and it's not even that new of a concern. I
mean a lot of our discoveries about genetics and the
human genome and things like that have given us new anxieties.
But the fear of crossing species goes way way back.
It goes back into actually into mythology. You've got you know,
like folklore with the minotaur, it's you know, half human,
(02:56):
half man, and half man. I like, how I just
rolled right through that too. I was like, yeah, half human,
half man, that's terrible. You got me. I was trying
to slip a fully human past on you. As a minotaur.
This is an es School act with the head of
a rabbit and the body of a different rabbit. Now
(03:17):
the minotaur, of course, with the head of a bull
and the body of a man and all that. All
the terrifying stuff that comes with that. But even more recently,
but also less recently, you had H. G. Wells the
Island of Dr Moreau, right, which case you're talking about
surgery in order to alter animals to be more human
like and then conditioning them in order to be human right, Well,
(03:41):
had he didn't know anything about genetics, nobody did yet,
but he he already had this idea and was feeling
a bit cautious about it. Oh yeah, yeah, Well, I
mean that was also an anxiety I would imagine based
on the surgeries of the day that were often performed
at open galleries because you had to make your own fun,
right right. Uh. And there was no TV back then,
(04:02):
so and we did talk an awful lot about that
crossing of boundaries in our Future of Monsters episode Oh yeah,
which we did last October with Robert Lamb. Yeah. Yeah.
We even talked about it earlier in our September episode
GMOs Food and fud or If Your Uncertainty and Doubt,
where we talked about how and and Lee alluded to this,
(04:23):
the idea of the transmit, transplanting genes from one organism
into another in order. Yeah, in this case, the fish
jeens to tomatoes. The idea there, I believe was to
make them more resistant to frost, yeah, cold weather. But uh,
some people said, oh, does this mean that I'm going
to get scales on my tomato or it's gonna taste
(04:44):
fishy or smell fish right, which again, that was if
you if you were curious about that, then you should
definitely go and listen to both of those episodes because
they kind of lay some groundwork. But we're going to
continue that conversation and talk specifically about incorporating genetic material
of animals and humans together. Yeah, okay, So one of
(05:07):
the first things I think we should do is a
little bit of vocabulary clean up because the word that
always gets used in in popular talk about mixing species
is hybrid or hybridization. Now, in a technical sense, a
hybrid is something specific, and a lot of the times
(05:27):
when people are talking about certain kinds of animal human hybrids,
they're not actually talking about hybrids. In the technical sense,
a hybrid would mean you've crossed germ cells like a
sperm in an egg and created a true genetic mix
of two different parent species, and so the offspring species
would have the would have a mix of the two
(05:50):
parent species DNA in every cell of its body, whereas
a lot of times what people are actually talking about
or what we would call chimeras. Yeah, chimera is also
uh interesting organism. This is one that has at least
four parents cells instead of the normal two and has
(06:12):
at least two different sets of DNA as a result
of this. Right, so you could be a chimera. That's
you know, you are Jonathan Strickland, a human of human species,
but some part of your body has been supplemented with
with cells or genetic material from another species. Okay, so
there we've established the basics. But the question that's at
(06:35):
hand is mixing of humans and other animals in nature
or any other organisms. Has anybody actually already done this
and have and if they've done it, have they done
it in ways that we should be concerned about? Um,
they totally done it. Yeah, the answer to your first
question is yes, whether you want to be concerned about
(06:57):
it is really a personal issue that we should think on,
which you know, we're not saying it's right or wrong
to be concerned or not concerned, merely that it is
a personal, you know decision you're gonna come to, well, sure. Sure,
and we can tell you about some of the ways
that this has been done and perhaps you can begin
formulating that opinion. Yeah. And so when it comes to
(07:17):
mixing or or transplanting genetic material from one organism into another,
we've done a lot more, i would say, of transplanting
human genetic material into animal cells than the other way around. Yeah,
so it's it's more of creating a human animal hybrid
in a cellular sense, uh, with the human material going
(07:39):
into the animal cells. Um. For for various reasons, and
a lot of this has been for two major areas
of research. One is biology just simply learning more about
biological processes, and the other is being able to advance medicine.
And uh, it turns out that there are really good
reasons to pursue both of these in order for us
(08:02):
to get a better understanding and also just more effective
medical treatments for all sorts of stuff. Okay, well let's
hear an example, all right. So, um, you know, when
a pharmaceutical company is developing drugs and they need to
start testing it on organisms, obviously they don't jump straight
to humans, right. We talked about this in a previous podcast.
I'm pretty sure, yeah, yeah, about the method that that
(08:25):
new drugs need to go through before they ever reach
human testing, right. I think we were probably talking about
this with respect to the idea of the organ on
a chip. Yes, Like, can you you create a system
that allows testing of drugs on simulated human organs that
doesn't necessitate testing of animals or live human subjects? Right,
So the testing of animals is a very I mean,
(08:49):
that's that's the accepted way of testing drugs before moving
on to human trials, and to get them safer before
they move on to those human trials. Right. You're learning
exactly why dosages maybe toxic. You're learning whether they're actually
efficacious or not, what kind of side effects they might have.
But you know, an animal isn't exactly like a human, right,
(09:11):
even the animals that we tend to use, Like we
talked about how close mice are as far as you
know when we're testing drugs, Like, well, mice react largely
the way humans do. That's not entirely true. They have
very different cellular makeup for certain organs. So, for example,
a little mouse liver. Let's say you want to create
(09:32):
a drug that you realize it's going to potentially have
an effect upon the liver. If if that effect arises
within a mouse's liver, that may or may not be
indicative that the same day could happen to a human.
So one of the things we've seen, as we've seen
scientists UH put human liver liver cells into mouse test
(09:54):
subjects and try to find out if in fact they
could create uh essentially a liver in a mouse that
is human tissue as opposed to mouse tissue, to thus
test these drugs and see what the effect would be
on a human liver. UM Sheep have actually been used
for the same purpose, and most research that involves putting
(10:16):
human genes into animals cells is along these improved animal
testing research lines. Um uh mice have also been given
humanized immune systems an attempt to give us new test
subjects for HIV vaccines. UM there's tinkers at the University
of Michigan that gave a mouse a human anal sphincter
(10:36):
to test treatments for incontinence. What. Yeah, that's science. That's
something that's science that happened. So here's one that is more.
This one certainly kind of skirts the line from some
people's perspective as far as ethics are concerned, this is
this is going to be part of this discussion. Is
(10:56):
this idea of giving animals human like intelligence, if that
were ever a possibility, would that be ethical? And I'm
not suggesting that that's what the team I'm about to
talk about did, but it starts to approach that line.
So there was an experiment at the universities of Wisconsin
and Rochester to separate universities. Obviously, that involved using a
(11:20):
toxin to destroy the hippocampus in test mice. That's the
part of the brain that's associated with memory. So they
would train the mice to, say, run a maze, and
the mice would learn how to run a maze. Then
they would use this toxin that essentially destroyed the hippocampus,
so the mice could no longer remember how to run
that mace. They couldn't do it anymore. Then they transplant
(11:42):
cells from human embryos into the mice, which essentially repaired
the damage in their neuron cells, and they regain their
cognitive functions and we're able to run the maze again. Yeah.
