Lest anyone is tempted to think that the debate over hybrid embryo creation is premature, the troubling announcement on April Fools Day (4/1) that a research team at Newcastle University in England had successfully created the first part-human part-animal hybrid embryo (cow egg, human somatic cell nucleus) in the UK will make clear how late in the day the time actually is.  The embryo survived for three days.  Parliament will debate next month the morality and utility of socially sanctioning the creation of such embryos. 

Fellow in Ethics Christian Brugger clarifies, in layman terms, what it is to be: To be who we are when we were an embryo.

Recently a Catholic U.S. Coast Guard officer filed suit to prevent being forced to receive a vaccination he believed morally objectionable since the vaccine derived from the remains of an aborted child. The officer, Lt. Cmdr. Joseph Healy filed a complaint just last week, charging the government with using “its own arbitrary judgment of what constitutes Catholic theology while permitting religious exemptions to others.”

A collage of headlines covering Monday’s breakthrough in stem cell research, published in the scientific journals, Science and Cell, attempt to state what, to many, is not so obvious.   What we have found are pluripotent stem cells, equal to, but not to be confused with pluripotent embryonic stem cells.

On Sept. 5, a government agency (called the Human Fertilization and Embryology Agency or HFEA) decided to let scientists, mad or otherwise, create human/animal hybrids. Let me repeat: Science fiction will become science fact very soon; and man and beast will be combined into one.