It was pointed out again in the weird news that the photo at the top - which has been circulating on the Internet for several years now - is not an actual dog-human hybrid. It is a sculpture by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini, who explains in this video what her motivations were and why we find her work (made with, among other things, leather and human hair) so disturbing. You can see it here from other angles and navigate to her other installations by clicking on the images. The human-animal hybrid goes by many names: chimera (referring to the mythological creature made from parts of several animals), transgenic species or cybrid (scientific terms), and parahuman (a word often used to sensationalize the science). Humans and animals have been physically fused in many ways. Xenografts (transplantation of animal organs into humans) have been performed for many years. Since human skin cells and rabbit eggs were first grafted in 2003, 32-cell human-cow embryos have been engineered and a human ear has been grown from cartilage scaffolding on the back of a mouse (another photograph that got wide exposure on the web). Scientists have created pigs with human blood flowing through their veins, mice with a partially human brain, rats with human kidney tissue, and sheep with a largely human liver. Most of this experimentation is to research disease and to achieve living factories for customized lab-grown biopharmaceuticals, tissues, and organs. One of the points that Piccinini makes with her artwork is that it is no longer possible to distinguish between the natural and the artificial. But with this boundary blurred, the task is to set up ethical guidelines and draft legislation as science fiction becomes science fact.
