Print Article
>> Back to the article
Jan 11, 2008
Views surrounding human-animal research highly subjective
I REFER to the report, 'Animals with human DNA: Ethics body invites debate' (ST, Jan 9).

Before we go further, is the debate revolving around the term 'impurity'? Is the human species sullied by the fusion of animal and human DNA?

If this is so, may I make the following observations.

Eons ago in the primordial seas of earth, there floated atoms and scum. Over millions of years, there was a constant mixing of atoms where the mix broke apart because of instability.

Finally, there appeared some combinations, which were stable, and these proceeded into complex molecules and on to very simple organisms.

At some point in time, some organisms crawled or slithered onto land and we had our first life on land.

The butterfly and the mosquito go through two stages of transformation. A certain flat worm goes through four stages, the last being that of a frog.

The frog is always incapable of moving because it has to be captured and eaten by a special bird where in its intestines, the flat worm takes its real shape.

How do we define purity if we look at the human species from the time it progressed from the primordial seas onto dry land in its evolutionary selection, so to speak, until it appears today?

How do we say which fusion is ethical and which is not?

The question is subjective and looking at the examples of the butterfly and flat worm, which transformation is unethical and which is not?

Connotation plays a great part and interpretation is predicated on connotation.

Dudley Au

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access