The the hippocampus is one of the few parts of
the human brain that does regenerate. Um, I mean and
not like wolver Raine regenerates, but but but the way
that your skin might regenerate. Wow. Yeah. Um. Other than brains,
(12:07):
there are some things that humans produce that we would
that it would be kind of cool and convenient if
animals could produce for us, um, like cars, like milk.
M Some researchers in China took jeans that create human
milk proteins and swapped them first inten mice is a
kind of test run, and then into goats, and these
goats can now produce quantities of humanized milk. So this
(12:31):
experiment involved milking mice to get human milk. Yeah, it's
good on a resume. Uh. You know, my first reaction
to this is one of like, this is where we
get into the creepy thing. Just one of those initial reactions.
And by that I mean personally, that's my reaction. I
don't mean to suggest everybody reacts that way. But then
(12:53):
it leads me on to think, wait a minute, I
drink other animals milk all the time. I am a
big milk consumer. I like cheese as well, and I
like goat cheese, and I eat so much cheese. Y'all.
You know, it's just one of those things where I
realized it would be weird if it was human goat cheese. Yes,
(13:13):
it would be weird. It would be more weird would
technically would just be human cheese that you got from
a goat. This, this whole thing is kind of odd.
At the same time, however, I can definitely see where
it could be a benefit. You know, it's not It's
not necessarily the most healthy thing in the world for say,
(13:36):
an infant to be switched to another animal's milk right away. Sure,
and and yeah, and even formulas don't really make up
the difference of all of the benefits of human milk, right, So,
I mean, I totally see where this is going. It's
just it's interesting that that was the first thing on
this list that had me get that kind of reaction. Yeah,
(13:58):
but you know, rationally, again, I I get around that
pretty quickly, But there is that weird emotional reaction that
I can't necessarily explain. Another important use for this kind
of approaches is the cultivation of stem cells. Now, stem
cells are very important. We've talked about those before. Stem
cells have the potential to turn into other types of cells. Right,
(14:20):
you've got potent stem cells. Those are the that the
golden goose transformers. Those are the ones that have the
potential to be any type of tissue. Now, a lot
of stem cells have specific types of tissue they're limited
to they can only develop into certain kinds. But at
any rate, cultivating them has been a controversial issue for
(14:41):
many years, and there we've seen a lot of advances
in science to allow doctors and scientists researchers get stem
cells in innovative ways. Uh So, scientists in the UK
used cow egg cells that they kind of scooped out
the genetic material. They put in the human genetic material
from skin cells. They stimulated those cells and that cause
(15:02):
them to divide and create stem cells, which they then harvested.
Rabbit eggs have been used for the same thing, actually,
or rabbit egg cells, I should say, because otherwise we're
talking about the Cadberry bunny, which is a different issue. However,
if you want to send us Cadbury eggs, feel free.
We will do so much research about how tasty they are.
(15:23):
I will. I will research until I can't feel my
right arm. So who are you too? You eat candy eggs?
Cadbury eggs are amazing. I'm gonna have to show you
a video when this don't know what I'm going to
show you a video when this is all over of
a guy who makes Cadbury eggs. Benedict's. Is that on
(15:48):
Epic meal Time? No, it's on Andy Candy. It's a
free plug for Andy Candy. There's Uh. There's another category
of research that can really only be carried out with
hybrid cells like this. UM. For for example, the Mayo
Clinic in Minnesota gave pigs some human blood, like human
(16:09):
blood pumps through their veins. Um. Not like they became
vampire pigs. No, not that I'm aware of um. Uh
And and and having this human blood in the pigs system,
let's researchers look at how viruses pass from animal cells
to human cells. Very important work. Yes, yeah, we have
talked about that before on this show. I believe in
(16:31):
terms of the future, yes, yes. And hybrids can can
also possibly help us gain a better understanding of cells.
Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, which is generally important for medical
research because it's one of those tiny things that that
we can't really get that good of a look at
by just looking at normal old human cells. For example,
(16:54):
in human pig hybrid cells created at the University of Warwick,
UM Higgs egg cell will be implanted with a human
cell nucleus. Okay, so so like so like scoop out
the pig nucleus, put in a human nucleus UM, and
then watching the cells grow UM. Based on that that
large amount of genetic information from the human nucleus, and
(17:18):
though we little bits of genetic information from the mitochondria
that are still pig mitochondria UM will throw each DNA
types rolls into more of a stark contrast than we
would normally see from from regular cells UM, because you know,
the different cellular structures affect the whole cells. You know,
(17:39):
complete growth right so UM. So hypothetically watching and learning
from these interactions could lead to better research into therapies
for genetic defects and stuff like Alzheimer's. That's really interesting.
I never considered that, but it makes so much sense
when you've got you know, we talk about complex systems
all the time on this show, whether it's biological system
or a climate system, and the idea of being able
(18:02):
to kind of force a system where there is this
stark contrast where you can see those reactions more clearly
because there's this delineation due to the fact that you're
talking about two different species. Genetic information is a really
novel approach that I honestly had never heard of until
until just now. Yeah, using this method be a way
(18:24):
to isolate variables, right right. Um. Then there's also the
crazy art side of things, of course. Um there's what yes,
crazy art hybrids for crazy art. Um, there's Dr Moreau
as an artist. A guy named Eduardo cock Um worked
together with a plant biologist by the name of Neil
(18:46):
Olswisky to put a little bit of of Eduardo's genetic
material into a pink petunia. It doesn't do anything other
than grow pretty much normally like a petunia would. Um,
but he does call it a plant amole. Why wouldn't you.
