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The professed goal of Belmonte and co.’s experiments is to grow human organs and tissue inside of animals for use in transplants new hearts for when our own explode.Ĭhimeras are a transhumanist fantasy, and such fantasies are increasingly popular among the wealthy and tightly woven into Silicon Valley ideology. We’re not growing chimeras because we’d like to die sooner, but rather because we wish to live forever. But the second best for you – is quickly to die.” Needless to say, we haven’t listened to Silenus. When he finally caught him, Midas asked him what men should most desire and, after much cajoling, was told, “Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to tell you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is beyond your reach forever: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche (who happens to be, along with Schopenhauer, Belmonte the geneticist’s favourite philosopher) tells a story from a fragment of Aristotle’s lost text Eudemus, as recounted by Plutarch, about King Midas hunting a satyr named Silenus in the woods. They were, contrary to popular portrayal, sad country clowns, wise but miserable fellows that only drank and danced and pleasured themselves continuously as ways of leaving their reason and consciousness behind. Though he never became a goat, he did become something more like a satyr, those half-goat, half-man woodland spirits and companions of Dionysus from classical mythology.

What happens if the stem cells escape and form human neurons in the brain of the animal? Would it have consciousness? “I don’t think I really had a moment of, ‘Ah, yes, freedom.’” “It was cold and wet and terrifying, going down steep Alpine slopes with loads of excited goats”, he said. Only, as things turned out, Thwaites could not escape the prison of the human mind any better than the rest of us. For him, becoming an animal was supposed to offer a respite from the existential terror of life. That summer, he’d tried to experience how it would feel to turn oneself into a goat by constructing an artificial rumen (the first ̑ of a goat’s four stomachs) for digesting grass, using transcranial magnetic stimulation to momentarily disrupt the part of his brain related to speech production, and building a prosthetic body and living with a Swiss goatherd in the Alps, which did sound rather blissful, for a few days.

#Human chimera person full#

In 2016, I interviewed artist Thomas Thwaites in his live-work loft space full of goat skeletons by London’s Borough Market. Today, when we’re more interested in ourselves, we send pieces of monkeys down into our genetic code. In the late 1940s and 50s, when we were dreaming of exploring the universe and understanding all its mysteries, we sent monkeys into space.

#Human chimera person how to#

Recently however scientists have discovered how to engineer such chimeras by collaging human stem cells into animal embryos, successfully constructing pig-human embryos at the Salk Institute in 2017, sheep-human embryos at the University of California in 2018, and now monkey-human embryos. In science, it’s a biological anomaly in which a person (or any organism) contains two or more people within themselves, in the sense that they contain two or more sets of DNA capable of forming different individuals.

In mythology, a chimera is a monster made of two or more different animals. Going back further, Classical Roman and Greek poetry and art was full of stories of people transforming into animals, often with unfortunate results, but sometimes wonderful ones. Crossing a monkey with a person doesn’t sound so Catholic to me, although Saint Peter Damian did often speak, in the 11th century, about an Italian lady who’d allegedly had a child with an ape, and may well have discussed the matter with Pope Alexander II. A couple weeks ago, El País reported that Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Southern California, has been growing monkey-human embryos somewhere in China in collaboration with scientists from Murcia Catholic University, Spain.