Via Kevin Drum, PZ Myers offers an explanation of the absolutely strangest moment of last night's speech, Bush's talk about "animal-human hybirds." Apparently, scientists really are injecting mice and such with people genes, creating "chimeras" that are used to research disorders like Down Syndrome. Myers writes:
Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it's really happening. Of course, it isn't with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it's the topic of ongoing debate.If you guessed that this is an issue that religious conservatives have on their radar screen, bingo.
It's somewhat amazing to me that we live in a time when the President of the United States uses an incredibly loaded phrase during a State of the Union address only a small minority of the American population could reasonably be expected to understand. He really is quite the uniter, isn't he?