That's pretty cool. So this is this is swamp thing
(19:09):
they made swamp thing or or it's man thing, one
of the two. It could be either one. It's and
it was. It was a little bit of his amino
globin DNA, So it's it's part of it's sort of
clever because it's it's uh, you know, part of your
DNA that tells your body which cells are yours and
which cells are something else's, And so by incorporating them
(19:30):
into something else that was kind of cute. What if
it turns out this bowl of flowers is in fact
the same character from Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy that thinks,
oh no, not again before breaking on the surface of
the earth, Dear, What if these flowers are sentient and
have a soul, thus saying oh no, not again when falling,
(19:52):
he's doomed his genetic material to a terrible fate. Yeah. Actually,
I already know the answer to that, because there's a
character in the Hitchhecker's Guide series gets reincarnated over and
over again and is constantly killed by Arthur Dint And
it's not No, it's not EDWARDO. Well, okay, So we've
talked about putting human genetic material into animal cells, and
(20:13):
you know, I think a lot of people would be
on board with that basically if it's done for a
good cause, if it's done for useful research that can
save lives or teach us more about how the body
works and things like that. But what about going the
opposite direction, So bringing animal material into a human organism. Yeah, well,
we've done some of that. It's not a genetic transplant,
(20:36):
but we've seen zeno transplant experiments. That's where you take
an animal organ and transplant into a human person. You
mean like Dr Brinkley, Dr Brinkley. Have you not read
about Dr I haven't read about Dr Brinkley's gonna have
to explain. Dr Brinkley was a guy who came up
with the popular goat testical cure, where he would put
goat gonads into men's bodies to increase their virility. That's
(21:00):
not what I was thinking, but that work out for
people not so great in the end. Yeah. I just
looked it up and uh, and his full name was
John Romulus Brinkley. He later changed the Romulus to Richard
And I can't imagine why I was hoping we changed
it to James Tiberius Brinkley. I was. I was hoping
he would go with John Vulcan Brinkley. So we have
(21:22):
a very similar joke in mind. But I think he's
better Joe. Yeah. Well, at any rate. Uh, you know,
the xeno transplants really are more like things like taking
a baboon heart or a pig heart and transplanting it
into a human patient, and I guess you could say
(21:43):
it's been met with limited success. Really, the transplanting another
species organ into a human very frequently results in the
human body rejecting that organ. Yeah, well, I mean transplanting
a human organ into another human can frequently and in
rejection of the and and smaller pieces I think have
(22:04):
found more success. I think I've read about pig heart
valves to bypass surgery, things like that. Also, joints being
joint replacement surgery. Sometimes the joints are taken from animals,
and that has seen more success. But yes, when you
start getting into complicated tissues like kidney or heart, then
(22:25):
the chance for rejection gets a lot higher. Yeah, that
would just be my non expert intuition would be that
the more the tissue is just a sort of basic
mechanical object, the better it would do. And and the
more it's like a complex thing, it seems like that
would be more likely to not work out. Yeah, anything
that's tied to any kind of hormones or proteins or
(22:48):
any of those we little bits that fly around and
muck all of our stuff. They call the decisions on
our behalf without us knowing about it. Put some dead
leaves under your skin, and yeah, I just shove it
in there. It's fine, Like suddenly it became a Tim
Burton movie. Uh. Well, the interesting thing here to me,
I mean, this is all interesting, but this also leads
(23:08):
to the fact that there are doctors and scientists who
are trying to work with animals to develop more human
like organs, you know, actually cultivating human like organs in
animals for the purposes of transplanting those into actual human patients.
So this would combine both of the things we just
talked about. So it would be like making putting genetic
(23:30):
material from a human into an animal to make the
animal grow something that's human that you can take out
of the animal and put into a human exactly. It
would be the idea of you've got a human heart,
but you've got your human heart from a pig, so
kind of like getting your human milk from a goat.
I guess, uh, but you know that's that's the possible
future that we have with this. Now. Granted, this is
(23:51):
one element one one line of research. We've talked a
lot in other episodes about other lines of research that
could end up making this particular or line obsolete. So,
for example, if we get to a point where we
can reliably produce three D printed organs based upon the
patient's own biological information, that's obviously preferable and safer and uh,
(24:14):
you know, more cuddly for the poor pig. Right, you
don't have you don't have the ethical questions about is
this really the right thing to do? You know, altering
animals in order to benefit humans. We've done that throughout
the entire history of our species is not new with genetics.
We've been doing that forever. It's just now we're able
to do it on a level that some people find
(24:36):
disturbing questionable. Yeah. Uh so obviously though, like you were saying, Lauren, Yeah,
going with this other approach would mean that you don't
have to put those animals in harm's way, You don't
have to alter them in any way. You don't have
the tricksy question of whether it's okay to eat the
pig after the human heart has been transplanted out. Wow,
I didn't even think about that, But then I don't
eat mammals, so, uh that one, that one did not
(24:58):
even occur to me. That's excellent point. Uh, you know
this is still the three D printed organs is a
wonderful future that we hope we get to, but there
there may be many many years before that's viable, which
is a reason why this other line of research is
in fact necessary. I mean, we are talking about human
(25:19):
lives in the balance here. So that being said, let's
talk a little bit more about what are our listeners
brought up this idea of not just human animal hybrids,
but actually bestowing upon people animal like traits due to
(25:39):
this kind of cross hybridization thing, right, like a like
like terrific fins for swimming, or or the or yeah,
our the ability to do a vertical jump that's three
times higher than watching normally could and land it without
breaking all your bones or snapping attendant uh, bombardier beetle
(25:59):
burning acid chamber. Yeah, or just a dung beetle's ability
to push a weight far greater than its own, so
that way, when your car breaks down, you can just
move it yourself off the side of the road without
you know, scorpion tail, six extra eyes, sider web spinning capability.
Now we're getting to the quote I started this entire
(26:20):
episode off with, um, Yeah, so here's the deal guys.
First of all, scientists have pointed this out many times.
We don't know enough to do anything like that, Like
not even we don't even know what we don't know yet, right,
we don't the ignorance here is this enormous black cloud,
(26:41):
and we have the dimmest of candles shining just a
little bit of light. We don't know enough to be
able to dope a human with human genes, uh, let
alone using another animal. So you're saying like, we don't
know enough to go get some Olympic sprinters genes and
put that in somebody else and make them run fast exactly,
(27:01):
and that you would assume would be at least a
little bit easier than translating some animal characteristic into a human.
Going from one human to another has got to be
orders of magnitude simpler than that. I mean you're talking about, like,
how would you ever make sure that such an organism,
(27:22):
such a hybrid between a human and an animal, would
be able to survive, to be born, alive, to grow
and develop, and to develop those animal traits in a
way that is incorporated with the human traits. I mean,
these are all really complicated. The ideas that we just
don't have the answers too. We don't have the question.
(27:44):
We don't even know the questions to ask yet, right right,
And and it's you know, we were talking earlier about
examples of hybrids and nature, and and not even those
work out well all the time. I mean, even even
something is as simple as a as a African versus
a European elephant can can not douce viable offspring. So
so if you you know, with this in mind, we
(28:05):
don't we don't have any way of approaching the answer
to this question yet. I mean, we don't know, um,
if there are actual limits to what we can do, Like,
is there is there a hard limit to the amount
of genetic material that we can transplant from one organism
into another and have it actually make a meaningful change
in whatever, you know, whatever the result was supposed to be. Um,
(28:28):
we don't know. There might be a limit. There might
be something where we find out that, you know, I
really wanted to to have retractable clause or something, and
it turns out that no matter what I do, I
can't have that happen. It's not gonna there's there's just
a limit. And then cells are no longer viable. That's
a possibility, we don't know. Also, side note, um elephants
(28:51):
have been extinct in Europe for several thousand years, so
it's probably more like Asian elephants that were interbreed unsuccessfully. Yeah,
well I just wanted to throw that in there. Well yeah,
but that that just means the European elephants really aren't
going to be breeding with the African elephants for multiple reasons.
But also there's the question of ethics. Is it ethical
(29:12):
to do this, because we're not talking about, you know,
being bitten by a radioactive you know, wombat and suddenly
you have wombat powers. We're talking about creating an organism
from the cells up right, You're not you know, you're
not talking about having some sort of shot that you
get and now you're panther man um. It's it's gonna
(29:35):
be more like, well, let's try and create a bibit
that's got animal characteristics and human characteristics. That's a huge problem,
is that. I mean, because you can't ask that baby
that's that an Let's say it works, but then they decide, oh,
you know what, this was a bad idea. We can't
(29:56):
do that. Well, now you've got an organism that is
the only of a it's kind, and you know, we've
read plenty of science fiction that has warned us against
this very thing, like like it's completely unfair to the organism.
