IngentaConnect Approaching Religious Guidelines for Chimera Policymaking

Abstract:

Recent developments in the use of cow egg cells to clone human somatic cells, and the grafting by researchers at several universities of human neurons into mice, bring the notion of the chimera, a mixture of several living organisms, from myth into reality. In his article “Cross-Species Chimeras: Exploring a Possible Christian Perspective,” Neville Cobbe considers the religious arguments overlying the creation of human-nonhuman chimeras. In my commentary I focus on the distinction between germline- and tissue transplant-related chimeric techniques implicit in Cobbe's essay and argue that the former poses more serious moral difficulties than the latter if the chimeric product is brought to term. The substantive view of the imago Dei, or image of God, serves as a scaffold by which to judge the permissibility of chimera creation using stem cell and other tissue implants. While useful for judging the rights of such artificially generated beings, I argue that specific criteria such as proportion of tissue uptake, mental capacity, and adherence with the organism's telos are more appropriately considered within a composite image of the living being reflecting its unique integrality. Human co-creativity with the Divine will inevitably prompt attempts to generate medically useful chimeras. Religious dialogue, combined with the categories of religious moral argument appearing in Cobbe's essay, will help to establish the outline of feasible policy guidelines addressing the complexities inherent in the creation of chimeras.

Keywords: chimeras; cloning; dialogue; ethics; gene therapy; genetics; imago Dei (image of God); morals; ontology; policy; religion; religion and medicine; reproduction; stem cells; transplantation; wholeness; xenotransplantation

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9744.2007.00855.x

Affiliations: 1: Genomics research area specialist and Dissemination Activities Director in the Center for Public Health and Community Genomics, University of Michigan, 2675 CBPH, SPH-I Tower, 109 S. Observatory, Ann Arbor, MI 48109;, Email: mod@umich.edu.

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