I, Human?

https://singularityhub.com/2020/01/08/the-top-biotech-trends-well-be-watching-in-2020/

Here’s an ethical challenge and also a great potential story.  Imagine a hybrid born with unexpected human characteristics.. .now what?  Euthanasia? Raise it as a lab animal even though it is disturbingly human?  Try to fit it into a human family like those chimps in 1970’s experiments?

In 2019 Japan removed restrictions from experimentation involving human animal hybrid embyos.  You don’t hear much about it today but I took a look just to see. Here are some excerpts from the report I read:

> The more ethically-challenged idea is to grow human organs directly inside other animals—in other words, engineer human-animal hybrid embryos and bring them to term. This approach marries two ethically uncomfortable technologies, germline editing and hybrids, into one solution that has many wondering if these engineered animals may somehow receive a dose of “humanness” by accident during development. What if, for example, human donor cells end up migrating to the hybrid animal’s brain?

Nevertheless, this year scientists at the University of Tokyo are planning to grow human tissue in rodent and pig embryos and transplant those hybrids into surrogates for further development. For now, bringing the embryos to term is completely out of the question. But the line between humans and other animals will only be further blurred in 2020, and scientists have begun debating a new label, “substantially human,” for living organisms that are mainly human in characteristics—but not completely so. <

So stop worrying about cyborgs and start worrying about “substantially human” creatures.

Reference note from Goodreads.com. >Asimov wrote the short story "The Ugly Little Boy" in 1958. But there is much more to the story of the little Neanderthal boy plucked out of time and transferred to the 21st century. Now, Robert Silverberg--in this second collaboration with Asimov--has made this sf classic into an engrossing novel-length tale.<