And you know how the the amount of a hubrists
(30:17):
shown by by the humans who are in charge of
it is ridiculous. So there is that ethical question like
where do you get to the point, like how can
you how can you come to a conclusion where this
is in fact something that should be done. Um, and
it may very well end up being moral on the
lines of for the sake of the future of the species,
(30:40):
we have to alter the species. If we were to
ever get to that point, maybe it would be a
viable conversation to have. I can't imagine what that stuff
circumstances would be. But that doesn't mean to I don't
mean to suggest that it couldn't possibly come about. What
if there what if there's such a change in climate,
for example, that we realize, well, if we want humans
to exist on another three generations, we have to change
(31:02):
what humans are. Yeah, yeah, but I mean it probably
wouldn't be you know, like I don't know, like dragon
arms for law zys, like it's not going to be
it's probably never going to be like that. I don't
see us gang too. I mean, not even considering the
fact that Dragonstone exists, right, I was just thinking of
Trug Door. He was a man. He did, he did.
(31:27):
But what if you're a human, it follows that a human, yeah,
do Trug The very first part of the Door was
a man. I mean, he was a dragon. He was
a dragon man. So there's some confusion already. We don't
know what what how it all started at any rate.
Here in the United States, a few states have actually
(31:48):
passed laws that formerly formerly that formally prohibit animal human
hybrid creation. UM. These laws generally positive that you know,
it's okay to implant most genes or or organs into animals,
and to implant little animal bits into humans where applicable
for the kind of medical research purposes that we've talked
(32:09):
about um during this episode. UM, but that it's not
okay to fertilize human eggs with animal sperm or vice versa. UM.
And furthermore, that's not okay to attempt to put a
human brain into an animal, right, because that's shady as hell, y'all. Well, yeah,
I mean like if you if you give an animal
the ability at all to think on a remotely human level,
(32:32):
that raises tons of ethical questions. Well, yeah, I mean,
as soon as you've put a human brain in an animal,
you've essentially created the salient factor about being human that
says we shouldn't experiment on, you know, humans. So now
by virtue of the fact that you've created a human
(32:53):
animal hybrid, the experiment is intrinsically unethical, right, Yeah. And
I think a lot of people might say that that
such laws seem like they are regulating something that doesn't
exist yet, that there's no, we don't have the science.
But at the point it's it's almost hilarious in fact
that anyone was so worried about this that they felt
(33:14):
like they needed to pass a law like right now,
because it's it's not it's not anywhere close to that.
But at the same time, it's almost like saying, do
we entrust that people come to these ethical decisions on
their own when they are knee deep in the science,
or do we get ahead of it and and regulate
or make a law now that that paints a distinct
(33:37):
line and says anything that's across this line is totally
tote's not okay, guys, Yeah, yeah, And and they're and
they are pretty sensible laws at least, I mean that
the laws aren't aren't in there going all like oh mg,
no mermaids, y'all. Yeah. Yeah. The last thing I would
point out is that we don't even know if let's
say that it is in fact possible that we figure
out how to do this where we can give uh
(34:00):
animal traits to people. Let's say that we have satisfied
whatever ethical concerns there may be. So now we've reached
some formidable, huge assumptions assumptions. But even then I would worry, like, um, okay,
let's say you can do it, and we decide we
feel good about doing it. Yeah, is it a good
(34:20):
idea for the organism? Right? Is it actually going to
work out in the long run? Right? One? Is the
organism viable? Is it going to live? If it is
going to live, what kind of life are we talking about?
On top of that, we don't have any idea of
how this could impact the overall population. So you know,
(34:40):
we were talking earlier about studying how viruses can pass
from animals to humans, that the viruses can com mutate
to the point where it infects one species and then
can slowly infect other species. I would imagine this kind
of hybridization would could potentially escalate that sort of thing.
So we don't know. I mean, obviously it's at a
(35:02):
level where it's beyond what we can really talk about realistically.
But it's again another concern, so not just ethical or possible,
but also is it safe. All of these questions to
me suggest that uh, if anything, if we ever get
to that point, we are decades away from that uh
(35:23):
maybe even beyond the standard forty in this case. Um.
But and again, it may turn out that other advances
in science and technology make a lot of these questions moot,
because perhaps we'll end up finding technology to enhance us
and give us animal like abilities, but without actually implanting
(35:44):
animal genetic information into us. We may rely on some
sort of technological uh construct, whether it's an exoskeleton or
some form of implant, that would allow us to do
those kind of things without genetically altering ourselves. UM. Don't
know the answer to that either. I just I think
it's more likely because there I think the ethical concerns
(36:06):
are a little easier to handle. I mean, there still
are some I mean, obviously there's some for doctors who
would perform such a thing, but I think it's a
little less murky than the animal questions. So uh. And
and also a lot of those things come under the
umbrella of enhancing us rather than altering us. There's a
(36:26):
there's a subtle difference. I think. Oh yeah, I think
that in general, when when there are lives to be saved,
human lives to be saved, um, we can we can
excuse an awful lot of things that um that that
might be a little bit on the tricky end at
the speaking, Um, you know, it's it's one of the
the greater good kind of things. Um. But I think
(36:49):
it's to all of our greater good that we wound
up talking about this today. So thank you so much
to Lee and Amy for that was a great question
that both of you sent in. Uh, so well done.
I assume there was no collusion between the two of you. Uh, Now,
that's fantastic, And we really had a fun time looking
into this very kind of tricky conversation to have in
(37:11):
many ways. But if you guys have any other questions
that relate to the future, something that you've always wondered
about and you would like to hear our take on it.
We'd love to hear from you. We love getting this
and we want to do more of these kind of
episodes in the future, but in order to do that,
we have to hear from you first, So right to us.
Our email address is fw thinking at how Stuff Works
(37:33):
dot com. Or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter,
or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are
fw thinking. Search for fw thinking at Facebook will pop
right up. Leave us a message, and we'll talk to
you again really soon. For more on this topic in
the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought
(38:05):
to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking pay and welcome to Forward Thinking the podcast
that looks at the feature says, as he strong listen Bud,
he's got radioactive blood. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bocaton,
(00:21):
and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be
tackling another listener request topic. It's a kind of creepy one.
I almost wish it was Halloween season to do this. Yeah,
it's actually not that creepy as it turns out, which
is kind of the point of this entire show. Basically,
you can stop listening spoilers. If you were expecting creepy,
We're largely going to be dismantling some of it is
(00:44):
totally creepy. Okay, read, let's let's read these listeners right well, Actually,
more than one listener has, in in different kind of ways,
asked us to cover this topic. And the first one
is from our listener, Amy, who actually wrote us a
really long, super interesting email full of excellent ideas. Eventually,
I want to get to all of Amy's ideas. But
(01:04):
the part of her email that's relevant was she asked us.
Have you ever done human animal hybridization? If they could
grow an ear on a mouse, poor mouse? She says parenthetically,
can they give humans the nasal capabilities of a dog?
What about the muscle strength of a gorilla? M O?
