According to the BBC, British scientists have applied for permission to create a cow-human embryo. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6121280.stm.

Wow, what a fantastically useful thing that would be.

In case you, like me, are wondering WHY ON EARTH? The reason is apparently for stem cell research to cure every known worrying disease…..

I have serious doubts about this sort of thing. The only positive thing you could say is that it might spare a few animals from the joys of animal tests. Otherwise, it seems so comically Frankenstein-like as to give even Mary Shelley nightmares.

We seem to have no concern for future generations in terms of considering the potential impacts of genetic research. Can anyone guarantee that unknown future side effects won’t result from this? Clearly not. No one seems to have realised that feeding dead cows to other cows could cause any problems to cows, let alone humans, until we found out about mad cow disease.

However, surely the average person, let alone bigoted vegetarians like me would have said “No, cannibalism is probably not safe” if there had been any public input on the issue of feeding the bodies of dead cattle to live ones. And would have been proved to be correct, in the long term, however irrational their ideas might have seemed in the face of the perceived benefits of faster cattle growth. Sometimes our instinctive distrust of certain procedures proves correct and this human-cow hybrid certainly evokes a great deal of instinctive revulsion, as shown on the BBC feedback pages.

In any case, has anyone seen any of the promised benefits from stem cell research? My reading of the popular science press (and I will happily concede the limitations of that as a source of knowledge) suggests that almost every claim that stem cells will cure paralysis, alzheimers and cancers turns out to be bogus. Indeed a goodly number of the stem cell experiments appear to be bogus in their entirety.

Sheep cloning was a proof of concept. Real sheep produce sturdy offspring by themselves. For free. Cloning produced a sickly creature at a cost of millions. There must be a reason for these lines of research – profit, I assume – but the value largely escapes me.