Bab 12: Is he a hybrid?
Everything was strange about that black faced creature. It reminded me of the Chimeras, about which I had studied a lot in earlier days. Since childhood, I used to wake up during mid nights, from the fear of attack of Chimeras and animal-human hybrids. Terracotta army and the legends of the King with the dragon tail made me believe very strongly that Chimeras can be created.
Chimera, in genetics, is an organism or tissue that contains at least two different sets of DNA, most often originating from the fusion of as many different zygotes (fertilized eggs). The term is derived from the Chimera of Greek mythology, a fire-breathing monster that was part lion, part goat, and part dragon.
Did you know that scientists are creating cow/human hybrids, pig/human hybrids and even mouse/human hybrids? This is happening every single day in labs all over the western world, but most people have never even heard about it. After having observed the "terracotta army for years" and having read the legends of the King with dragon tail, I always wondered if it could be possible that the Qin dynasty might have perfected the art of creating hybrids, so as to win wars and conquer nations.
In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a monstrous fire-breathing creature, typically described as having the head of a lion, with a snake as a tail and the head of a goat emerging from its back.
Just as it terrorized the minds of the Greeks, this vision is also the cause of much consternation regarding the successful creation of the first human-pig hybrid embryos at the Salk Institute in California. In fact, such human-animal hybrids are often referred to as "chimeras".
While this scientific advance offers the prospect of growing human organs inside animals for use in transplants, it can also leave some people with a queasy feeling. People, it seems, just can't stomach the idea of growing human kidneys in pigs.
Many of us are like six-year-olds who turn their nose up at the idea of mixing their broccoli with their mashed potato. We prefer to keep things pure. Whether it is cross-bred animals or racially mixed children, people who see the world as defined by underlying essences tend to reject this "impurity".
What is an "underlying essence"? It's the idea that things have certain necessary properties that are essential to them being what they are. So there is a kind of "pigness" that is exclusive to pigs, and a "humanness" that is exclusive to us.
But in biology, at least, there is no actual essence to anything in this sense. We're all made of different combinations of the same kinds of stuff, like proteins and amino acids. Even much of the blueprint – our genes and DNA – are shared across species, such that humans and mice share around 90% of their DNA, and we even share around 35% of our genes with the simple roundworm.
But this does not mean that we don't often rely on this way of thinking to understand what makes a tiger natural in a way that a chair is not. It is also this intuition that makes us squirm at the thought of a tiger-goat but intrigued by the idea of a chair-table.
A few of my colleagues, scientists, has actually inserted human genes into the DNA of dairy cow embryos. Now there are hundreds of human/cow hybrids that produce milk that is virtually identical to human breast milk.
Would you buy such milk if it showed up in your supermarket? The scientists that "designed" these cows say that is the goal.
Not long ago, Chinese scientists embedded genes for human milk proteins into a mouse's genome and have since created herds of humanized-milk-producing goats. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Michigan have a method for putting a human anal sphincter into a mouse as a means of finding better treatments for fecal incontinence, and doctors are building animals with humanized immune systems to serve as subjects for new HIV vaccines.
Mixing human and animal biology is perceived as being unnatural and bit on the nose, creating a fear that human-pigs might escape the lab and take over the world.
Plus, one question that arises in my mind is - once animal DNA gets into our breeding pool, how will we ever put the genie back into the bottle? As the DNA of the human race becomes corrupted, it is easy to imagine a future where there are very few "pure humans" remaining.
While the possibility of human-animals chimera wandering the planet is far from reality in the time that we live in, the fear of hybrids, after having observed the black faced creature, could very much be real 2000 years back.
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The waning moon rose late. Its light struck a ghostly white beam across my cabin, and made an ominous shape on the planking by my bunk. Then the staghounds woke, and began howling and baying; so that I dreamt fitfully, and scarcely slept until the approach of dawn.
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