And it's worth asking, and we will we will attempt
(01:28):
to answer some questions in this, but we have another listener.
Uh yeah. Lee wrote in on Facebook and said, Hi, there,
I had an idea for an episode. I'm not sure
if you've covered genetic hybrids or not, but all the
superhero episodes got me thinking of this. Since I grew
up before why it was really a popular genre. I've
been going back and reading some of those books now,
including Maximum Ride, which has characters that are genetic hybrids,
(01:50):
humans spliced with a bird or a wolf. I know
they have created such genetic hybrids with some food and plants.
I think there was a tomato with fish genetics senet
or something, and just one it. If you could talk
about this technology in general and the possible future of it.
Is there something in the science that would prevent us
from using such technology with humans or animals or is
it purely an ethical concern? Well, guys, I mean Amy
(02:13):
and Lee, thank you for writing it, and this gave
us a great opportunity to look into this and discuss it.
It's a I mean, this is a hot topic issue
in many ways because while it's not like we're seeing,
you know, cheetah boy running around outside, but we are.
Science is reaching a level where we've got a lot
of questions that pop up around things like this. Yeah,
(02:35):
and it's not even that new of a concern. I
mean a lot of our discoveries about genetics and the
human genome and things like that have given us new anxieties.
But the fear of crossing species goes way way back.
It goes back into actually into mythology. You've got you know,
like folklore with the minotaur, it's you know, half human,
(02:56):
half man, and half man. I like, how I just
rolled right through that too. I was like, yeah, half human,
half man, that's terrible. You got me. I was trying
to slip a fully human past on you. As a minotaur.
This is an es School act with the head of
a rabbit and the body of a different rabbit. Now
(03:17):
the minotaur, of course, with the head of a bull
and the body of a man and all that. All
the terrifying stuff that comes with that. But even more recently,
but also less recently, you had H. G. Wells the
Island of Dr Moreau, right, which case you're talking about
surgery in order to alter animals to be more human
like and then conditioning them in order to be human right, Well,
(03:41):
had he didn't know anything about genetics, nobody did yet,
but he he already had this idea and was feeling
a bit cautious about it. Oh yeah, yeah, Well, I
mean that was also an anxiety I would imagine based
on the surgeries of the day that were often performed
at open galleries because you had to make your own fun,
right right. Uh. And there was no TV back then,
(04:02):
so and we did talk an awful lot about that
crossing of boundaries in our Future of Monsters episode Oh yeah,
which we did last October with Robert Lamb. Yeah. Yeah.
We even talked about it earlier in our September episode
GMOs Food and fud or If Your Uncertainty and Doubt,
where we talked about how and and Lee alluded to this,
(04:23):
the idea of the transmit, transplanting genes from one organism
into another in order. Yeah, in this case, the fish
jeens to tomatoes. The idea there, I believe was to
make them more resistant to frost, yeah, cold weather. But uh,
some people said, oh, does this mean that I'm going
to get scales on my tomato or it's gonna taste
(04:44):
fishy or smell fish right, which again, that was if
you if you were curious about that, then you should
definitely go and listen to both of those episodes because
they kind of lay some groundwork. But we're going to
continue that conversation and talk specifically about incorporating genetic material
of animals and humans together. Yeah, okay, So one of
(05:07):
the first things I think we should do is a
little bit of vocabulary clean up because the word that
always gets used in in popular talk about mixing species
is hybrid or hybridization. Now, in a technical sense, a
hybrid is something specific, and a lot of the times
(05:27):
when people are talking about certain kinds of animal human hybrids,
they're not actually talking about hybrids. In the technical sense,
a hybrid would mean you've crossed germ cells like a
sperm in an egg and created a true genetic mix
of two different parent species, and so the offspring species
would have the would have a mix of the two
(05:50):
parent species DNA in every cell of its body, whereas
a lot of times what people are actually talking about
or what we would call chimeras. Yeah, chimera is also
uh interesting organism. This is one that has at least
four parents cells instead of the normal two and has
(06:12):
at least two different sets of DNA as a result
of this. Right, so you could be a chimera. That's
you know, you are Jonathan Strickland, a human of human species,
but some part of your body has been supplemented with
with cells or genetic material from another species. Okay, so
there we've established the basics. But the question that's at
(06:35):
hand is mixing of humans and other animals in nature
or any other organisms. Has anybody actually already done this
and have and if they've done it, have they done
it in ways that we should be concerned about? Um,
they totally done it. Yeah, the answer to your first
question is yes, whether you want to be concerned about
(06:57):
it is really a personal issue that we should think on,
which you know, we're not saying it's right or wrong
to be concerned or not concerned, merely that it is
a personal, you know decision you're gonna come to, well, sure. Sure,
and we can tell you about some of the ways
that this has been done and perhaps you can begin
formulating that opinion. Yeah. And so when it comes to
(07:17):
mixing or or transplanting genetic material from one organism into another,
we've done a lot more, i would say, of transplanting
human genetic material into animal cells than the other way around. Yeah,
so it's it's more of creating a human animal hybrid
in a cellular sense, uh, with the human material going
(07:39):
into the animal cells. Um. For for various reasons, and
a lot of this has been for two major areas
of research. One is biology just simply learning more about
biological processes, and the other is being able to advance medicine.
And uh, it turns out that there are really good
reasons to pursue both of these in order for us
(08:02):
to get a better understanding and also just more effective
medical treatments for all sorts of stuff. Okay, well let's
hear an example, all right. So, um, you know, when
a pharmaceutical company is developing drugs and they need to
start testing it on organisms, obviously they don't jump straight
to humans, right. We talked about this in a previous podcast.
I'm pretty sure, yeah, yeah, about the method that that
(08:25):
new drugs need to go through before they ever reach
human testing, right. I think we were probably talking about
this with respect to the idea of the organ on
a chip. Yes, Like, can you you create a system
that allows testing of drugs on simulated human organs that
doesn't necessitate testing of animals or live human subjects? Right,
So the testing of animals is a very I mean,
(08:49):
that's that's the accepted way of testing drugs before moving
on to human trials, and to get them safer before
they move on to those human trials. Right. You're learning
exactly why dosages maybe toxic. You're learning whether they're actually
efficacious or not, what kind of side effects they might have.
But you know, an animal isn't exactly like a human, right,
(09:11):
even the animals that we tend to use, Like we
talked about how close mice are as far as you
know when we're testing drugs, Like, well, mice react largely
the way humans do. That's not entirely true. They have
very different cellular makeup for certain organs. So, for example,
a little mouse liver. Let's say you want to create
(09:32):
a drug that you realize it's going to potentially have
an effect upon the liver. If if that effect arises
within a mouse's liver, that may or may not be
indicative that the same day could happen to a human.
So one of the things we've seen, as we've seen
scientists UH put human liver liver cells into mouse test
(09:54):
subjects and try to find out if in fact they
could create uh essentially a liver in a mouse that
is human tissue as opposed to mouse tissue, to thus
test these drugs and see what the effect would be
on a human liver. UM Sheep have actually been used
for the same purpose, and most research that involves putting
(10:16):
human genes into animals cells is along these improved animal
testing research lines. Um uh mice have also been given
humanized immune systems an attempt to give us new test
subjects for HIV vaccines. UM there's tinkers at the University
of Michigan that gave a mouse a human anal sphincter
(10:36):
to test treatments for incontinence. What. Yeah, that's science. That's
something that's science that happened. So here's one that is more.
