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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
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Category: Culture
Posted on: November 15, 2006 1:48 PM, by Jonah Lehrer
In the 1920s, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin sent an animal-breeding expert to Africa in hopes of creating an army of half-man, half-monkey soldiers. Attempts both to inseminate women with monkey sperm and impregnate female chimpanzees with human sperm failed.
That's from Slate. Read more about Stalin's horrifying attempts at cross-breeding here. I don't even think Kim Jong Il would do something that evil: Stalin really was one-of-a-kind.
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Actually, I think Kim Jong Il would very well do something like that if he thought he could get away with it easy enough. I mean this is the same guy who is third behind Mao and Stalin for most people starved to death. And there's also his forcable remove of all triplets into orphanges.
According to a March 2003 story in the Herald Sun:
All triplets in North Korea are being forcibly removed from parents after their birth and dumped in bleak orphanages. The policy is carried out on the orders of Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-il, who has an irrational belief that a triplet could one day topple his regime.
I have to disagree here. Surely you do not think trying to intrebreed horses and donkeys is evil, do you? Or lions and tigers? Or any of the myriads of other halfbreeds that humans have attempted to create? Well then, why is this one evil?
Oh, but humans are umm... umm... Intelligent? Superiour? Made by God himself who forbade us to meddle with ourselves?
I don't think so.
I, for one, am glad that these experiments have been tried. Now we know that it doesn't work. We have thus gained knowledge, and gaining knowledge is always good.
(Of course, the experimenters should have treated those that were involved in the experiment (especially the human females) in a humane way, wich they might not have done).
Well, I've known that Stalin is responsible for millions of people died by malnutriution and in concentration camps (called "Gulag"). Stalin being evil isn't quite new, actually.
Unlike "An evil one?", I think it's nasty to inbreed human and apes. Not for the reasons you told. Can it be "humane" to be inseminated with monkey sperm? In case the experiment doesn't fail: What happens to the creature born and to the mother? There is a border for research, defined by responsibility and ethic, not by religion.
Gotta agree with Martin here. Our research questions must absolutely be constrained by our ethics. To bust out the requisite Nazi example: the Nazi's conducted all sorts of grotesque research that resulted in the increase of "scientific" knowledge. That doesn't make the research any less repugnant or wrong or evil. Knowledge is a means to an end, not a panacea in and of itself.
"Can it be "humane" to be inseminated with monkey sperm?"
Yes.
"In case the experiment doesn't fail: What happens to the creature born and to the mother?"
I suppose the mother (and father?) should raise the half-monkey to the best of their abilities. (obviousely under constant medical/scientific surveillance).
"Knowledge is a means to an end, not a panacea in and of itself"
I don't think so. Did maxwell think of all the good things electromagnetism has brought us? Did Hertz? Did Einstain think of the present-day applications of relativity? Did Mendel think of the present-day uses for genetics? No, they were all just looking for knowledge. Thus, knowledge is not a means to an end, rather, the ends for wich the knowledge is a means are only found after the knowledge is discovered.
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Comments (6)
Holy Shit. Saruman from The Lord of The Rings in real life!
Posted by: writerdd | November 15, 2006 3:47 PM