In one of this summer’s most-awaited novels, “The City of Mirrors,” author Justin Cronin completes his unlikely literary trilogy about a world overrun by vampire-like creatures he dubs “virals.”
Unlike Bram Stoker’s creation, the disaster unleashed by his monsters is entirely man-made. Men, seeking to “play God,” created monstrous hybrids they could never hope to control, with disastrous but completely predictable results.
While Cronin’s work is fiction, its themes ring all too true. As one colleague of mine put it, the book reads like a “warning shot across our bow.”
As if to prove Cronin and my colleague right, a recent story proved that the impulse to “play God” isn’t limited to the fiction segment of the best-seller list. Just in the last few months, several news stories have described how scientists are creating embryos that are part human and part animal.
The purpose of these “chimeras,” as these hybrids are called, is ultimately to “help save the lives of people with a wide range of diseases.” As one report on NPR told listeners, “chimera embryos” might be used “to create better animal models to study how human diseases happen and how they progress.”
These hybrids are made, if not possible, at least significantly easier, by CRISPR, the gene-editing technology that I recently told you about on BreakPoint. In one instance, the “gene that pig [or sheep] embryos need to produce a pancreas” is removed. In its place researchers insert human-induced pluripotent stem cells.
Continue reading BreakPoint – Monster Madness of Our Own Making: Human-Animal Hybrids
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