This one certainly kind of skirts the line from some
people's perspective as far as ethics are concerned, this is
this is going to be part of this discussion. Is
(10:56):
this idea of giving animals human like intelligence, if that
were ever a possibility, would that be ethical? And I'm
not suggesting that that's what the team I'm about to
talk about did, but it starts to approach that line.
So there was an experiment at the universities of Wisconsin
and Rochester to separate universities. Obviously, that involved using a
(11:20):
toxin to destroy the hippocampus in test mice. That's the
part of the brain that's associated with memory. So they
would train the mice to, say, run a maze, and
the mice would learn how to run a maze. Then
they would use this toxin that essentially destroyed the hippocampus,
so the mice could no longer remember how to run
that mace. They couldn't do it anymore. Then they transplant
(11:42):
cells from human embryos into the mice, which essentially repaired
the damage in their neuron cells, and they regain their
cognitive functions and we're able to run the maze again. Yeah.
The the hippocampus is one of the few parts of
the human brain that does regenerate. Um, I mean and
not like wolver Raine regenerates, but but but the way
that your skin might regenerate. Wow. Yeah. Um. Other than brains,
(12:07):
there are some things that humans produce that we would
that it would be kind of cool and convenient if
animals could produce for us, um, like cars, like milk.
M Some researchers in China took jeans that create human
milk proteins and swapped them first inten mice is a
kind of test run, and then into goats, and these
goats can now produce quantities of humanized milk. So this
(12:31):
experiment involved milking mice to get human milk. Yeah, it's
good on a resume. Uh. You know, my first reaction
to this is one of like, this is where we
get into the creepy thing. Just one of those initial reactions.
And by that I mean personally, that's my reaction. I
don't mean to suggest everybody reacts that way. But then
(12:53):
it leads me on to think, wait a minute, I
drink other animals milk all the time. I am a
big milk consumer. I like cheese as well, and I
like goat cheese, and I eat so much cheese. Y'all.
You know, it's just one of those things where I
realized it would be weird if it was human goat cheese. Yes,
(13:13):
it would be weird. It would be more weird would
technically would just be human cheese that you got from
a goat. This, this whole thing is kind of odd.
At the same time, however, I can definitely see where
it could be a benefit. You know, it's not It's
not necessarily the most healthy thing in the world for say,
(13:36):
an infant to be switched to another animal's milk right away. Sure,
and and yeah, and even formulas don't really make up
the difference of all of the benefits of human milk, right, So,
I mean, I totally see where this is going. It's
just it's interesting that that was the first thing on
this list that had me get that kind of reaction. Yeah,
(13:58):
but you know, rationally, again, I I get around that
pretty quickly, But there is that weird emotional reaction that
I can't necessarily explain. Another important use for this kind
of approaches is the cultivation of stem cells. Now, stem
cells are very important. We've talked about those before. Stem
cells have the potential to turn into other types of cells. Right,
(14:20):
you've got potent stem cells. Those are the that the
golden goose transformers. Those are the ones that have the
potential to be any type of tissue. Now, a lot
of stem cells have specific types of tissue they're limited
to they can only develop into certain kinds. But at
any rate, cultivating them has been a controversial issue for
(14:41):
many years, and there we've seen a lot of advances
in science to allow doctors and scientists researchers get stem
cells in innovative ways. Uh So, scientists in the UK
used cow egg cells that they kind of scooped out
the genetic material. They put in the human genetic material
from skin cells. They stimulated those cells and that cause
(15:02):
them to divide and create stem cells, which they then harvested.
Rabbit eggs have been used for the same thing, actually,
or rabbit egg cells, I should say, because otherwise we're
talking about the Cadberry bunny, which is a different issue. However,
if you want to send us Cadbury eggs, feel free.
We will do so much research about how tasty they are.
(15:23):
I will. I will research until I can't feel my
right arm. So who are you too? You eat candy eggs?
Cadbury eggs are amazing. I'm gonna have to show you
a video when this don't know what I'm going to
show you a video when this is all over of
a guy who makes Cadbury eggs. Benedict's. Is that on
(15:48):
Epic meal Time? No, it's on Andy Candy. It's a
free plug for Andy Candy. There's Uh. There's another category
of research that can really only be carried out with
hybrid cells like this. UM. For for example, the Mayo
Clinic in Minnesota gave pigs some human blood, like human
(16:09):
blood pumps through their veins. Um. Not like they became
vampire pigs. No, not that I'm aware of um. Uh
And and and having this human blood in the pigs system,
let's researchers look at how viruses pass from animal cells
to human cells. Very important work. Yes, yeah, we have
talked about that before on this show. I believe in
(16:31):
terms of the future, yes, yes. And hybrids can can
also possibly help us gain a better understanding of cells.
Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, which is generally important for medical
research because it's one of those tiny things that that
we can't really get that good of a look at
by just looking at normal old human cells. For example,
(16:54):
in human pig hybrid cells created at the University of Warwick,
UM Higgs egg cell will be implanted with a human
cell nucleus. Okay, so so like so like scoop out
the pig nucleus, put in a human nucleus UM, and
then watching the cells grow UM. Based on that that
large amount of genetic information from the human nucleus, and
(17:18):
though we little bits of genetic information from the mitochondria
that are still pig mitochondria UM will throw each DNA
types rolls into more of a stark contrast than we
would normally see from from regular cells UM, because you know,
the different cellular structures affect the whole cells. You know,
(17:39):
complete growth right so UM. So hypothetically watching and learning
from these interactions could lead to better research into therapies
for genetic defects and stuff like Alzheimer's. That's really interesting.
I never considered that, but it makes so much sense
when you've got you know, we talk about complex systems
all the time on this show, whether it's biological system
or a climate system, and the idea of being able
(18:02):
to kind of force a system where there is this
stark contrast where you can see those reactions more clearly
because there's this delineation due to the fact that you're
talking about two different species. Genetic information is a really
novel approach that I honestly had never heard of until
until just now. Yeah, using this method be a way
(18:24):
to isolate variables, right right. Um. Then there's also the
crazy art side of things, of course. Um there's what yes,
crazy art hybrids for crazy art. Um, there's Dr Moreau
as an artist. A guy named Eduardo cock Um worked
together with a plant biologist by the name of Neil
(18:46):
Olswisky to put a little bit of of Eduardo's genetic
material into a pink petunia. It doesn't do anything other
than grow pretty much normally like a petunia would. Um,
but he does call it a plant amole. Why wouldn't you.
