It will advocate the recognition of the chimeric person as the ‘true’ legal father but point out that this may require fatherhood to be understood as more of a ‘process’ than is often realised.īrian Sloan is College Lecturer & Fellow in Law, Robinson College, Cambridge and a member of the Cambridge Family Law Centre. The seminar will then consider what the phenomenon of the chimera might tell us about our understanding of parenthood and the differences between biological motherhood and fatherhood respectively. This seminar will explore the likely practical response of English Law to the situation of a potential chimera, with reference inter alia to the human rights of all family members involved.
Cases of chimeras potentially present a challenge to legal systems, given their frequent emphasis on genetics in determining parenthood. The result was that the true genetic father of the man’s son was the man’s deceased twin, who had never been born. Such a chimera has extra genes, in this instance absorbed from a twin lost in early pregnancy. This was apparently the first reported instance of a paternity test being ‘fooled’ by a ‘human chimera’. The event was recorded and is now available as a video or as an audio recording.Ībstract: In 2015, The Independent newspaper reported the case of a man who had ‘failed’ a paternity test in the United States because the genetic material in his saliva was different from that in his sperm. Please register at you plan to attend, so you can be sent login details. This seminar is being organised jointly by the Cambridge Reproduction SRI and the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group. That leads to the inescapable conclusion that we have already crossed a number of moral lines.College Lecturer & Fellow in Law, Robinson College, Cambridge Tens of millions of animals are sickened, injured, genetically manipulated, and killed in biomedical labs every year, even as a robust body of evidence shows that some animals are more self-aware and emotionally and cognitively complex than we previously thought. “These concerns about chimeric research add to the already potent ethical issues associated with mainstream invasive animal research. Lori Matthews, executive director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy and a neuroscientist, argues that we should place these ethical questions within the context of ongoing animal rights “abuses”. But this unique psychological characteristic is not likely to emerge in a chimeric animal’s brain”. In my view, the only characteristic that might qualify doing this heavy moral lifting is the appearance of human-like self-consciousness, defined as an existential awareness and concern for oneself as a temporally extended agent with higher-order beliefs about one’s own mental experiences. “It it is entirely unclear what types of new psychological characteristics could count to elevate the moral status of a research animal above where it currently is, such that its scientific use would no longer be morally acceptable.
In an influential article published in Plos Biology last year, Hyun wrote: Likewise, if it could plausibly have higher cognitive functions, it should be treated as if it would have them.”Ĭase Western Reserve University bioethicist Insoo Hyun is critical of the assumptions underpinning the idea of “chimera personhood”. “Any human-pig chimera should … be assessed against the criteria of personhood… If there is a chance a new lifeform could experience pain or might not be able to interact socially, and we don’t know, it should be treated as if it does experience pain and will have problems of social adaptation. We should take a precautionary approach with chimeras, Savulescu suggests. In an article published in Quartz this week, Oxford ethicist Julian Savulescu noted that human-pig chimeras may be capable of feeling pain, and, indeed, could potentially engage in higher cognitive functions and social activity.
Ethicists are debating the moral issues surrounding this research, and, in particular, the moral status given to human-nonhuman chimeras. Ethicists are debating the moral issues surrounding chimera research.Įarlier this year US researchers reporting that they have successfully created human-pig chimera embryos.
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