That's pretty cool. So this is this is swamp thing
(19:09):
they made swamp thing or or it's man thing, one
of the two. It could be either one. It's and
it was. It was a little bit of his amino
globin DNA, So it's it's part of it's sort of
clever because it's it's uh, you know, part of your
DNA that tells your body which cells are yours and
which cells are something else's, And so by incorporating them
(19:30):
into something else that was kind of cute. What if
it turns out this bowl of flowers is in fact
the same character from Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy that thinks,
oh no, not again before breaking on the surface of
the earth, Dear, What if these flowers are sentient and
have a soul, thus saying oh no, not again when falling,
(19:52):
he's doomed his genetic material to a terrible fate. Yeah. Actually,
I already know the answer to that, because there's a
character in the Hitchhecker's Guide series gets reincarnated over and
over again and is constantly killed by Arthur Dint And
it's not No, it's not EDWARDO. Well, okay, So we've
talked about putting human genetic material into animal cells, and
(20:13):
you know, I think a lot of people would be
on board with that basically if it's done for a
good cause, if it's done for useful research that can
save lives or teach us more about how the body
works and things like that. But what about going the
opposite direction, So bringing animal material into a human organism. Yeah, well,
we've done some of that. It's not a genetic transplant,
(20:36):
but we've seen zeno transplant experiments. That's where you take
an animal organ and transplant into a human person. You
mean like Dr Brinkley, Dr Brinkley. Have you not read
about Dr I haven't read about Dr Brinkley's gonna have
to explain. Dr Brinkley was a guy who came up
with the popular goat testical cure, where he would put
goat gonads into men's bodies to increase their virility. That's
(21:00):
not what I was thinking, but that work out for
people not so great in the end. Yeah. I just
looked it up and uh, and his full name was
John Romulus Brinkley. He later changed the Romulus to Richard
And I can't imagine why I was hoping we changed
it to James Tiberius Brinkley. I was. I was hoping
he would go with John Vulcan Brinkley. So we have
(21:22):
a very similar joke in mind. But I think he's
better Joe. Yeah. Well, at any rate. Uh, you know,
the xeno transplants really are more like things like taking
a baboon heart or a pig heart and transplanting it
into a human patient, and I guess you could say
(21:43):
it's been met with limited success. Really, the transplanting another
species organ into a human very frequently results in the
human body rejecting that organ. Yeah, well, I mean transplanting
a human organ into another human can frequently and in
rejection of the and and smaller pieces I think have
(22:04):
found more success. I think I've read about pig heart
valves to bypass surgery, things like that. Also, joints being
joint replacement surgery. Sometimes the joints are taken from animals,
and that has seen more success. But yes, when you
start getting into complicated tissues like kidney or heart, then
(22:25):
the chance for rejection gets a lot higher. Yeah, that
would just be my non expert intuition would be that
the more the tissue is just a sort of basic
mechanical object, the better it would do. And and the
more it's like a complex thing, it seems like that
would be more likely to not work out. Yeah, anything
that's tied to any kind of hormones or proteins or
(22:48):
any of those we little bits that fly around and
muck all of our stuff. They call the decisions on
our behalf without us knowing about it. Put some dead
leaves under your skin, and yeah, I just shove it
in there. It's fine, Like suddenly it became a Tim
Burton movie. Uh. Well, the interesting thing here to me,
I mean, this is all interesting, but this also leads
(23:08):
to the fact that there are doctors and scientists who
are trying to work with animals to develop more human
like organs, you know, actually cultivating human like organs in
animals for the purposes of transplanting those into actual human patients.
So this would combine both of the things we just
talked about. So it would be like making putting genetic
(23:30):
material from a human into an animal to make the
animal grow something that's human that you can take out
of the animal and put into a human exactly. It
would be the idea of you've got a human heart,
but you've got your human heart from a pig, so
kind of like getting your human milk from a goat.
I guess, uh, but you know that's that's the possible
future that we have with this. Now. Granted, this is
(23:51):
one element one one line of research. We've talked a
lot in other episodes about other lines of research that
could end up making this particular or line obsolete. So,
for example, if we get to a point where we
can reliably produce three D printed organs based upon the
patient's own biological information, that's obviously preferable and safer and uh,
(24:14):
you know, more cuddly for the poor pig. Right, you
don't have you don't have the ethical questions about is
this really the right thing to do? You know, altering
animals in order to benefit humans. We've done that throughout
the entire history of our species is not new with genetics.
We've been doing that forever. It's just now we're able
to do it on a level that some people find
(24:36):
disturbing questionable. Yeah. Uh so obviously though, like you were saying, Lauren, Yeah,
going with this other approach would mean that you don't
have to put those animals in harm's way, You don't
have to alter them in any way. You don't have
the tricksy question of whether it's okay to eat the
pig after the human heart has been transplanted out. Wow,
I didn't even think about that, But then I don't
eat mammals, so, uh that one, that one did not
(24:58):
even occur to me. That's excellent point. Uh, you know
this is still the three D printed organs is a
wonderful future that we hope we get to, but there
there may be many many years before that's viable, which
is a reason why this other line of research is
in fact necessary. I mean, we are talking about human
(25:19):
lives in the balance here. So that being said, let's
talk a little bit more about what are our listeners
brought up this idea of not just human animal hybrids,
but actually bestowing upon people animal like traits due to
(25:39):
this kind of cross hybridization thing, right, like a like
like terrific fins for swimming, or or the or yeah,
our the ability to do a vertical jump that's three
times higher than watching normally could and land it without
breaking all your bones or snapping attendant uh, bombardier beetle
(25:59):
burning acid chamber. Yeah, or just a dung beetle's ability
to push a weight far greater than its own, so
that way, when your car breaks down, you can just
move it yourself off the side of the road without
you know, scorpion tail, six extra eyes, sider web spinning capability.
Now we're getting to the quote I started this entire
(26:20):
episode off with, um, Yeah, so here's the deal guys.
First of all, scientists have pointed this out many times.
We don't know enough to do anything like that, Like
not even we don't even know what we don't know yet, right,
we don't the ignorance here is this enormous black cloud,
(26:41):
and we have the dimmest of candles shining just a
little bit of light. We don't know enough to be
able to dope a human with human genes, uh, let
alone using another animal. So you're saying like, we don't
know enough to go get some Olympic sprinters genes and
put that in somebody else and make them run fast exactly,
(27:01):
and that you would assume would be at least a
little bit easier than translating some animal characteristic into a human.
Going from one human to another has got to be
orders of magnitude simpler than that. I mean you're talking about, like,
how would you ever make sure that such an organism,
(27:22):
such a hybrid between a human and an animal, would
be able to survive, to be born, alive, to grow
and develop, and to develop those animal traits in a
way that is incorporated with the human traits. I mean,
these are all really complicated. The ideas that we just
don't have the answers too. We don't have the question.
(27:44):
We don't even know the questions to ask yet, right right,
And and it's you know, we were talking earlier about
examples of hybrids and nature, and and not even those
work out well all the time. I mean, even even
something is as simple as a as a African versus
a European elephant can can not douce viable offspring. So
so if you you know, with this in mind, we
(28:05):
don't we don't have any way of approaching the answer
to this question yet. I mean, we don't know, um,
if there are actual limits to what we can do, Like,
is there is there a hard limit to the amount
of genetic material that we can transplant from one organism
into another and have it actually make a meaningful change
in whatever, you know, whatever the result was supposed to be. Um,
(28:28):
we don't know. There might be a limit. There might
be something where we find out that, you know, I
really wanted to to have retractable clause or something, and
it turns out that no matter what I do, I
can't have that happen. It's not gonna there's there's just
a limit. And then cells are no longer viable. That's
a possibility, we don't know. Also, side note, um elephants
(28:51):
have been extinct in Europe for several thousand years, so
it's probably more like Asian elephants that were interbreed unsuccessfully. Yeah,
well I just wanted to throw that in there. Well yeah,
but that that just means the European elephants really aren't
going to be breeding with the African elephants for multiple reasons.
But also there's the question of ethics. Is it ethical
(29:12):
to do this, because we're not talking about, you know,
being bitten by a radioactive you know, wombat and suddenly
you have wombat powers. We're talking about creating an organism
from the cells up right, You're not you know, you're
not talking about having some sort of shot that you
get and now you're panther man um. It's it's gonna
(29:35):
be more like, well, let's try and create a bibit
that's got animal characteristics and human characteristics. That's a huge problem,
is that. I mean, because you can't ask that baby
that's that an Let's say it works, but then they decide, oh,
you know what, this was a bad idea. We can't
(29:56):
do that. Well, now you've got an organism that is
the only of a it's kind, and you know, we've
read plenty of science fiction that has warned us against
this very thing, like like it's completely unfair to the organism.
And you know how the the amount of a hubrists
(30:17):
shown by by the humans who are in charge of
it is ridiculous. So there is that ethical question like
where do you get to the point, like how can
you how can you come to a conclusion where this
is in fact something that should be done. Um, and
it may very well end up being moral on the
lines of for the sake of the future of the species,
(30:40):
we have to alter the species. If we were to
ever get to that point, maybe it would be a
viable conversation to have. I can't imagine what that stuff
circumstances would be. But that doesn't mean to I don't
mean to suggest that it couldn't possibly come about. What
if there what if there's such a change in climate,
for example, that we realize, well, if we want humans
to exist on another three generations, we have to change
(31:02):
what humans are. Yeah, yeah, but I mean it probably
wouldn't be you know, like I don't know, like dragon
arms for law zys, like it's not going to be
it's probably never going to be like that. I don't
see us gang too. I mean, not even considering the
fact that Dragonstone exists, right, I was just thinking of
Trug Door. He was a man. He did, he did.
(31:27):
But what if you're a human, it follows that a human, yeah,
do Trug The very first part of the Door was
a man. I mean, he was a dragon. He was
a dragon man. So there's some confusion already. We don't
know what what how it all started at any rate.
Here in the United States, a few states have actually
(31:48):
passed laws that formerly formerly that formally prohibit animal human
hybrid creation. UM. These laws generally positive that you know,
it's okay to implant most genes or or organs into animals,
and to implant little animal bits into humans where applicable
for the kind of medical research purposes that we've talked
(32:09):
about um during this episode. UM, but that it's not
okay to fertilize human eggs with animal sperm or vice versa. UM.
And furthermore, that's not okay to attempt to put a
human brain into an animal, right, because that's shady as hell, y'all. Well, yeah,
I mean like if you if you give an animal
the ability at all to think on a remotely human level,
(32:32):
that raises tons of ethical questions. Well, yeah, I mean,
as soon as you've put a human brain in an animal,
you've essentially created the salient factor about being human that
says we shouldn't experiment on, you know, humans. So now
by virtue of the fact that you've created a human
(32:53):
animal hybrid, the experiment is intrinsically unethical, right, Yeah. And
I think a lot of people might say that that
such laws seem like they are regulating something that doesn't
exist yet, that there's no, we don't have the science.
But at the point it's it's almost hilarious in fact
that anyone was so worried about this that they felt
(33:14):
like they needed to pass a law like right now,
because it's it's not it's not anywhere close to that.
But at the same time, it's almost like saying, do
we entrust that people come to these ethical decisions on
their own when they are knee deep in the science,
or do we get ahead of it and and regulate
or make a law now that that paints a distinct
(33:37):
line and says anything that's across this line is totally
tote's not okay, guys, Yeah, yeah, And and they're and
they are pretty sensible laws at least, I mean that
the laws aren't aren't in there going all like oh mg,
no mermaids, y'all. Yeah. Yeah. The last thing I would
point out is that we don't even know if let's
say that it is in fact possible that we figure
out how to do this where we can give uh
(34:00):
animal traits to people. Let's say that we have satisfied
whatever ethical concerns there may be. So now we've reached
some formidable, huge assumptions assumptions. But even then I would worry, like, um, okay,
let's say you can do it, and we decide we
feel good about doing it. Yeah, is it a good
(34:20):
idea for the organism? Right? Is it actually going to
work out in the long run? Right? One? Is the
organism viable? Is it going to live? If it is
going to live, what kind of life are we talking about?
On top of that, we don't have any idea of
how this could impact the overall population. So you know,
(34:40):
we were talking earlier about studying how viruses can pass
from animals to humans, that the viruses can com mutate
to the point where it infects one species and then
can slowly infect other species. I would imagine this kind
of hybridization would could potentially escalate that sort of thing.
So we don't know. I mean, obviously it's at a
(35:02):
level where it's beyond what we can really talk about realistically.
But it's again another concern, so not just ethical or possible,
but also is it safe. All of these questions to
me suggest that uh, if anything, if we ever get
to that point, we are decades away from that uh
(35:23):
maybe even beyond the standard forty in this case. Um.
But and again, it may turn out that other advances
in science and technology make a lot of these questions moot,
because perhaps we'll end up finding technology to enhance us
and give us animal like abilities, but without actually implanting
(35:44):
animal genetic information into us. We may rely on some
sort of technological uh construct, whether it's an exoskeleton or
some form of implant, that would allow us to do
those kind of things without genetically altering ourselves. UM. Don't
know the answer to that either. I just I think
it's more likely because there I think the ethical concerns
(36:06):
are a little easier to handle. I mean, there still
are some I mean, obviously there's some for doctors who
would perform such a thing, but I think it's a
little less murky than the animal questions. So uh. And
and also a lot of those things come under the
umbrella of enhancing us rather than altering us. There's a
(36:26):
there's a subtle difference. I think. Oh yeah, I think
that in general, when when there are lives to be saved,
human lives to be saved, um, we can we can
excuse an awful lot of things that um that that
might be a little bit on the tricky end at
the speaking, Um, you know, it's it's one of the
the greater good kind of things. Um. But I think
(36:49):
it's to all of our greater good that we wound
up talking about this today. So thank you so much
to Lee and Amy for that was a great question
that both of you sent in. Uh, so well done.
I assume there was no collusion between the two of you. Uh, Now,
that's fantastic, And we really had a fun time looking
into this very kind of tricky conversation to have in
(37:11):
many ways. But if you guys have any other questions
that relate to the future, something that you've always wondered
about and you would like to hear our take on it.
We'd love to hear from you. We love getting this
and we want to do more of these kind of
episodes in the future, but in order to do that,
we have to hear from you first, So right to us.
Our email address is fw thinking at how Stuff Works
(37:33):
dot com. Or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter,
or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are
fw thinking. Search for fw thinking at Facebook will pop
right up. Leave us a message, and we'll talk to
you again really soon. For more on this topic in
the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought
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